From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  The old tombstone carver’s workshop at the entrance to the graveyard now hosts German language classes for refugees.

  “It’s a space that’s been abandoned, and used for burying people, used for, now, gardening and cultivating human beings in the best way possible,” said Fetewei Tarekegn, the head gardener of the community project.

  Roques Blanques is attempting to do more than just bury the dead. They have won awards for their green initiatives. Their fleet of vehicles is electric, including the hearse shaped like a silver bug, conceived by students at a Barcelona design school. The ten hectares of land lodge protected squirrel colonies, wild boars, and special houses for bats. The bat colonies are cultivated to control the dangerous invasion of the Asian tiger mosquito, although Roques Blanques received some bad press for daring to associate their cemetery with bats, vampires, the vile undead!

  Environmentally sound though these initiatives may be, Roques Blanques is not a natural cemetery. The dead are required to be buried in wooden coffins in granite crypts, stacked in layers of two, three, or six people. This is puzzling. Why not place the body directly into the soil, without granite? This would allow the bones to decompose completely, meaning there would be no need for the communal grave space, thus freeing up the land. “We just don’t do that in Spain,” Joan said.

  Joan has decided to be cremated, but seemed to understand the contradiction in that choice. “It takes nine months to create a baby, but we destroy the body too easily through industrial cremation processes.” He thought for a moment. “The body should take the same nine-month time to disintegrate.” I whispered to Jordi, “It sounds like he wants natural burial!”

  Spain is very good at being almost green in its postmortem ideas. On our tour we passed through a grove of trees, Mediterranean and native to this area, of course. Roques Blanques will plant a tree and bury five sets of your family’s ashes around it, making it a literal family tree. They are the first cemetery in Spain to offer this option.

  Roques Blanques’s “family tree” is similar to the wildly popular biodegradable urn, Bios Urn, created by a design firm in Barcelona. You might have seen it floating through your social media feed. Bios Urn resembles a large McDonald’s cup filled with soil, a tree seed, and a place for cremated remains. One of the most popular articles on the Bios Urn is called “This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die!”

  It is a lovely thought, and a tree may grow from the soil provided, but after the 1,800-degree cremation process, the remaining bones are reduced to inorganic, basic carbon. With everything organic (including DNA) burned away, your sterile ashes are way past being useful to plants or trees. There are nutrients, but their combination is all wrong for plants, and don’t contribute to ecological cycles. Bios Urn charges $145 for one of their urns. The symbolism is beautiful. But symbolism does not make you part of the tree.

  Roques Blanques has two cremation retorts (machines) at the cemetery, which cremate 2,600 people every year. Walking in to see the machines, I was surprised by two men in suits flanking a light wooden coffin with a cross emblem, waiting with hands folded outside a preheated retort. “Oh, you’re waiting for us, excellent! Gracias!” I am always excited to witness a cremation. It never gets old, no matter how many you’ve overseen or performed. It is powerful to be in the presence of a corpse mere moments from being transformed by fire.

  Joan took us on a brief tour of the cremation room, including the fifteen-year-old cremation machine used for family-witnessed cremations. It was significantly nicer than the industrial warehouses back home. “The walls are marble from Italy, the floor is granite from Brazil,” he explained.

  “Sixty percent of our families come to witness the cremation,” Joan announced. Here’s where my jaw hit the polished granite floor.

  “I’m sorry, 60 percent?” I reeled.

  That is an enormous number—far higher than the percentage in the United States, where many families don’t even know they have the option of witnessing the cremation.

  Before the cremation began, Joan brought us just outside the room, behind—are you ready for it?—three panes of glass stretching floor to ceiling. They were identical to the three panes of glass that had separated us from the body at the funeral home. “Why do you use the glass for cremations?” I asked Joan.

  “The angle is such that you can’t see fully inside the oven, to the flames,” he replied.

  It was true. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see the fire, just the edge of the cremation machine. The two men slid the coffin into the brick-lined machine. When the heavy metal door came down, they pulled a classy wooden door across the front of the retort, hiding the machine’s industrial façade.

  Barcelona was the land of almost. They had initiatives for eco-cemeteries, animal conservation, and the growth of native trees. Their bodies were not embalmed, and were buried in wooden coffins. Almost a green burial, except for the granite fortress the coffin was required to be placed in. They had witness cremations that 60 percent of families attended, and funeral homes in which the family could stay the whole day with their loved one. Almost a paragon of family interaction at death, yet there was glass separating the family from the body at the viewing and at the cremation, setting up Mom as a museum exhibit.

  I wanted to be self-righteous about the use of glass, but couldn’t, for this simple reason: with its elegant marble and glass, Altima had provided the one thing the United States needs more than anything—butts in the seats. People showed up for death here. They showed up for daylong viewings, sitting close vigil with the body. They showed up for witness cremations: 60 percent at this location. Perhaps the barrier of glass was the training wheels required to let a death-wary public get close, but not too close.

  The cremation process would take approximately ninety minutes. Joan took Jordi, my publisher, to the back of the machine, where the family does not come. Pulling open a hinged metal window, he allowed us to peer inside the cremation chamber. Fierce blasts of fire shot down from the ceiling and devoured the top of the coffin. Jordi’s eyes widened as he took his turn peeking in, his pupils reflecting the flames.

  For his trouble in showing me around Barcelona, poor Jordi had been rewarded with multiple close encounters with the dead. As we ate what seemed like a fourteen-course dinner in the city, I inquired what the day had been like for him. He thought, and replied that “when your bills come due, you have to pay them. At my company, I pay my bills. Here at this restaurant, I pay my bill. It is the same with feelings. When the feelings come, the fear of death, I must feel those feelings. I must pay my bill. It is being alive.”

  JAPAN

  TOKYO

  Tokudane!, the Japanese morning television show, cut to a commercial break. Women in grape suits danced to a pulsing electronic beat. Animated bunnies clipped a toupee onto an astounded man’s head. Tokudane! returned and the hosts introduced the next segment, which began with a white-robed monk praying in a temple. There were flowers and incense; he appeared to be presiding over a funeral.

  The temple was crammed with distraught mourners. The image pulled back to reveal the altar and the source of all this sorrow—nineteen robotic dogs. The camera zoomed in on their broken paws and snapped-off tails. I watched the TV at the hotel breakfast buffet in rapt attention, eating fried eggs shaped like hearts.

  Electronics giant Sony released the Aibo (“companion” in Japanese) in 1999. The three-and-a-half-pound robocanine had the ability to learn and respond based on its owner’s commands. Adorable and charming, the Aibo also barked, sat, and mimicked peeing. Their owners claimed the pups helped combat loneliness and health issues. Sony discontinued the Aibo in 2006, but promised to keep making repairs. Then, in 2014, they discontinued repairs as well, a harsh mortality lesson for the owners of the roughly 150,000 Aibos sold. A cottage industry of robotic vets and online grief support forums sprang up, culminating in funerals for Aibos tragically beyond repair.

  Once the Tokudane! segment ended,
I headed into Tokyo full of heart-shaped eggs to meet my interpreter, Emily (Ayako) Sato. She had suggested we meet at the statue of Hachikō in the Shibuya railway station. Hachikō is a national hero in Japan. Hachikō was also a dog (a real one). In the 1930s he would meet his owner, an agriculture professor, at the rail station each day after work. One day, the professor never came to meet Hachikō; he had died of a brain hemorrhage. Undeterred, Hachikō returned to the station every day for the next nine years, when his own death halted the ritual. Dogs are a solid meeting point from a cross-cultural perspective. Everyone respects a devoted canine.

  Sato-san was waiting when I arrived, a woman in late middle age who did not look a day over forty. She wore a power pantsuit and sensible walking shoes. “My secret is walking ten thousand steps each day.” I almost lost her several times as we descended into the labyrinthine bowels of the Shibuya station, swept up in the throngs of Tokyo’s well-dressed denizens. “Perhaps I need to hold up one of those flags that tour group leaders carry, with a skull on it, just for you,” she grinned.

  After two turnstiles, three staircases, and four escalators, we reached our platform. “We’re safer down here from earthquakes,” Sato-san announced. This wasn’t a non sequitur. Just that day there had been a 6.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast. I couldn’t speak to anyone in Tokyo without them referencing the psychological impact of the 2011 earthquake, with its subsequent tsunami that roared through northeast Japan and killed more than 15,000 people.

  On the subway platform, sliding glass barriers separated the riders from the rails below. “Those barriers are somewhat new,” Sato-san explained. “For one thing they prevent”—she lowered her voice—“the suicides.” Japan’s rate of death by suicide is one of the highest in the developed world. Sato-san continued, “Unfortunately, the workers have become very efficient in cleaning up the train suicides, collecting the body parts and whatnot.”

  In the Judeo-Christian view—and thus, the dominant Western view—to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5.)

  The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It’s viewed as a selfless, even honorable act. The samurai introduced the practice of seppuku, literally “cutting the abdomen,” self-disembowelment by sword to prevent capture by the enemy. In World War II, nearly 4,000 men died as kamikaze pilots, turning their planes into missiles and crashing into enemy ships. Apocryphal but famous legends tell of the practice of ubasute, where elderly women were carried on their sons’ backs into the forest to be abandoned in times of famine. The woman would stay dutifully put, succumbing to hypothermia or starvation.

  Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a “suicide culture.” But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than about fascination with mortality itself. Furthermore, “foreign scholars can look at statistical numbers on suicide, but they will not understand the phenomenon,” argues writer Kenshiro Ohara. “Only Japanese people can understand the suicide of the Japanese.”

  For me, observing death in Japan was like gazing through the looking glass: everything familiar but distorted. Like America, Japan is a developed nation, where funerals and cemeteries are big business. Large funeral corporations play a sizable role in both Western and Japanese markets. Their pristine facilities are staffed by professional death workers. If that were the whole story, it would have made no sense for me to visit. But that is not the whole story.

  KOUKOKUJI BUDDHIST TEMPLE, a seventeenth-century building tucked away off a quiet street in Tokyo, is home to a modest cemetery, with aged headstones representing generations of families that have come to worship here. A black and white cat lounged on the stone path. We stepped out of modern Tokyo and into a Miyazaki movie. Yajima jūshoku (jūshoku means head priest or monk) emerged to greet us, an affable man in a brown robe with close-cropped white hair and glasses.

  In contrast to his archaic surroundings, Yajima jūshoku is a man of new ideas, specifically, how to memorialize cremated remains (my kind of guy). Funeral directors in the United States blanch with fear at the thought of a national “cremation culture,” which would undercut profit margins in embalming and casket sales. In reality, we have no idea what a homogenous “cremation culture” might look like. But the Japanese do. They have a cremation rate of 99.9 percent—the highest in the world. No other country even comes close (sorry, Taiwan: 93 percent; and Switzerland: 85 percent).

  The emperor and empress were the final holdouts, still choosing full body burial. But several years ago, Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko announced they would also be cremated, breaking with four hundred years of royal burial tradition.

  When Koukokuji Temple reached capacity, the priest Yajima could have invested in an old-fashioned cemetery space. Instead, seven years ago he built the Ruriden columbarium. (Columbaria are separate buildings for storing cremated remains.) “Buddhism has always been state-of-the-art,” he explained. “It is quite natural to use technology alongside Buddhism. I see no conflict at all.” With that, he showed us through the doors of the complex’s newest hexagonal building.

  We stood in the darkness while Yajima punched something into a keypad at the entrance. Moments later, two thousand floor-to-ceiling Buddhas began to glow and pulse a vivid blue. “Woooaahhh,” Sato-san and I bleated in unison, stunned and delighted. I had seen photographs of Ruriden, but to be surrounded, 360 degrees, by the luminous Buddhas was overwhelming.

  Yajima opened a locked door, and we peeked behind the Buddha walls at six hundred sets of bones. “Labeled to make it easy to find Miss Kubota-san,” he smiled. Each set of cremated remains corresponded to a crystal Buddha on the wall.

  When a family member comes to visit Ruriden, they either type in the name of the deceased or pull out a smart card with a chip, similar to the cards used on Tokyo’s subways. After the family keys in at the entrance, the walls light up blue, except for one single Buddha shimmering clear white. No need to squint through names trying to find Mom—the white light will guide you straight to her.

  “All of this evolved,” said Yajima. “For example, we started with a touch pad, where you type in your family member’s name. One day I saw a very old woman struggling to type a name in, so that’s when we got the smart cards. She just had to tap the card and can immediately find her dead person!”

  Yajima headed back to the keypad controller, and instructed us to stand in the center of the room. “The autumn scene!” he announced, and the formation of Buddhas turned yellow and brown with shifting red patches, like piles of freshly fallen leaves. “Winter scene!” and the Buddhas turned to snowdrifts of light blue and white. “Shooting star!” and the Buddhas turned purple as white spots jumped from Buddha to Buddha, like a stop-motion animation of the night sky.

  The majority of columbaria leave no room for innovation. Their design is the same the world over. Endless rows of granite walls, where ashes reside behind the etched names of the dead. If individuality is a priority, you may be allowed to affix a small picture, a stuffed bear, or a bouquet of flowers.

  This LED light show could have been a Disney production, but there was something in the sophisticated design of the lights that made it feel as though I were being swaddled in a Technicolor womb.

  “The afterlife of Buddhism is filled with treasures and light,” Yajima explained.

  Religious scholars John Ashton and Tom Whyte described the Pure Land (the celestial realm of East Asian Buddhism) as “decorated with jewels and precious metals and lined with banana and palm trees. Cool refreshing ponds and lotus flowers abound and wild birds sing the praises of the Buddha three times a day.”

  In designing Ruriden, Yajima was creating “an afterlife along the path of Buddha.”

  The Buddha lig
hts weren’t always this elaborate. One of the early visitors to the new facility at Ruriden was a light designer, and she volunteered to create the scenes from different seasons. “At first, the lights looked like a Las Vegas show!” Yajima laughed. “This is not a toy, I said! Too much! We canceled that. As natural as possible, I said. The work is still happening to create that atmosphere, as natural as possible.”

  Yajima invited us for tea inside the temple and offered me a stool, brought out for visiting foreigners. He believed I couldn’t endure sitting cross-legged on the floor mats for the duration of tea and conversation. I assured him I absolutely could. (I couldn’t. My legs fell painfully asleep within the first three minutes.)

  I asked Yajima why he had designed Ruriden the way he did, and his response was impassioned. “We had to act, we had to do something. Japan has fewer children. Japanese people are living longer. The family is supposed to look after your grave, but we don’t have enough people to look after everyone’s grave. We had to do something for those people left behind.”

  A FULL QUARTER of Japan’s population is over the age of sixty-five. That, combined with a low birthrate, has caused Japan’s population to shrink by one million people in the last five years. Japanese women have the longest life expectancy in the world; Japanese men have the third longest. More importantly, their “healthy life expectancy” (not just old, but old and independent) is the longest for both genders. As the population ages, the need for nurses and caregivers is swelling. People in their seventies are caring for people in their nineties.

  My interpreter, Sato-san, knows this well. She herself is responsible for the care of six people—her parents, her husband’s parents, and two uncles. All are in their mid-eighties or early nineties. A few months ago, her great aunt died at one hundred and two.