Tribute in the Home

Continuing with the religion theme this week, I chose to touch upon something I've seen in a few of my Japanese homestays along the way; small home "shrines".
For starters, one day I noticed a small cabinet-type piece of furniture placed in the small living room space in the home of my current host mother. There was a small picture of an aged man, some dying flowers, and oddly enough, an empty can of a popular beer brand sitting inside. It wasn't until a few days later, after my host mother mentioned the illness and eventual death of her husband, that I made the connection. This small shelf was a "shrine" or tribute of sorts to her late husband, the man in the photograph.



Since those weeks past, the dead flowers have been removed, but nothing else has changed. What is the purpose of this display? My host mother claims to have absolutely no affiliation with religion whatsoever; she isn't doing it for that. It's more likely she simply wants to honor and pay tribute, to always remember.

Maybe the case of my host mother's husband is a little out of the ordinary, because she is treating the shelf as a sort of "grave site" by occasionally gifting it with flowers.
However other households have similar, more tradition places of "worship".

Four years ago, I was placed in a host family with quite an extravagant display built into their wall. When the seemingly obscure doors pulled back, quite an intricate cubby took its place. It was no wider than two feet across, and decorated extravagantly like a small temple. In Buddhism, these displays are called Butsudan (loosely meaning "Buddha's House"). Inside are Butsudu, or all of the things used to pay tribute. They can be anything from candles to incense, flowers to food and other personal items. Various websites mention that often households pray once in the morning and once at night in front of this "altar", but in my previous experience I've always had only moderately religious families, and all together I think I've never seen any of them pray in front of the structure. In fact the only time it was ever opened was purely for display purposes; to show it to me and to show it off to others in the home. After all, they are a bit pricey so why not show it off?



If they weren't using it religiously, and it was so expensive, why did they have it? Well, the family seemed like quite the well-off type. The father was a president of a brach of the Pocari Sweat company, and their house was fairly large (for Japanese standards). Perhaps these Butsudans have become a symbol of something more than just the religion.