Book Review of G

Boret’s book offers a clear and well-documented account of ‘tree burial’, defined as ‘concealing a corpse inside a tree or beneath its roots ’ (p. 4), a practice which has emerged in Japan over the last sixteen years. The author’s core argument is that, while there has been a decline in ancestor worship in Japan since the 1970s, new forms of burial and ancestor worship such as tree burial are not so much a rejection of Japanese ancestral rites and tradition as a symptom of the desire to liberalize and innovate what the author calls ‘ways of death ’ in Japan today. In particular, tree burial provides the Japanese with an ecologically sustainable alternative to cremation and grave burial, as well as a way to avoid the exorbitant expenses associated with funeral practices in Japan today (e.g. the author quotes a figure of no less than £70,000 as the average price for a typical grave in Tokyo as of 2010). In Chapters 1 and 6, the author claims that the growing interest in tree burial in Japan and elsewhere (this is far from being a uniquely Japanese practice, having started in the UK in 1993, i.e. six years before Japan) is inscribed in the transnational desire to live on after death through the perpetuation of the life cycle. Chapter 6 particularly puts forward Davies ’ concept of ‘ecological immortality ’ in which one conceives of a corpse’s elements as a way to re-generate other forms of life through burial. Chapter 2 successfully explores the correlations between Japan’s environmental crises and changes in the ways in which the Japanese dispose of the dead. This is an important chapter, as the author shows that, in Japan today, individual action may come to undermine cultural norms and tradition if it needs to produce new social paradigms and new acceptable praxis. This is reminiscent of other forms of civil disobedienc