Last year, a friend who lives in Tokyo received a letter from the Buddhist temple where her family grave is located. The temple is in a town in Gunma Prefecture, and while none of her relatives live there any more, they visit the grave for the proper seasonal observances.

The letter informed my friend that the temple had decided to move the graves to a "more convenient" location, and it asked them to pay for the removal. Families don't own grave plots: They pay a one-time fee for the right to use them in perpetuity so long they visit them regularly. Obviously, if the temple was moving the graveyard, there was nothing my friend could do if she wanted to maintain her family's grave there, so she paid the considerable removal fee. When she later visited her family grave in its new location, she found that the old graveyard was still in use but that the temple had sold rights to the newly empty plots to other families.

This is a good illustration of the situation surrounding Japanese temples, which is becoming increasingly precarious in a country where religion is more a matter of function than anything else. Whatever Buddhism's value as a philosophy and spiritual outlet, for most Japanese its main purpose is to facilitate rituals associated with death. In the past, temples were central to the lives of communities because ancestors were interred within their precincts, and as more people leave their hometowns for the cities, their relationship with those temples deteriorates.