Cemeteries in Japan

The other day Mike and I went to Lone Tree Cemetery in Hayward, which I will write about in a upcoming post.  We weren't actually going to Hayward for the cemetery (yes, I do have a life outside of genealogy!), but rather to the Japanese gardens there.  We had a beautiful stroll, followed by a not-so-beautiful lunch in a restaurant downtown.  As my mind tried to escape the meal, I thought that perhaps it would be nice to write a bit about cemeteries in Japan.

It should be mentioned that though cremation is not mandatory in Japan, you'd be hard-pressed to find a cemetery that allows for burial.  This is not so much for religious reasons as for making room for the living.  There is not a whole lot of wide-open ranges in the country, which explains why the typical cemetery in Japan looks like this:

What is all of that?!?

In brief:

There generally are not individual graves in cemeteries, but family plots.  Like here, you will find engraved on the stone the names of the deceased.  In Japan, it is not uncommon to have a family crest, which too will be engraved on the stone.  Some have their family tree engraved on the stone.  I wish we'd do that here!

If you see your name in red on a gravestone, fear not, for this means that you are alive.  If your name is written in black, you may have something to worry about...

There is a place in front of the stone to offer flowers, incense and water...or a nice shot of shochu if the deceased was especially liked.   ＼（＾ ＾）／

Below each stone is a locked area for ashes.  The ashes of famous people are sometimes stolen.  Try not to be famous. 

Dying is expensive in Japan.  A grave site will set you back $20,000 to $40,000, which does not include the cost of the funeral.  Try not to die.  If that is not an option, having a high tech burial will save you about 80%.  For more info, watch the Reuters segment on card-activated crypts or the video below (which I highly recommend):

Sorry, but the weird voice of the lady's

deceased father is not included.  

そうなのか

Rio Vista

Yesterday I got a wild hair to go to a cemetery.  Hubby was willing to go along for an adventure.  He picked the city of Rio Vista, a small rural community in the Sacramento Delta. 

Both the Catholic cemetery and the Odd Fellows cemetery are located just as you enter town.  The entrances to both are very small.  I had to circle around the Catholic cemetery to find out exactly where to enter.  I wasn't even sure at first it was a Catholic cemetery.  I thought perhaps it was a second part of the Odd Fellows cemetery, a "spill over" of sorts.  The narrow entrance at Odd Fellows takes you straight up a small hill.  It was such a slope that I decided to exit through the church parking lot next door.

It was at the Catholic cemetery that I ran for my life from an attacking swarm of bees (be careful if you visit- the bees are on the right side of the fence, under the tree closest to the street).  At the Odd Fellows cemetery next to the parking lot, hubby pointed out a dead jackrabbit.  How very sad!!  That being said, both cemeteries are very well-maintained. 

To top off my bizarre day, my plumber's crack (ha!) got sunburned while I was bent over transcribing a gravestone.  Ouch!!  Normally a long inscription is from a passage of the Bible or a cherished poem.  After coming up empty on a Google search for a source of the inscription, I felt compelled to try my best at deciphering the old stone. 

The inscription is just beautiful!  It provokes images a young girl's spirit being alive and free of the burdens of nature and time:

She passed away at the early dawn of
a bright and intelligent womanhood.
Her form is mouldering here.
But her spirit is beyond the reach
of sin or earthly trouble.
No sorrow in store for her.
Untrammeled by flesh unchained
to earth. Free to roam through
the boundless expanse of this
glorious Universe forever.
The rain will fall the sun will shine. The flowers will bloom and droop again.
As in time past giant trees did ???
Where now is this small grave of ???
Sweet birds of song now fly about
Where in another age the sea
Will ??? and give a route
To sailors seeking ??? free
Thy home will be the spirit land
Untouched by time and in nature's hand.

Oh how I wish I could make out the entire inscription!   If you'd like to give it a try, you can visit Virginia Ewing's tribute at Find-A-Grave:

Virginia "Virgie" Ewing (1860-1874)

The Passing Of Time

Time goes by so quickly...personal issues have prevented me from doing any cemetery research for quite some time.  When I was finally able to continue, I forgot to update this blog.  It is not my intention to be so neglectful.  All I can say is that I will try harder in the future.

And so I will begin anew by admitting to a gravestone no-no that I actually did today.  I saw the fragmented pieces of a young child's marker, all but one piece separated by a few inches.  I carefully picked the three smaller pieces up and moved them to fit near the larger two.  Yes, I risked breaking the pieces even further, but I felt in this case it had to be done.  Chunks of the stone had slid down the hill.  Some had shattered; thankfully, the most important parts of the stone were still in tact.  I was careful to not move the pieces from the area where the child's name was found.  The name was next to a relative who I assume was the mother of the child.  As I bunched some grass up below the stones to help prevent them from sliding again, I imagined that the mother would have felt very sad to know that her young daughter's gravestone has almost been lost to time.

Here is the gravestone of young Violet M. Shouse (1910-1923)

Photography will remember what

mother nature will eventually destroy.

The Use of Shaving Cream

Life has been busy.  I apologize for not posting sooner....

So a couple of months back I was doing some work at Find A Grave, when I stumbled upon a biography of one of the volunteers there.  She was dead set against spraying shaving cream on tombstones.  Now I thought to myself, "Well, I am too!  That's just wrong to go around defacing tombstones with shaving cream", not realizing that this is not done as an act of vandalism but as a way of reading the inscription on decaying old tombstones.  In fact, it took me some time for this naive rabbit to find out that many people use shaving cream as a tool to help with transcription.

My initial reaction was, "Well, how silly.  Shaving cream isn't going to hurt anything", but then I got to thinking that I really don't know that for certain.  And so I began to do some online reading on the subject.

I have concluded that neither those for or against the use of shaving cream really have any kind of proof as to its effects. I like to err on caution though and so I will probably not pack shaving cream along on my next visit to a cemetery.

If you'd like to read up on the subject, here are two articles that represent both views:

Shaving Cream: Genealogist’s Friend or Cemetery Conservator’s Foe?
Shaving Cream on Tombstones

And a before and after photo of a gravestone that was cleaned with shaving cream (both pictures taken from Hoggatt-family.com).

A Room With A View

Okay, so the title is tacky, but when I pranced around in the mud looking for a grave of an ancestor at Sunrise Memorial Cemetery, I wasn't expecting to find such views.  It's not like I haven't been to Sunrise before; in fact, I've been out there more times than I can count.  So why am I just seeing it this way for the first time?  I just don't know!

I guess perhaps it was in the way I treated this visit that changed my perception of the cemetery.  What I normally do is look throughout a cemetery and capture a picture or two of a gravestone that is ornate.  Perhaps the person lived a very long time, or maybe not long at all.  There may be a large family buried together, or one solitary stone crying out for attention.  Whatever it is that stands out, I take a photo.

Two days ago, it was the peacefulness of the cemetery that stood out.  It was a quiet day, cool and windy.  I was alone at the cemetery, besides the countless souls buried beneath my feet, and a squirrel or two that ran along the side of the road.  I didn't hear any people or cars.  I didn't see any trash or debris.  It was just me and nature.

I was searching for a particular grave, but I began to click my camera-phone, not paying much attention to the usual things so much.  I saw some interesting things, like...

A wooden door.  How eerie!  It looks like I can push this door down easily.

A Day of the Dead tribute??  All I know is that I wasn't going to get

any closer.

Gravestones are sinking!  I thought the Newcomb stone looked like

it was sliding.  I didn't notice the stone on the left until I looked 

at the picture.

Many, many squirrels.  I stopped counting at 70.

The office hasn't been open to the public in at least a year, and I never did find a particular grave I was searching.  That means I'll be back out here soon to search again.  I just hope the stones will still be standing.

Please support the funding of your local cemeteries.

A Return To Sunset

Part of my goal for going out to Sunset View Cemetery the last time was to see if I could find the grave of my mother's great aunt, Evelyn Law.  I never met Evelyn, and I had surmised from the stories I had heard about her and her siblings that perhaps she was the quiet one.  After a lengthy couple of passes down Row 20 of the Pine Lawn portion of the cemetery, Mike inadvertently discovered that Evelyn was in fact not buried in Row 20, but in Row 19- alongside her second husband and her only daughter, Mae.

One thing that I did not know until the cemetery returned my husband's phone call, was that the marker was made of bronze.  Now I have seen markers like this all the time.  Not in the habit of bending down to touch or disturb the marker, I now know that markers such as these are made of the fine material.  This is important (to me anyway) because bronze will last for a very long time.

Sunset View Cemetery

At the end of a very busy little street in El Cerrito sits Sunset View Cemetery.  Mike and I found out the hard way that the cemetery is deceptively large.  No chance of just stumbling across someone here.  Come prepared by calling the office first.

From the top of the hill one can see from Sausalito in the North Bay to San Francisco.  All but the side that overlooks the bay is surrounded by tall, beautiful trees.  Birds and squirrels were everywhere.  The only audible sound was the wind.

I thought I'd do this post a little differently and just show a few pictures of the cemetery.