I will share with you my impressions of how I participated in funeral of old Japanese baba. Not yesterday and not today, about ten years ago.
A beautiful day dawned – a Japanese baba died. It was a long-lived baba, like all Japanese babas. She has lived a long century and reached almost the two-zero zone. Not much was missing. The Japanese are all long-lived to the end. A real head-scratcher for the pension and health care system.
The phone rings – a distant relative is calling. He whispers – my mother has died. We are deeply sorry. But there is one problem. There is a shortage of realtives who can participate in funerals. In the sense of lack of people of relatives who will accompany Grandma on her last journey. In Japan,it is not for nothing that they say a good neighbour is more important than a close relative. And what about when one relative is 700 km to the north and the other 800 km to the south. So kinship ties in Japan are very peculiar. Here, you don’t get much of a focus on going and sitting together at New Year. The first question is where to put the relative and his family who will prepare the room. Who will cook and a million other problems. Thereforegathering of relatives is rare. Weddings and those take place on a conveyor belt which will have to be told in other blog posts.
So our relative, a cousin of the mother-in-law, is faced with a seriuos problem – at his mother’s funeral there are simply not enough people physically available to sit next to the jubilarian and keep her a company.
The problem can be solved in three ways.
First. Baba’s funeral without guests.
Second. Funerals with hired relatives. This is how you can find a service like hiring guests/relatives in Japan. You can hire relatives or other guests online for funerals, weddings or other celebrations. You can even hire characters of a certain type in general. Let’s say you are planning a party and you want to have an elderly man who is a director type. No problem. You go to the oyaji no mori page and you can choose the right type of man.
Three. You call a veryv very far relative and invite him to join.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of Buddhist funerals but what you don’t know is very interesting. I sign my name sweetly to the offer to attend Baba’s funeral as an official relative. Who could deny that I am not a relative. Well, a slightly crooked, slender, white, big, blue-eyed relative, but a relative nonetheless. Maybe my grandmother used to be a bit of a prankster in her day…
My mother-in-law and I go to my grandmother’s on Friday evening. The crematorium in the southern part of Tokyo is one of the largest. Many babas go up the chimney to the hell. My mother-in-law is also lying in the hall, covered in roses and carnations. Maybe it was some Buddhist practice but at least mine was lying comfortably in a sea of flowers. Outside, the weather is fine, spring. And then I want to say, “Baba, what are you doing? Get up. Let’s go outside and enjoy the sun. But grandma doesn’t get up.
I sit down next to the lodge of relatives. In the evening there is some kind of religious ritual something like the last night or something. Neighbours, friends, co-workers, acquaintances and strangers gather, then everyone queues up to say goodbye to the client. And everybody carries envelopes. They hang them up. Later, a Buddhist monk appears. I like their mantras. It’s fun to listen to. Sometimes I hear my name, date of birth and place of residence. God must know where the sheep comes from and who comes to the heaven.
Saturday dawns. Today we will burn baba. The Japanese burn all their customers. I remember I once attended a special business conference at the Turning Point in Lithuania where I met the director of K2. A serious man with a fancy black business card. I thought maybe he was a special agent. Turns out no. K2 were the owners of the only crematorium in Lithuania at that time.
In Japan, crematoria and burial halls are integrated complexes. During the corona time they had a lot of work to do. A colleague told me that his uncle had been in the fridge for three weeks because he hadn’t had time to burn.
So we go to our crematorium too. Baba is lying pretty in the flowers.
Around noon I watch a butler come in and push some kind of table structure. It turns out to be a crematorium worker in charge of taking customers away. A smart black suit, white gloves, a solemn expression, a look of sadness on his face.
Ladies and gentlemen it is time.
I wonder how he is going to carry the client. It turns out that the butler handles himself like a real specialist. A mournful mimic closes the grandmother’s shutter and pushes the metal structure against the rake. Then he elegantly twists the rake with both hands and it rolls gracefully on the wheels built into the table. Top class. Everything is so easy and simple. Japanese quality.
Then all the guests and the butler move towards the main room. A large hall. Conveyors in the wall for the oven. Ok, have a good trip. They push the baba into the oven. I’m thinking, what’s next, we’ll stand and wait like at the Ganges for the fire to start. No, it turns out everything has been thought of.
Assistant takes my hand and invites me to go up to the second floor. The second floor of the cairn has been designed as a banquet hall. While the customer is heating up, the relatives refresh themselves with Japanese feasts and beer, reminiscing about their younger days.
Just when it seems that the party is getting underway and I’ve managed to knock back a gram with all my relatives the announcer’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. “Dear guests, the customer is ready.” We dart to our relatives. Everyone stands up and with sad faces puts one foot in front of the other like a string of geese and goes up to the first floor to the baba’s stove.
There the butler is waiting for us again in his white gloves and beautiful black hairdresser. Somehow I always thought and imagined that at the end of a cremation all that is left of the client is ashes. You get an urn and you go for a coffee. It’s not like that in Japan. This is the Galapagos. Assistant opens the oven door then unwraps a white towel from which he unwraps two sticks. The chopsticks are like chopsticks but longer and metal. Oh dear, you can see the shrunken bones of a baba on the tin. Deeply saddened the butler takes the sticks and placing an urn nearby organises an anatomy party for us. He gracefully grabs a bone with his stick – here’s a snapshot – and puts it in the urn. Here’s the forearm, here’s the shin. Ooh, like Dr Menge. That’s terribly interesting. Then he gives the sticks to each of the relatives and they take turns to put the relics in the urn. At the very end a butler with a white, presumably sacred, leaf beautifully wipes the scarvad and pours the ashes into the urn. The urn is wrapped up beautifully like a welcome pack and given to the next of kin. The latter has to keep the urn at home for about 40 days before it can be taken to the cemetery in the temple.
That’s how I burned Japanese baba.
