The (Un)social Smells of Death: Changing Tides in Contemporary Japan

In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and post-growth economic shifts, sociality is downsizing in Japan away from the family to more single lifestyles. The effects of this on the necro-landscape are examined here in terms of what happens to those who die all alone, untended by others ("lonely death") as well as new practices emerging to replace the family grave and family caregivers with an alternative social model (what is called "promiscuous care"). The essay argues that, at both ends of this spectrum, smell can be used to register both the unsociality of a bad death, as well as the shifting sociality of new ways of handling the dead. (This short article is based on Being Dead Otherwise, recently published by Duke University Press).