Chronicles of a Japanese funeral
Sushi Suzuki says: "I recently came back from the US to attend my grandfather's funeral in Japan and found some of the Japanese customs very interesting. I'm Japanese but spent more than half my life in the US so my senses may be more Western. Anyways, after the funeral, I decided to chronicle the entire event on my blog to share a first hand perspective of a Japanese funeral. Many of my friends found it interesting, I hope you guys do too. One particularily interesting custom:
When we entered the private room, a large tray was waiting for us in the middle of the room holding the ashes of the body. While all the flesh, the entire casket, flowers, and most other contents had burned down to fine ash, the skeletal structure of the body was still intact and warm (you could feel the heat radiating from the tray). Looking carefully in the ashes, one could identify small nails from the casket or pieces of the watch that was burned with the body... The representative then handed out several pairs of mismatched chopsticks (one wood, one bamboo) for us to pick the bones to place inside the urn. If you ever wondered why it's taboo to eat with mismatched chopsticks, this is why. He instructed us to pick from the feet first so that the body will be upright in the urn. We each picked a bone, placed it in the urn, and then passed off the chopsticks to the next person.Link
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This reminds me of the wonderful 1984 film, The Funeral, by Itami Juzo.
For a bit more and some photos, my wife blogged a bit about her grandfather's funeral in Japan a couple of years ago.
I turned my experience as a Mormon missionary (I'm an atheist, now) visiting my Japanese Grandfather's funeral into a short story. The description of the cremation is based on my recollection, and should be as accurate as five year old memories can be.
Hamish beat me to it. :(
But The Funeral, like everything I've seen by Itami, is really good. It's his first so it doesn't have the confidence you see in, say, Tampopo, but in some ways this is a benefit.
What a weird coincidence, as I'm sitting here reading this I'm eating dinner with mismatched chopsticks. I had no idea it was taboo! Guess I'd better go find a matching pair ...
I read somewhere that stabbing your food with chopsticks is taboo in China.
The reason is -- at funerals, bowls of rice are ceremonially offered to ancestors, with chopsticks in them standing vertically.
Can anyone corroborate?
The linked post describes many of the same things mentioned in an essay published earlier this year by Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
DJ:
I don't know about China, but in Japan, yeah, the "final meal" is a bowl of rice with the chopsticks stuck into them vertically. This is placed at the deceased's head as he/she/it "sleeps" in his/her/its house for the last night while family members watch over.
Oddly enough, my wife has never complained about mismatched chopsticks, and she's usually pretty superstitious about things like this...
my parents are chinese and my mom is also insistent on not sticking chopsticks into a bowl (even if it contains noodles and not rice) vertically because it's what's done during funerals. but many chinese people (outside of china) are probably not aware of this though.
i haven't heard of the mismatched chopsticks thing though. maybe it's a japanese-only thing.
I remember that at a discussion session about culture shock in Japan that we had at a conference for the Japan Exchange & Teaching Program, we were talking about things that Japanese do or say that foreigners find annoying, like constantly being asked if your country has 4 seasons, if you like Japanese food, etc.
The speaker talked about his own experience at his wife's funeral. The man was American, and his Japanese wife had died of cancer. As the funeral was beginning, the priest turned to him and as he started to hand him the set of chopsticks to pick up the bones, his eyes widened and he asked, in the way that almost all Japanese people eventually do when confronted with a foreigner, "...can you use chopsticks?"
It would have been amusing if it had been a joke, but I can imagine that the poor guy must have wanted to bite the priest's head off at that moment.