Comments on: Beyond belief: Graveyard business expands

By: James

James — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:18:01 +0000

I have been wondering as well, where do gaijins get buried. Do they get shipped back to their country of origin or do the Japanese say just creamate that foolish foreigner and give him back to his family. Also with the high suicide rate in Japan, is there any way that a gaijin get an opportunity to own a partial ownership in a cemetery? Has anyone ever thought of that?

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:41:57 +0000

The subtitle of the picture really is a statement of black humor:

“People are dying to get into the new graveyard at Ishihama Shrine”.

I just wondered if this was written intentionally or just happened by mistake.

By: Miko

Miko — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:29:37 +0000

This post has reminded me to ask something very important: where on earth do gaijins go? It’s something that has been worrying me for a while now. I hope you do a post about it.

By: Phillip Larrabee

Phillip Larrabee — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 06:01:10 +0000

Graves and memorials exist to placate the living, they have no significance to the dead. In fact, there are no dead. Either something exists or it doesn’t; therefore, it makes no more sense to make objective references to the present state of someone who no longer exists than it does to describe the idiosyncrasies of someone who has never existed.

Consider the statement: Shakespeare is dead. In a very real sense, that phrase is nonsensical in that it ascribes a characteristic to a subject that doesn’t exist; i.e., Shakespeare can no more be (=) dead than he can have a toothache or be on vacation in Miami. All that phrase can mean is that there once was a person named Shakespeare but now there isn’t. Once you understand that, death loses all it’s sting.