It's quite possible I misheard, or that marital relationships are more important than I thought.)Īnyway, there's a slab sitting beside each shrine with the names of everybody buried there. (I don't know why all four of Okaasan's grandparents were buried under the same shrine. They were all buried under the same shrine. It's traditional for Japanese to be cremated and their ashes to be buried with those of their family. We went to visit Okaasan's mother's parents, and Okaasan's father's parents. (Look up pictures of Japanese graves, they're dope.)
When I say graveyard I mean it pretty loosely. A lot of North Americans wouldn't even guess that the decorative shrines were actually the final resting places of hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese. The "gravestones" are layers of cement or more expensive rock, with a bigger square base and smaller ascending levels, until an upright slab about as tall as the combined layers pokes out at the top. So we, like almost everybody in Ishikari, went to visit graves. The graveyard was a little over an hour drive away, but we had snacks, so that was okay. It was a Tuesday, but, it being a national holiday, I got the day off school and my host parents didn't have work. There're a few Buddhist holidays dedicated to just that, and one of them came up last weekend, on the 24th of September. In Japan, honoring your ancestors is very important.