Abstract
This chapter, based on 231 interviews in three societies, explores how people envision what happens after they die in Japan, China, and the United States, and relates these envisionings to how they live their lives. We have found that in the United States life before/after death remains defined by the Christian God in moral guidance, which, whether believed in or not, cannot be escaped; life after death in Japan is defined by its myriad possibilities, a realm of personal choice felt to be lacking in the world before death; and life after death in China is defined by moral loss—the promise of a now-discredited communist paradise that can only be partially replaced by nationalism and senses of familial immortality.
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- 1.
Islamic nations such as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Iran, as well as largely or partially Christian nations such as the Philippines, Nigeria, and Uganda, have rates of belief in life after death of 85% or above. On the other hand, in European societies such as France and Germany and a range of others, less than half of respondents say they believe in life after death (Inglehart et al. 2004, 353). Although there are numerous exceptions, the very broad global trend is that, with the exception of the United States, the richer the society, the less the belief in life after death. Among developed countries, the only country with a higher percentage of belief in life after death than the United States is Chile, at 82%.
- 2.
We should note that when the people we interviewed spoke of an existence beyond the grave, we generally asked them about the extent to which they felt such an existence might actually be the case: “What percent chance is there that you’ll die and then find yourself in a life after death?” Thus interviewees’ emphasis on percentages is an artifact of interviewing procedures, rather than because of statistical-mindedness on the part of interviewees.
- 3.
In Japan it is wives who attend to the family household altar where regular offerings are made to the ancestors. These two women quoted here are both engaged in this practice on a daily basis.
- 4.
What is cause and what is effect is unclear in this correlation. Perhaps high crime rates and personal insecurity lead more people to attend church in search of a sense of control over their lives.
- 5.
Many NEETs (young people not employed or in education or training), hikikomori (young people who socially withdraw, often shutting themselves in their rooms, and parasaito shinguru (young adults who do not marry but remain dependent on their parents) sense no choice but to drop out, given limited opportunities provided by Japanese economic structures today, as many commentators have noted (Brinton 2010).
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Mathews, G., Kwong, M.Y. (2017). Life After Death/Life Before Death and Their Linkages: The United States, Japan, and China. In: Boret, S., Long, S., Kan, S. (eds) Death in the Early Twenty-first Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52365-1_4
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