Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1: 141–162© 2004 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

Ellen Schattschneider

Family Resemblances
Memorial Images and the Face of KinshipIn some northern Tohoku institutions, a dedicated hanayomeningyõ (bridedoll), infused with the spirit of the bodhisattva Jizõ, functions as a spirit
spouse for the unquiet soul of a child or youth who died before marriage.
Although the ³gurine used is the opposite sex of the deceased, the doll’s face iswidely believed to come to resemble that of the dead person. These imputed
cross-cutting “family resemblances” (in Wittgenstein’s sense) emerge from theenigmatic double life of ritual images, which may simultaneously be experienced
as representations of distant beings and as ef³cacious entities in their own right.
By building up an extended web of partial associations among the living, thedead, and memorial images, those who dedicate and pray to hanayomeningyõ
help regulate relations between categorical domains of existence. In “facing” thedead, the living thus mimetically represent and reproduce generative principles
of human kinship.

keywords: memorial practice – ritual images – Jizõ – ningyõ – kuyõ – hana-

yomeningyõ

Ellen Schattschneider is assistant professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

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[We] see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing…I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities
than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members ofa family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament…overlap andcriss-cross in the same way.
(Wittgenstein 1973, p. 32)
Before all, [religion] is a system of ideas with which...individuals represent tothemselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it.
(Durkheim 1965, p. 257)

The Problem: “Doubleness” and the Creation of Resemblance
In this paper I attempt to bring Wittgenstein’s well-known critique of essentialist modes of thought to bear on the classic Durkheimian problem of religion’s
capacity to represent “the obscure but intimate relations” between persons andtheir social world. I do so by concentrating upon an ethnographic puzzle arising from my research in northern Tohoku on the memorial practice of consecrating bride dolls (hanayomeningyõ PA^†) to the souls of the unmarried
dead. During the postwar period, hundreds of families have memorialized theunsettled souls of children or youths who have died before marriage by dedicating bride and groom dolls believed to have been infused with the bodhisattva
Jizõ. The practice is often referred as a “marriage” between the doll and theunhappy spirit; in many cases, the dead person, unmarried in life, is believed tohave pleaded, through a spirit medium, with living family members for a wife
*Fieldwork on bride doll (hanayomeningyõ) memorialization, primarily in Aomori Prefecture,
was conducted in 1991–92, 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2003, and has been made possible by the generous
support of U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, theNortheast Asian Council (Association of Asian Studies), the Social Sciences Research Council, andthe U.S-Japan Fulbright program.
I have been extensively aided in my research by numerous itako and kamisama spirit mediums innorthern Tohoku, and by many of their clients and worshippers, identi³ed by pseudonym. I am
grateful to the priests, staff, and lay congregants at multiple institutions including Nishikõyasan temple (Kizukuri), Kawakura Jizõ-son (Kanagi/Nakasato), Entsðji (Osorezan), Yamadera (Yamagataken), and Yasukuni Jinja (Tokyo) for their many kindnesses and their profound insights into bride
doll dedication.
I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues at Hirosaki University, especially Sugiyama Yuko,
Tanno Tadashi, and Sakumichi Shinsuke, for their hospitality and intellectual generosity. This paper
also reµects and builds upon very helpful conversations and correspondence with Mark Auslander,
Hosoi Yuko, Ikegami Yoshimasa, Richard Parmentier, Robert Paul, Ian Reader, and Robert Smith.

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schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 143or husband in the other world (Matsuzaki 1993; Schattschneider 2001; Van
Bremen 1998).
Collaboratively developed by local priests, spirit mediums, and laypersons to
comfort the souls of local unmarried men who have died in combat during the
Asia-Paci³c War, bride doll dedication has subsequently been extended tomemorialize children and youths who died before marriage from disease, roadaccidents, and other causes.1 At Nishikõyasan (Kõbõji) Temple in Kizukuri,
Kawakura Jizõ-son in Kanagi, and Entsðji in Osorezan, many hundreds of these
consecrated dolls are enshrined, most with photographs of the deceased.2
Within glass boxes that house the doll and photograph, mourners place offerings that evoke the full life denied to the prematurely dead youth: beer, sake,packaged food, cigarettes, toy cars, and articles of clothing. After a number ofyears, it is believed, the dead child’s soul will ³nally be released from the liminal
void in which it has wandered in pain, and move towards Buddhahood.
The puzzle is as follows: Why do mourners and other visitors insist that theface of each doll over time comes to look like the (opposite sex) face of thedeceased in the photograph? This apprehended emerging resemblance between
the face of the doll and that of the dead child is cited by virtually all of myinformants as proof that the ritual has worked, and that the lost soul has beenplaced on the proper track towards solace and perhaps ultimate transmigration.
Why should this be the case?
This ethnographic puzzle may cast some light on an enduring conundrum inthe anthropology of religion, the linked problem of the “doubleness” of images
and the “doubleness” of human persons. Theorists of ritual images and icons
have noted that such symbolic forms are “double:” they are both representationsof an absent element (the god, the ancestor, or other forces) and the thing itself(Belting 1994, Faure 2000, Freedberg 1998, Gell 1998, Rupert 2000). The
image simultaneously points to an absent thing and is that dynamic, active presence. Such images are, in certain respects, both signi³er and signi³ed. The precise
nature of that “doubleness” may vary dramatically, but perplexing paradoxes
1. For a review of spirit marriage in comparative East Asianist perspective, see Schattschneider
2001, pp. 855–56. Modern bride doll dedication in Tohoku emerges out of multiple sources, includingJizõ memorial stone ³gurines and mukasari ema è²½ò…+, votive tablets through which the soulsof those who died unmarried were wed to painted spirit spouses (Blacker 1975, p. 158, Wada 1988;
Schattschneider 2001; Tõnoshiritsu Hakubutsukan 2001). The use of dolls in the postwar era
was strongly inµuenced by the common wartime practice of giving masukotto ningyõ æÁ»ËÐ^†(mascot dolls) or imon ningyõ ]“^† (care bag dolls) to soldiers going off to battle as protective
amulets (omamori) (Schattschneider, forthcoming).
2. Bride dolls are also dedicated at Yamadera in Yamagata prefecture, where they are said to beinfused with the bodhisattva Kannon (Wada 1988). Since the early 1980s, hundreds of bride dolls
have also been dedicated at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (Schattschneider, forthcoming). As noted
below, the faces of the bride dolls at Yasukuni are said not to alter over time.

144 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
generated by this uncanny sense of the doubleness life of images emerge indiverse systems of ritual and representation the world over.
From an orthodox Durkheimian position, the “doubleness” of ritual images
is basically a function of the doubleness of human existence. Ritual practices
bridge the two poles of human existence, our status as both individual andcollectively-constituted beings. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,
Durkheim approaches the central Australian Aboriginal totem sacred object,
the churinga, as a double entity. This object of wood or polished stone, uponwhich is engraved a design representing the group totem, is both a representation of the clan totemic ancestor and is experienced as the ancestor itself. This
doubleness, Durkheim implies, is produced by the dynamic relationshipbetween individual and society. A group of individuals acting and feeling inconcert project their combined psychic energies into the churinga, which therefore appears to them the animate incarnation of the god. Through common
veneration of the animated churinga, each individual person is therefore ³lledwith the spirit of society itself, and various components of the community arerecalibrated with one another.
Leaving aside the many dif³culties with Durkheim’s ethnography and his
speci³c interpretation of Aboriginal materials, are we willing to accept the classic Durkheimian insistence that these two forms of “doubleness” are precisely
homologous? Is the double quality of a ritual image, as both signi³er andsigni³ed, simply a product of the fact that each person is both an individual
being and a collectively-constituted entity? In apprehending a human-madeimage as alive or sacred are we simply glimpsing, through an opaque lens, thepower of society as a uni³ed entity? Or is the production, circulation, andreception of intimate physical resemblances a more subtle and complicatedprocess, embedded in society but not simply a reµection of society as such? To
put it another way, might we, following Wittgenstein, argue that the likenesses
produced in these instances are not homologous mappings between self andsociety, but are rather “family resemblances” in his sense of the term, crisscrossing and cross-cutting partial af³nities which, taken as a whole across anextended ³eld or network, produce a sense of common coherence without
being reducible to a single speci³able or essential quality? Might the dissonances and dissimilarities cutting across these webs of resemblance further fueltheir aesthetic, emotive, and ritual power? Might these relations of likeness andtension, in turn, cast some light on how relations of kinship among the living
and the dead are produced and reproduced in Japan?
Doubleness in Japanese Ritual Images: Mitate and the Efficacy of Imitation
Japan is an especially interesting site in which to consider the “doubled” quality ofritual images. For centuries, Buddhist and Shinto ritual specialists have ponderedschattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 145
the varied paradoxes of resemblance associated with images of the human³gure. Japanese theorists of ritual and aesthetics have articulated the principleof mitate ØCm, the concept that most ef³cacious offerings to the gods are necessarily imitations of divine beings. Offerings depend, as anthropologist Masao
Yamaguchi has argued, on “the art of citation,” evoking an absent force orbeing through imitative action precisely in order to bring that being into immediate co-presence with the human worshipper (Yamaguchi 1991; see also
LaMarre 2000). Thus, a group of priests seeking to venerate and derive meritfrom the invisible gods, who reside atop a sacred mountain, will fabricate andpresent a tsukuriyama 6™[, a miniature mountain that is explicitly glossed as a
³ctive image of the local mountain, which is in turn understood as a representation and incarnation of the world-mountain. In ritual action, this mimetic
image comes to function as the mountain itself, and brings the invisible divinities into the immediate precincts of the shrine and its human residents. Not
insigni³cantly, most Japanese Shinto shrines are centered on a mirror thatrecalls and instantiates the mythic cosmogenic mirror through which the sun
goddess Amaterasu was “tricked” out of a cave to restore life to the universethat had been darkened by her willful absence. In this primal mirror she
glimpsed an image of herself, which she mistook for a beautiful rival. Life itself
is thus founded on an initial illusory act of representation, a potent confounding of presence and absence, merging the imitative image with the represented
thing itself (Schattschneider 2003).
This principle of ef³cacious imitative action has long informed ritual practices of memorializing the dead in Japan. For millennia memorialization has
been organized around manifestly arti³cial images of the human ³gure, craftedwith careful attention to the dynamic relationship between visibility and invisibility. Buddhist wooden portrait sculptures, for example, were long consideredliving embodiments of honored dead persons; the statues were activated as
dynamic conduits between the visible and invisible worlds through carefulmanagement of their interior and exterior features. The dead person’s ashes
and cloth replicas of their viscera were placed within the hollow trunk of thestatue. Particular attention was given to the faces of these images, placing
reµective materials in the statue’s eyes and, in one important case, the actual
hair of the deceased on the statue’s face and head. Through such practices,
oscillating between visible surfaces and invisible interiors, the hollow portrait
statue served as an iconic model of the dynamic frontier between worlds. It
became a powerful mediator between different realms of existence, enabling
miraculous interventions by invisible powers on behalf of the mortal pilgrims
who gazed upon it (Faure 1998 and 2000).
In a comparable fashion, modern bride doll consecration in northern Tohoku
depends on the fascinating “doubleness” of the primary ritual icon, the ningyõ
itself. Suggestively, the characters for ningyõ ^† can also be read as hitogata, a146 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
term which generally refers to paper ritual ³gurines long used in puri³cationand memorialization rites. Indeed, my informants insist that any ningyõ, that is
to say any object made by human hands to resemble a person, is a potential vessel of tamashii Ó (spirit) and may serve as a substitute for a human being or forimportant qualities of a person, living or dead. Any “human-shaped” artifact iswell suited to ritual acts of healing the living or memorializing the dead because
it represents (or doubles) the human form, establishing bene³cial links and distinctions between itself, its human donor and its ultimate (usually divine or
sacralized) recipient.
The imputed power of the bride doll is illustrated by the changing signi³cance ofthe photograph of the dead child that is placed next to the hanayomeningyõ within
the glass case. Before the ningyõ is dedicated, the photograph cannot really be said tofunction as an effective “doubled” ritual icon. It is primarily a signi³er of absence;
many family members who have lost a child tell me that it is almost unbearably
painful to look upon such an image. One of the most dif³cult aspects of consecrating a bride doll is selecting the dead child’s photograph to be placed in the glass box
with the doll. As one bereaved mother stated before a consecration rite, “I canhardly look at the picture. All I can think is that my son is no longer with me.”Yet, once the doll has been consecrated and animated with the living spirit of
the bodhisattva Jizõ, matters quickly change. Soon afterwards, grieving parents
and other relatives come to pray in front of the glass box assemblage in the temple building, and may gaze at the photograph of the dead child for long periodsof time. Many mourning mothers have pointed out to me particular features ofthe photograph, murmuring stories about their child’s old likes and dislikes,
and expressing relief that the child is now “happily married.”
Why this shift in the bereaved’s attitude towards the photograph? At the
manifest level, this change is due to mourners’ often-stated belief that the deadsoul is now being comforted by the spirit spouse. “He is not alone anymore,”
one mother told me as she pointed to the photograph of the child, adding, “I
can feel that now, he is being taken care of. They are a happy couple, I think.”
This shift is due, as well, to the general apprehension that the photographic
image is beginning to partake of the doubleness of the doll icon, which both
represents the Jizõ-infused spirit spouse and is Jizõ itself. The intimate contiguity between doll and photograph creates a visual ³eld of intense duplication, sothat the doll and the photograph both come to be more than mere representations of the spirit couple, but are tangibly the spirit couple’s living presence. Intime, this ef³cacious incorporation of the child’s photograph within the protective doubleness of the doll icon will be manifested in the doll’s face itself.
This process is modeled on the generally recognized power of Jizõ images,
through which enduring incarnations of deceased persons may be animatedand afµicted bodies healed (Reader 1991, pp. 152–53; Faure 2000, p. 71). Jizõ,my informants often note, easily binds himself to the restless souls of troubled

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 147
dead children, enveloping them within his capacious robes and transportingthem through the realms of creation. This capacity is exempli³ed by migawari
XÖ¡™ (substitutive or sacri³cial) Jizõ, which takes on the pain of the wandering soul so as to ease its spiritual passage. In a similar fashion, each offered bride
doll takes on the identity not only of the bodhisattva Jizõ but also, in part, of thesuffering dead child represented in the photograph. In effect, the Jizõ-infuseddoll functions as a binding agent, giving the once liminal wandering soul asecure material anchor and relieving it of its suffering.3
Signi³cantly, ritual specialists insist that the consecration rite—in which thespirit of Jizõ is called into the previously inanimate doll—should only be performed once the child’s photograph has been placed beside it within the glassbox. The materialization of Jizõ, in effect, occurs in intimate conjunction with
the image of the dead, unmarried child or youth, initiating the process of gradual identi³cation between the doll and the dead soul. In time, as the doll facecomes to resemble the face of the child, the doll ³nally comes to embody theunity of the spirit couple, and should be respectfully burned in a purifying ³re.
Bride doll marriage thus illustrates the Durkheimian insight that effective
ritual action depends on the positing of symbolic equivalences between socialgroups, persons, and inanimate objects. For Marcel Mauss (1990), solidarity
between dissimilar social groups is constituted through exchange, which
depends on the capacity of the gift object to embody the essence of the donating
individual or group, and for the gift transaction to symbolize the overall social
relationship between the donor and receiver. Levi-Strauss (1976) re³nes thisinsight to argue that the primary exchange medium was women; a woman’s
capacity, in marriage exchange, to stand for the group she originates from is, in
effect, the foundation of culture itself, necessitating exogamy and subsequent
enduring relations between wife-givers and wife-receivers.
This basic logic obtains in bride-doll-spirit marriage. Once consecrated andinfused with the spirit of the bodhisattva Jizõ, the bride doll evokes the presenceof an entire social unit, the society of the dead. She thus provides a tangible
anchor for the hitherto un³xed, interstitial soul of the deceased, wandering
along the riverbank between the worlds of the living and the dead. Through theanimated doll, the once-lost soul of the child is grafted into the extended community of the dead, and is effectively socialized into a new category of existence.
The memorialized youths, previously thought to have been lonely lost souls, arenow often said by family members to be playing or conversing with their new
tomodachi (friends), as the other ningyõ within the memorial hall are referred
3. This binding process is presumably aided by the dolls’ proximity to conventional Jizõ stone³gurines at these sites, characterized by extremely simple faces. Freedberg (1998, pp. 112–28) argues
that the simplest images often are venerated as the most potent and ef³cacious; their very simplicity
seems to reduce their effects to elemental levels and renders their features most open to diverse interpretations by those who encounter them.

148 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
to. As I have noted elsewhere, bride dolls enshrined at Kawakura are periodically rotated through the various chambers of the doll-holding memorial hall,in an ef³cacious mimetic enactment of the soul’s hoped-for passage throughthe six cosmic realms of rokudõ ÂŠ (Schattschneider 2001, pp. 867–68).
Signi³cantly, my informants insist that bride doll marriage simply will notwork if the consecrated bride doll box is brought back to the home of the
bereaved family after the dedication rite. “The couple needs to be in the safekeeping house, with the other couples,” an elderly itako spirit medium explained
to me, “for they will be comforted together there.” She added, “After all, the doll
is now Jizõ, everything will be ³ne now.” In the presence of hundreds of otherdolls, all infused with Jizõ’s miraculous presence, each doll eases the tragicallyisolated and individuated soul into the collective society of the dead.
The Meanings of the Face: Metonymy and Spiritual Transformation
Why, then, do informants insist that the shift in the doll’s facial features is thepreeminent “proof ” that the ritual of doll dedication has worked, as opposed toother forms of mimetic transformation? The explanation lies in the peculiarfeatures of facial representations in general and in Japan in particular. In his
celebrated essay “The Aesthetic Signi³cance of the Face,” Georg Simmel (1959)
argues that the high degree of distinctive expressiveness associated with facial
musculature leads to the face often metonymically standing for the person as awhole. Inasmuch as the face is composed of a set of intimately connected elements that form a complex whole, a face can potentially be apprehended ashaving a high-level unity or coherency that lends itself to spiritual or superordinate interpretations. This potential is heightened by the fact that, in contrast to the human trunk or appendages, the face is often apprehended ashaving a kind of separable status from normal corporeal existence. In Simmel’s
words, “The impression of spirituality is also strengthened by the fact that theface shows the inµuence of gravity less than other parts of the body” (Simmel
1959, p. 278). The beauty and expressions discernible from the face, or from avisual representation of the face, thus often serve to represent the entire spiritual or moral state of the person.
Simmel further notes that inasmuch as the human face is the most differentiated organ, it serves as a primary focal point of social distinction. Thus, one of themost miraculous kinds of resemblance is that established between an external
physical element and a face, the single most complex visible aspect of the person.4
Asian Buddhist iconography has long deployed shifting representations of
4. Thus, for example, Christian mystics at times report seeing the shape of a cross on the face of agreat teacher or holy person. Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. havereported seeing their own reµected faces as well as spectral visions of the faces of the dead superimposed over the names of dead soldiers.

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 149
the face of divine beings in order to evoke the miraculous qualities of Buddha
nature. The renowned Chinese Buddhist Master Baozhi is said to have had aface that was, “rectangular and gleamed like a mirror, reµecting the faces of
those who came before him.” When a monk tried to paint Baozhi’s portrait,
Baozhi scratched open his own face, “and from the gashes, one after another,emerged the twelve faces of Bodhisattva Avalokitešvara—too extremely beautiful to paint!”5 A famous Japanese twelfth-century sculpture of Baozhi now in
the Kyoto National Museum depicts the icon’s face as splitting open, revealing
the face of the Bodhisattva within (Faure 1998; Fowler 2000).
Close proximity to facial images, especially masks, often has profound ritual
implications in Japan. Being bitten on the head by the lion mask on special ceremonial occasions is widely regarded as protective, especially for children, but participants are speci³cally enjoined not to touch the mask’s face or gaze into it(Sakurai 1988). In the “Nijðgo Bosatsu Oneri Kuyõ” ceremony in Kyoto’s Sokujyõin, twenty-³ve persons, ranging from small children to a senior priest, repeatedly process across a great raised bridge connecting the temple’s honden û*(main shrine) to the Jizõdõ wearing golden face masks of the bodhisattvas who
escort the soul to the other world immediately after death. Wearing such a mask
is considered highly meritorious for children and their families, and in turn thosemasked children are believed to bestow great blessings upon the crowds assembled below the bridge.
In high performing arts, the face, mask, role, and personhood of the performer are juxtaposed and transposed in complex ways. In Bunraku, subordinate puppeteers controlling the body and appendages of a puppet are dressed inblack clothing, with gauze covering their eyes. In contrast, the face of the master
puppeteer, who alone controls the facial expressions of the puppet, is entirely
visible to the audience; his impassive face and the doll’s expressive face, in
effect, are intimately merged for the duration of the performance. In Noh,actors playing aged men, children, women, spirits, ghosts, or demons wear
carved wooden masks, but actors playing the unmarked category of middle-aged
men assume the stylized hitamen Ÿs (literally, “direct mask”) expressions, akind of supreme mask formed out of the physical face itself.
Given the long-term importance of masking in Japanese ritual and other performance genres, it is perhaps not surprising that the intimate relationshipamong mask, face, and personhood is an enduring theme in Japanese ³lm. For
example, in Shindõ Kaneto’s 1963 ³lm Onibaba, an old woman forcibly removes
with dif³culty an oni (demon) mask from the horribly scarred face of a violent
general; after she wears the mask to frighten her daughter into submission, the5. Entry on Baozhi. International Dictionary of Buddhism, http://www.orientalia.org/dic3.html(accessed 20 February 2004).

150 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
mask becomes welded to her. When it is ³nally removed she too is revealed tohave a scarred, demonic face.
Conversely, in Miyazaki Hayao’s Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away,
2001) the heroine, Sen, recovers her full personhood through befriending the mysterious outcast and masked ³gure Kao-nashi (No-face). Marked by the palpableabsence of a face, the principle medium of social intercourse, this spectral being is
profoundly unsocialized, and violently consumes people. The girl, who herself
lacks a name, is accompanied by Kao-nashi as she travels to the home of Zeniba,
the doppelganger sister of the frightening matriarch Yubaba, who has imprisoned
Sen and threatened to destroy her parents. Sen leaves behind Kao-nashi with the“good” maternal ³gure, and in so doing leaves behind an earlier, infantile stage in
her own psychological development, freeing herself to move towards love for the
dragon prince, whose face she had seen as a young girl. Returning to Yubaba’sbathhouse, she completes her quest to regain her name and full identity.
Signi³cantly, her ³nal departure from the spirit world depends on her resisting theurge to turn her face back towards it; her reconstituted selfhood depends on thelessons she has learned from the other world, but she must emphatically separate
herself from it in order to mature within the world of the living.6
As these disparate examples suggest, the manipulation of facial images andfacial orientations in Japan often enables the productive fragmentation andreconstitution of the person, moving across the boundaries between life anddeath and between human and the non-human poles. In the case of bride-dollspirit marriage in northern Tohoku, the developed resemblance between theinitially generic face of the mass-produced doll and the dead child’s face is aclear sign of the intervention of miraculous powers, establishing profoundresemblance where none existed before. The changing nature of the doll’s facestands metonymically not simply for the doll but also for the state of the deadchild’s soul. As the doll face comes to resemble the photograph of the late child,the living family members come to believe that the child’s soul is no longer lostand dismembered in the void, but is in fact merged with the compassionate
spirit of Jizõ and is moving back into conventional integrated status.
Rather like the ancient Buddhist teacher, Baozhi, the faces of the modern
bride dolls reµect the faces of beings near to them, and evoke the transformative
presence of a compassionate bodhisattva. Through Jizõ’s miraculous intervention, a previously hidden face begins to manifest itself on the once generic,mass-produced face of the bride doll. This special instance of mirrored representation signals the active presence of the divine, tangibly dramatizing theextraordinary doubleness of the ritual image.
6. Those undertaking ascesis or other spiritual journeys into locales associated with the otherworld are often enjoined against looking backwards, lest they carry back with them inappropriate
forces and beings into this world (Blacker 1975; Schattschneider 2003).

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Imaging Social Reproduction:
Bride Dolls and the Developmental Cycle of the Domestic GroupWhy not simply use the less elaborate stone Jizõ statues that often memorialize
dead children throughout Japan, and which have extremely simple, androgynous
faces that might more obviously lend themselves to apparent protean transformations? Why dedicate bride dolls? The explanation partly lies in the history of thesemass-reproduced ³gurines and their standard uses in modern Japanese marriage.
Although these bride and groom dolls appear to be “traditionally” dressed inkimono, they are relatively recent innovations. The modern Shinto wedding service that they evoke was only developed in 1900 for the marriage of Crown Prince
Yoshihito (later the Taisho Emperor). This event marked the conscious adoptionof monogamy and romantic companionate marriage along the Western bourgeois model as the national idealized form of marriage. Before that time, Shinto
wedding rites as such simply did not exist. Japanese commoners began to adopt
this wedding rite by 1902, and although enormously elaborated over the subsequent century, the basic structure has endured ever since (Edwards 1990; Goldstein-Gidoni 2001).
Bride dolls in their modern form seem to have ³rst appeared in the 1920s, following the widespread adoption of the Shinto wedding rite, and the increasing
incorporation of Western doll technologies and form (furansu ningyõ
ÝñûÁ^† “French dolls”) in Japan. The kimono clad bride dolls appear tohave initially been developed for the international tourist market, as exportablesigns of quintessential “Japaneseness.” In time, these dolls became a standard partof the bride’s trousseau, given by the bride to her new mother-in-law and stored
in the tokonoma display alcove at the house’s center. The bride doll (at times
paired with a groom doll) is invariably frozen in a characteristic pose, a convention that partly emerges out of the Kabuki theatre. These dolls emerge out of theeighteenth-century ichimatsu }Ç dolls modeled on the famous onnagata Kabuki
actor Sanokawa Ichimatsu, known for his portrayal of young women. Modern
hanayomeningyõ bride and groom pairs also reµect the growing tendency inearly-twentieth-century Japan to photograph the wedding couple.
The enormous sentimental resonance of these wedding dolls rest in theircapacity to evoke key features of the middle class female life cycle. As in many
cultures, an incoming bride in Japan is classically conceived as a suspect, almost
diseased ³gure; an intermediate, anomalous “stranger” in Simmel’s terms.
Over time, in principle, she will become more and more closely identi³ed withher husband’s household and family line, and may eventually become the mostimportant pillar of that institution presiding over a multigenerational household.
The movement of the bride doll from the daughter-in-law to the mother-inlaw is in part a projective ritual act, a tangible image of the daughter-in-law’s own
eventual passage from in-marrying bride to leading woman of the household.

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Just as the new bride doll is located at the symbolic center of the house, thealcove (tokonoma), so will the human bride move into a central structural position within the house of her husband, within the space of a generation. The bridedoll, in effect, allows the bride to envision herself as eventually reaching the endpoint of the process upon which she is embarking, entering into a superior
structural position at the center of her husband’s ancestral house. In turn, fromthe standpoint of the receiving mother-in-law, the bride doll gift dramatizes her
own achieved central position within her husband’s house. She sees in the face ofthe bride doll a refracted image of her former and current self, as an in-marrying
bride who has completed a structural journey from alien newcomer to respectedmother-in-law. The (secular) bride doll thus functions as a mediating operator,
establishing a gradual projective identi³cation between the daughter-in-law andmother-in-law.
In a comparable fashion, the bride dolls used in postwar northern Tohoku
memorial rituals gradually establish a chain of identities between various beings
through the logic of af³nity and temporal projection. The isolated dead child,so long deprived of marriage and the comforts of adulthood, is given a tangible
glimpse of the ful³llment of married life. The dead soul is given, in effect, a progressive existence. Indeed, in the years following the dedication of a bride doll,family members will often present gifts, such as a school backpack or a suit for a
job interview, that celebrate important passages in the dead youth’s alternate
life. The doll, itself a mitate or mimetic representation, enables a mimetic
tableau, an ef³cacious ³ctive representation of an alternative life cycle within
the microcosmic theatre of the glass box. These functions are consistent withthe deeper cultural history of bride dolls, which, as noted above, are transformations of ichimatsu dolls, historically used to represent a male Kabuki actor,
who played female roles in the popular theatre during the mid-Edo period.
The theatrical tableau presented in the glass doll boxes is also deeply engaging for the mother of a deceased son, who in the normal course of events would
have eventually received a bride doll from her new daughter-in-law on theoccasion of her son’s marriage. In the case of spirit marriage, the bereaved
mother gains a substitute daughter-in-law, embodied in precisely the token of
normal marriage, a bride doll itself. Like the conventional bride doll, whichmoves into the central alcove in the mother-in-law’s house, this ritual bride
doll comes to stand for the unity of the newly-married couple. So great is the
af³nity between the two members of the spirit couple that in time the motherand other mourners come to perceive the face of the dead child manifesting
itself on the face of the bride or groom doll. In due time, (in principle, after athirty-year union) the doll and photograph should ³nally leave this world
together in purifying µames.

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 153
From Trauma to Mourning: Progressive Identification and “Reality-Testing”
In psychoanalytic terms, the emergence of a fundamental resemblance between
the face of the doll and the face in the photograph may be conceived as marking atransition from trauma to mourning. In many of the cases I have worked on,
within a year or so after having dedicated a spirit couple, living survivors previously plagued by endlessly repeated, static images of the dead and of their untimely
death begin to recognize and accept gradual changes in the status of the dead.
Many report heart-warming dreams of the dead child beginning to “grow up” andmake friends in the other world, moving into a form of alternate adulthood. As
one man told me, several years after having dedicated a doll, “I miss my son terribly, of course. But I can see he is content there; he is not alone there, we can see.”As the father said this, he rearranged food offerings with the glass box, gently
touching the photograph and the kimono-clad bride doll.
These dynamics call to mind Freud’s well-known observation in Mourning
and Melancholia that the work of mourning demands a repeated testing of reality:
In mourning, time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carriedout in detail, and that when this work has been accomplished his ego will havesucceeded in freeing its libido from the lost love objects.
(Freud 1961, pp. 244–45)

This testing requires painful and piecemeal re-encounters with each and every
powerful memory and orientation associated with the deceased, from which
the libido must be speci³cally detached.
Appropriately, bride doll marriage establishes gradual separation between theliving and the dead through long term compensatory giving to the dead child.
Visits by parents to the bride doll boxes center on repeated tactile encounters withthe toys, food, and clothing objects most associated with the dead child—andwith the parents’ frustrated expectations of the child’s eventual adulthood. With
each visit to the doll box, the bereaved cleans and touches the miniature offerings
associated with the dead child, gazes at the kimono-clad doll spouse that embodies the expected married adulthood denied the child, and often gently touches thechild’s photograph. Evidently, the bereaved ego is engaging in a form of longterm “reality-testing,” gradually detaching itself, piece by piece as it were, frommemories of the lost one.
Bride dolls are especially appropriate media for this process. As we have seen,
in normal life, they enable progressive identi³cation between various parties in
the marriage process. In the special case of spirit marriage, the dolls in principle
enable progressive identi³cation between the dead child and its spirit spouse,sequentially differentiating the living survivors from the deceased.

154 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
The Promise and Perils of Doubleness: Two Case Studies
In practice, however, matters do not necessarily proceed so smoothly. The
ambiguous potentials of the double quality of ritual images are especially evident in the following two cases, in which mothers seek to comfort the souls of
their dead, unmarried children.
Case One: About eight years ago, Mrs. Tanno found herself suffering fromacute anxiety and ³nancial worries. Consulting a spirit medium, she learned
her dif³culties were caused by the unquiet soul of her daughter, who had died
two weeks after birth, two decades earlier. Speaking through the medium’s
voice, the dead daughter requested a spirit marriage to a groom doll, a request
to which Mrs. Tanno readily assented.
In recent years, her dead daughter, who has grown into a beautiful, selfpossessed young woman in the other world, has visited Mrs. Tanno in
dreams. In one dream, the daughter explained that she was getting blisters on
her feet as she “shopped” for the other children memorialized in the temple.
Mrs. Tanno thus bought her sandals, a scarf, and lipstick in preparation forattending a “party” with her deceased companions. Through such gifts, thedaughter is gradually moved towards structural adulthood and into the stablecommunity of the dead.
Several years ago, Mrs. Tanno decided not to give her daughter and spirit
doll son-in-law a child doll of their own, as that would engender a new roundof obligations, for the child itself might someday want a spirit bride. She thus,
almost imperceptibly, began to step back, allowing a necessary separation
between the living and the dead.7
Case Two: Recently, at an annual doll memorialization ceremony at Nishikõyasan, I encountered a somewhat more complicated case. Six months earlier, Kenji, the twenty-six-year-old son of Mrs. Morita, had died unexpectedlyof a heart attack. The bereaved Mrs. Morita quickly dedicated a bride dollbox. (Signi³cantly, she took this action on the advice of her mother-in-law
and an itako spirit medium.)At the conclusion of the ceremony, Mrs. Morita took her son’s memorial
box down from the large temporary altar to refresh its offerings, and added
new packages of undershirts and jockey shorts. She explained to me that now
that Kenji was “married” to the spirit doll (who bears the same name as his
living girlfriend) she, as his mother, feels a special obligation to wear his
clothing whenever possible.
During the ceremony, Mrs. Morita wore her late son’s favorite red sweatshirt as well as his watch, although it was far too big for her small wrist. Indeed,
she recalled that a month earlier, a neighbor had seen her in the sweatshirt and7. A more detailed account of this case is given in Schattschneider 2001, pp. 860–62 and 869–71.

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 155
momentarily thought she had seen Kenji himself. In contrast to Mrs. Tanno,
Mrs. Morita is reluctant to allow any distance to be established between her
and her lost son. In explaining why she must wear Kenji’s clothes, she toldme, “I am Kenji.”Psychoanalyst Doi Takeo (1981) argues that in Japan, the birth of a son is
profoundly empowering for women, giving them a highly valued capacity to act
forcefully upon the world. In Mrs. Morita’s case, Kenji’s clothing would appear
to have become a tangible manifestation of that empowering capacity. Insteadof sending him on his way, she strives towards an imaginary fusion with her
deceased son. In her words, “Every day without fail we go together, me and myson.” Her tendency each day to dress up in her dead son’s clothing has begun totrouble members of her family, and may suggest that the trauma of his death isbeing repeatedly, compulsively re-enacted.
Clearly, both mothers have been deeply affected by the double quality of thedoll image, which represents absent persons while functioning as a living
instantiation of those persons, or at least of signi³cant aspects of those persons.
Yet, the impact of this doubleness is strikingly different. Mrs. Tanno, who atsome level understands that she is engaged in a set of representational
processes, apprehends both proximity and distance between signi³er andsigni³ed. Buying a doll child, she knows, would engender a corresponding setof ramifying obligations, binding her to the spirit couple. But Mrs. Morita has
not yet achieved that sense of necessary distance between signi³er and signi³ed.
She is pleased that she has been mistaken for her son Kenji. She cannot yet
relinquish the immediate identi³cation between herself and her dead son, who
tangibly “lives” within the enshrined doll complex.
The Face of Kõbõ Daishi: Negotiating Affinity and Generation through the Image
The potential of bride doll memorial dedication to renegotiate self-other relations in the context of the domestic developmental cycle are poignantly illustrated by another case, in which the presentation of a memorial doll allowed alarger family social drama to play out.
Several years after the death of an unmarried twenty-year-old man, Saitõ
Tsuyoshi, his extended family journeyed with a female spirit medium, KudõHisako from their home up to Entsðji temple at Osorezan, perhaps Japan’s
most prominent Sainokawara wuIã (lit. banks of the underworld river
Sai). Some months earlier, Kudõ Hisako had transmitted to the family thedead youth’s request for a bride doll, which they had purchased, and carried
with them to Osorezan. The medium placed the doll in its case on the altar of
the memorial hall, along with a photograph of the dead young man. The family spent considerable time gesturing toward the doll box and discussing how156 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
beautiful the bride doll’s delicate face looked, “just like a bride on her wedding day.” They then participated in an extended Buddhist memorial service
in which, the priest later explained, the miraculous power of Jizõ had been
activated within the bride doll; Jizõ, in the form of the beautiful doll, would
now serve as a loving companion and spiritual guide to the dead Tsuyoshi.
After the services, the medium led the family group in an hour-long reverential circuit through the rocky paths of Osorezan; they periodically prayed at
designated spots and stooped to make small piles of stones, an action held toease the predicament of dead children who, in the afterlife, strive to build
miniature stupas in order to honor their families, only to see these piles
repeatedly torn down by demons.
In front of a new large statue of Kõbõ Daishi at the far end of the main
rocky ³eld, the medium paused, gazed up at the statue’s monumental face,and began to chant.8 Her voice suddenly changed pitch, and she began to
speak in the voice of Tsuyoshi, to whom the bride doll had just been dedicated. After thanking his family for obtaining a beautiful bride for him, theyoung man then declared that there was someone else present with him. The
medium’s voice shifted into that of Tsuyoshi’s deceased paternal grandfather,
the father-in-law of Mrs. Saitõ, the mother of the dead youth. The deadgrandfather remonstrated with his daughter-in-law (Tsuyoshi’s mother),with whom he had quarreled terribly in life, for not praying for him at thefamily butsudan (Buddhist memorial altar) during the years since his death.
Insuf³ciently memorialized, he had been lingering around the house andcausing her and her sisters to become ill. “Please forgive me,” he pleaded,“and please pray for me to become jõbutsu (a Buddha).”Crying profusely, Tsuyoshi’s mother agreed that she would pray for herlate father-in-law to achieve Buddhahood. The other family members joined
in her pledge, and returned home convinced that their health problems
would ease.

Among other things, this episode poignantly illustrates the frequent tendency, often observed in Japan and elsewhere, to mobilize the solidarity between
alternate generations in order to defuse tension between adjacent generations:the father-in-law and daughter-in-law, for so long locked in cycles of anger andmutual recrimination, are reconciled through the ³gure of the dead grandson,whom was intimately bound to both of them when he was alive. For our purposes, it is striking that this renegotiation of kinship relations is achieved
through a series of encounters with charged visual images, centered on humanmade representations of the face. Over the course of the morning the family
8. Many northern Tohoku kamisama spirit mediums enter into communication with dead souls
while praying in front of images of Kõbõ Daishi, usually placed on their central altars in their homes
and shrines.

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 157
party moved from the memorial hall, in which they were intensively oriented
towards the face of miniature bride doll and the adjacent tiny photograph of the
youth’s face, to the six-meter-high statue outdoors. As she began praying, themedium looked intently up into the carved face of Kõbõ Daishi, in which she
seemed to discern some sort of hidden transformation. The séance might bethought of as a very early phrase in the gradual convergence between the dedicated bride doll and the face in the photograph, a progressive identi³cation thatis necessary for the memorialization of the youth’s soul and for the ultimate
restoration of order and peace to his house. Aided by the transformative powersof Jizõ, incarnate in small and gargantuan ³gurines, the youth was now able tospeak to his parents in a way that began to untie a central knot of the family’s
predicament, opening up a bridge to communication between his parents andgrandfather, and encouraging the living to memorialize the resented deadpatriarch. Appropriately, this critical reconciliation took place under the gazeof a statue of Kõbõ Daishi, a saint renown as the maker of miraculous, animateJizõ statues that eased the sorrows of living and dead persons alike.
“Distributed Personhood” and the Dynamics of Gradual Convergence
These dynamics may be conceived of in term of Alfred Gell’s discussion of “distributed personhood,” the capacity of objects to be animated by overlapping, andoften divergent qualities of persons and person-like capacities (Gell 1998; Pinney and Thomas 2001). Without proper memorialization, the unsettled deadperson has a multifaceted existence, divided into divergent trajectories that mayµeetingly, unsteadily, and disturbingly manifest themselves in a range of objects,
locales, human bodies, animals or states of being. As a muenbotoke [â[, anunquiet soul may occupy a house, or a part of relative’s body or even a landscapefeature, manifesting itself in dangerous, uncontrolled ways as a specter orafµiction. The goal of proper memorialization is to move these divergent aspectsof the deceased person—that would otherwise wander in a chaotic manner on thebank of the river between worlds—into a productive, contained ³eld of social
relations, and eventually to consolidate a substantial component of the person
into a coherent singularity that can be subjected to measured, controlled passage
into the other world.
Over time, at Kawakura, Nishikõyasan, and Osorezan, more and more
aspects of the dead person come to rest in the dedicated doll itself. This process
does not happen of its own accord. Repeated memorial services, scheduled rotations of the dolls through the chambers of the doll holding buildings, correct
prayers, and offerings all help to cohere the late person within the con³nes of theglass box that holds the doll, the photograph, and associated memorabilia.
The state of affairs whereby doll comes to look like the dead person is thus apositive achievement, one in which many families take considerable pride and158 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
from which they derive great solace. The convergence of doll and photograph,like all the processes of kuyõ, needs to be achieved though dedicated humanlabor, repeatedly and regularly undertaken. Ultimately, this process culminatesin the inter-related artifacts being reduced to complete sameness. On the ³nal
day of the annual Jizõ festival at Kawakura, each deconsecrated doll and photograph are together consigned to a purifying ³re, collectively reduced to smoke
and ash. In such a way, priests explain, the soul of the dead is ³nally released
from this world and may ³nally move towards Buddhahood.9
The contrast to Yasukuni shrine, where hundreds of memorial bride dolls
have been dedicated since the 1980s to dead soldiers and sailors, is instructive.
At Yasukuni, priests and lay worshippers emphasize, the doll faces do notchange over time, and dolls are neither burned nor destroyed. After the initialdedication of the doll, family members are not permitted to make offerings
directly to the dolls, in the form of clothing, food or drinks or anything else.
(They may make subsequent offerings to the shrine as a whole, but these arereckoned non-speci³c offerings to all the mikoto or divinities enshrined at
Yasukuni.) Sacri³ced to the nation, the spirits of the dead have been, in principle at least, permanently separated from their families. From an orthodox, neonationalist Shinto perspective, the dead soldiers are not in a Buddhist state ofµux and transmigration, but have apotheosized into national divinities, eternaland unalterable (Nelson 2003). As such, the faces of images dedicated to themshould be equally ³xed and constant.
Conclusion: The Ritual Efficacy of “Family Resemblances”
In laying emphasis on “family resemblances” Wittgenstein holds that, rather
than reducing any category to a singular common denominator, human kinship is a far more helpful model for grasping likeness among the seemingly disparate elements that nonetheless form an extended set or system. To thisinsight, we may add that aesthetically pleasing, human-made groupings ofvisual elements—through which apparent dissimilarities are repressed and ultimate likenesses are foregrounded—help strengthen the actual bonds of humankinship, among the living and between the living and the dead.
When ³rst dedicated, each hanayomeningyõ box in northern Tohoku presents
a spectacle of fundamental gendered opposition between doll and photograph.
This gender distinction at one level is comforting to the family, for it indicates thedead child has at long last attained a conjugal bond with an opposite sex partner
9. Ritual specialists are insistent that the photograph has to be destroyed along with the doll andother items in the glass box. At the summer 2003 festival at Kawakura I proposed preserving a striking, original photograph of a soldier from a doll box that was about to be burned, but the priests
insisted that it would have been dangerous for all concerned not to burn the photograph along withthe doll.

schattschneider : memorial images and kinship | 159
that he or she was denied in life. Yet this distinction is also, at a less overt level,
troublesome, for it indicates that the dead child has not yet fully merged withJizõ, who is incarnate in the doll, and has not yet transcended his or her genderspeci³c mortal status. In learning over time how to apprehend subtle, overlapping correspondences between the facial features of the dedicated doll and the
opposite-sex face discernible in the offered photograph, bereaved families cometo sense a greater intimacy between the lost child and the lines of familial continuity and remembrance that are exempli³ed by Jizõ, who transcends conventional distinctions of gender and ordinary existence. By gazing into thechanging, absorptive face of the doll, that takes into itself all manner of difference,
they are reassured of the ultimate capacity of the family itself to encompass all of
its dispersed members, in this world and the other world.
In this sense, hanayomeningyõ dedication evokes some of the paradoxes of conventional conjugality: founded on fundamental difference between its constitutive
partners, a marriage nonetheless binds its partners, in principle at least, into a
uni³ed unit and propels them towards the common status of being parents. An
unmarried dead person, deprived of an opposite-sex partner to whom he or she
may be bound, runs the risk of being frozen in a perpetually static position. The
ritual of hanayomeiningyõ dedication, juxtaposing images that are simultaneously
dead and alive, static yet transforming, effectively propels the lost soul back into
motion, catalyzing a productive trajectory that will lead towards Buddhahood.
While we may hesitate to follow the Durkheimian reduction of the double
power of images to the doubleness of human existence, there is thus clearly apotent af³nity between the paradoxes of images and ongoing paradoxes ofsocial life. The enigmatic multiplicity of relations possible between beholder
and image are “good to think” with about the multiple orientations and rolepossibilities open to any social actor at any given moment. Hence, for example,
the usefulness of a conventional bride doll in negotiating af³nity, as an incoming bride is suspended between the structural role of outsider and the potential
future role of ultimate insider. By presenting or receiving the doll, a bridesimultaneously signals her subordinate position as daughter-in-law while looking forward to eventually occupying the honored mother-in-law position.
The uncanny qualities of images are especially useful in managing kinship relations between the living and the dead, as the living strive both for intimate connections to the lost and for productive separations between this world and the otherworld. In the case of spirit marriage in northern Tohoku, the living, animate qualities of the doll act as a kind of ritual magnet for the lost persona of the prematurely
dead child. As the doll closely draws the dead soul into its dynamic penumbra, thechild’s face becomes visibly manifest on the doll itself. The once formless, liminal
lost soul is thus given tangible living presence in the other world and can, in principle, be apprehended by the living as gradually detaching itself from their realm. As
the Saitõ case suggests, this process may even be extended to other troubled dead160 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31 / 1 (2004)
souls beyond the one being formally memorialized, easing them towards ultimate
release and Buddhahood.
To be sure, the capacity of visual signs to constitute and reproduce proper kinship relations is by no means automatic or predetermined. As the case of Mrs.
Morita reminds us, the double life of images can easily have unpredictable consequences, enabling unexpected forms of identi³cation and projection, at times
binding living and dead kin in potentially traumatic or pathological ways. “Family resemblances,” after all, are potentially limitless, and must be limited or
repressed to some degree if sanity and family life are to continue.
The mysterious qualities of representational forms are not ends in themselves
but are simply the building blocks of ritual practice, constantly incorporated into
the ongoing bricolage of symbolic action, evoking and redressing the paradoxes
and contradictions in the lives of persons and of collectivities. In the enigmatic
life of images—and perhaps especially in the compelling faces of human-madeimages of the dead—we are offered powerful and productive glimpses, in
Durkheim’s evocative phrase, of our own “obscure but intimate relations” withsociety. These glimpses are not, as we have seen, to be thought of as the orthodox
Durkheimian apprehension of society as a discrete unit in toto. Rather, these
glimpses are best to be understood as imaginative forays into a dense web ofpotential “family resemblances,” into the emerging social processes and symbolic
forms that constitute a dynamic sociocultural order. By facing the dead and giving face to the dead, we come to recognize the dynamic, mutual constitution ofself and other, person and society. Such acts have neither unitary causes nor referents, but are, rather, ongoing efforts to comprehend and resolve the enduring
mysteries of social and cultural life.

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