Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan

Andrew Bernstein's Modern Passings is a scholarly history of Japanese death ritual and mortuary politics across the modern imperial period, tracing how cremation, funeral practice and state ideology about death intersected with Buddhist institutions, Shinto nationalism and rapid social change from the Meiji era onward. Its authority comes from close archival work in Japanese-language sources on a topic, the social and political history of dying and burial, that had previously received less sustained scholarly attention than doctrinal Buddhist studies. As a history focused specifically on ritual practice and state politics around death, it is strongest on how funerary custom changed and why, and lighter on the doctrinal theology underlying any single school's teaching about death, which readers wanting that angle should pair with a dedicated doctrinal source.