| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: With the onset of the early modern period, the sense of reality inherent in the perception of fundamental beings declined, and the salvation of the dead could no longer be entrusted to the other-worldly kami. People then came to terms with catastrophes as natural disasters that must be faced. Rituals and customs, carried out over long periods, were put in place to raise the dead to the status of ancestral spirits. In addition to a shift from the traditional world in which kami, the living, and the dead coexisted toward a shutting out of the latter group, the process of modernization brought with it a restructuring of society around the exclusive rights and interests of human beings. The experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake has been an opportunity to reconsider the path ahead, and to reconsider responses to catastrophe which display the modern tendency to focus on the concerns of the living to the exclusion of the concerns of the dead. |
