Japan cremates 99.98% of its dead, the highest rate of any country that reports figures. It is tempting to read that as ancient tradition. It isn't. A century ago the national rate was 36%, and four decades before that the government had banned cremation outright, then backed down in under two years. What pushed it that high had less to do with faith than with land, disease and paperwork.

The number is newer than it looks

The Japan Society of Cremation Research keeps a timeline of the national rate. In 1915 it was 36.2%. Cremation did not account for even half of Japanese funerals until the mid-1930s, reaching 51.3% in 1935. It was 63.1% in 1960, 79.2% in 1970, and crossed 97% only in 1990.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recorded 1,674,520 funerals nationwide in fiscal 2024. Of those, 1,674,137 were cremations and 383 were burials. The Cremation Society of Great Britain, which compiles international statistics, puts Japan at 99.98% for the same year. South Korea follows at 93.59%, then the British Isles at 80.25%, the United States at 61.83%, Italy at 38.94% and Ireland at 26.56%.

Anyone born in Japan before the war grew up in a country where being put in the ground was unremarkable.

The government banned cremation, then backed down

Cremation came to Japan with Buddhism, and the language still carries the trace. The Japanese phrase for cremating someone, dabi ni fusu, derives from a word in Buddhist scripture.

In July 1873 the Meiji government banned the practice. The Council of State issued the decree under pressure from Shinto advocates who argued that cremation was a Buddhist import with no place in a state rebuilt around Shinto.

The ban lasted twenty-two months, and it collapsed for an unglamorous reason: cities ran out of ground. Burial plots in Tokyo filled up, fees climbed, and some cemeteries stopped accepting the dead at all. Petitions to restore cremation piled up from Buddhist institutions and from the city administration itself. On 23 May 1875 the government repealed its own decree.

A month after the repeal the government issued handling rules for crematoria, and in 1880 it set the siting-distance standard that still underpins the rules today. Cholera outbreaks pushed the policy further: anyone who died of a designated infectious disease was barred from burial, and the Infectious Disease Prevention Act of 1897 made cremation compulsory for those deaths. Within a generation, cremation had stopped being a religious question and become a sanitation policy.

The law does not ban burial. You still can't choose it.

In October 2025 a post asserting that burial in Japan is corpse abandonment and therefore illegal spread across social media. Within two days it had drawn more than 14,000 reposts and 3.46 million views. The Japan Fact-check Center published a correction rating the claim inaccurate.

The Graveyard and Burial Act, enacted in 1948, defines burial as placing a body in the ground and cremation as burning one. It prohibits burial, or the interment of ashes, anywhere outside a licensed cemetery. It does not prohibit burial itself.

The blocking happens a layer down. Tokyo's ordinance requires a burial grave to be at least two metres deep and allows the governor to designate zones where burial is prohibited; inside such a zone a cemetery may inter cremated remains and nothing else. Taito Ward's own rules designate the entire ward. Where no zone applies, the decision falls to whoever runs the cemetery. Honjo, a city in Saitama where burials do still take place, states it plainly in its public Q&A: the method of interment is the cemetery operator's call.

Of those 383 burials in fiscal 2024, 108 involved a body. The other 275 were stillborn infants whose families chose not to cremate. In a country that holds 1.67 million funerals a year, about a hundred bodies go into the ground. Muslims in Japan, whose faith requires burial, hit the same wall from the other direction, which we looked at separately.

What "returning to nature" legally means

Grave preferences have shifted. Kamakura Shinsho, which operates Japan's largest cemetery portal, surveyed 1,267 people who bought a grave through it during 2025. Tree burial, where a plot is marked by planting rather than a headstone, accounted for 47.4%. A conventional family grave accounted for 15.2%. Communal graves came second at 16.4%, passing both family graves and columbaria for the first time in the survey's history. Tree burial averages ¥717,000 (about $4,500) against ¥1.52 million (about $9,500) for a conventional plot, but succession weighs more: 38.8% named "no heir required" as a deciding factor.

The same pressure shows up in the reburial figures. Moving remains out of one grave and into another is the paper trail left when a family closes an ancestral plot, and those cases rose from 83,574 in fiscal 2014 to 176,105 in fiscal 2024.

But a tree burial site is still a cemetery. The ashes go into a vault beneath the planting, and the ground needs a licence. You cannot be buried at the foot of Mount Fuji, in your own garden, or under the field you farmed.

Scattering ashes is the strange case. No national law authorises it and none forbids it. The permissive reading rests on a remark the justice minister made at a press conference in October 1991, to the effect that Article 190 of the Penal Code, which carries up to three years' imprisonment for damaging or abandoning a body or remains, exists to protect religious sentiment and is not violated by a funerary rite performed with restraint. The Institute for Local Government notes that no ministry ever committed that view to an official document. In March 2021 the health ministry finally issued a guideline, and only for commercial operators.

Municipalities filled the vacuum themselves. Sixteen now regulate scattering by ordinance as of April 2026, the first passed by the town of Naganuma in Hokkaido in 2005 after residents objected to a planned tree-burial forest park. Three ban scattering outright, ten regulate scattering sites rather than the act, and the remaining three sit between the two. The resort city of Atami instructs operators to go at least 10 km offshore and not to advertise using the city's name; neighbouring Ito sets six nautical miles and the same naming rule.

In the United States, bodies become soil

Washington State legalised natural organic reduction, better known as human composting, in May 2019. Thirteen states have followed since, with New Jersey becoming the fourteenth in September 2025.

Recompose, the Seattle company that developed the process and lobbied the original bill through, lays the body in a steel vessel packed with wood chips, alfalfa and straw. Microbes do the work over five to seven weeks, the material cures for another three to five, and the bones, which do not fully break down, are powdered and returned to the mix. Each body yields about a cubic yard of soil, roughly 450 kilograms. The company charges $7,000, around ¥1.12 million.

The environmental case is the selling point. Recompose says a model built by Dr. Troy Hottle, whom the company engaged, found each person choosing it saves between 0.84 and 1.4 metric tons of CO2 against cremation or conventional burial, and that the method consumes 87% less energy than flame cremation. Those are the company's own figures. The Green Burial Council has argued that comparisons of this kind omit the carbon embedded in building and running the facilities, and overstate composting's advantage over a plain green burial.

In Japan the practice has no legal footing. Ukai Hidenori, a journalist and Buddhist priest who writes on death care, judged in 2023 that composting would probably run into Article 190, since scattering a body, ashes or composted remains across open country amounts to abandonment.

What actually decides how we are buried

Religion is the obvious explanation and mostly the wrong one.

Consider South Korea. Confucian teaching held that cremating a parent was unfilial, and burial dominated for centuries. In 1994 the cremation rate was 20.5%. It overtook burial in 2005 at 52.6%. By 2024 it was 93.59%. The teaching did not change in those thirty years. Cemeteries filled, land grew expensive, and tending a grave became a duty that smaller families could not absorb.

That is roughly Japan's story, run earlier and taken further. Buddhism supplied the vocabulary. Land, cholera and a century of ordinances set the number.

The variable now being added is carbon, and it points away from cremation rather than towards it. In the United States that argument has moved fourteen legislatures in six years. Whether it can move anything in a country already sitting at 99.98% is a much harder question.

So how are the dead sent off where you live? And when you ask yourself why it is done that way, does the answer turn out to be your religion, or your country's supply of land?

References