Cremation or Burial in Japan

Japan encourages cremation.

There are many countries in the world that advocate cremation, while China began to implement the cremation policy in 1956, and the real mandatory cremation has only been more than a decade, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs survey shows that China's cremation rate of 58.8%, indicating that nearly half of the people who died were not cremated, but instead the implementation of burial.

Compared with China, Japan has a much higher rate of cremation coverage, with cremation first recorded in Japan's history in the second half of the 6th century, though burial was still the norm at that time.

Japanese law does not prohibit burials

Japanese law does not prohibit burials, but burial sites are strictly regulated. In 1948, after World War II, the Law Concerning Burial in Cemeteries (the Burial Law) was enacted, stipulating that the use of burial grounds was limited, that applications for land to be used for burials had to be submitted to the local government, and that burials in densely populated cities were prohibited for public ****sanitary reasons.

The cremation rate has gradually increased since then, from 30% in 1900 to 54% in 1950, 63.1% in 1960, 70.2% in 1970, 91.1% in 1980, and 98.3% in 1994. This shows that the popularity of cremation in Japan is closely related to the stabilization of the standard of living after World War II.

There are some countries other than Japan where the cremation rate is not high due to religious reasons, such as the United Kingdom (70.4%) (1999), Korea (65%) (2008), France (26%) (2006), and the United States (23.6%) (1997). In contrast, Japan's cremation popularity is very thorough.