It’s August in Tokyo—hot and muggy, as usual. So I’ve scheduled my daily walk to be early and close to where I’m staying with a friend in the western part of the city. I walk to Tama-Reien, Tokyo’s largest municipal cemetery. Headstone and funerary shops line the street near the entrance. Once inside, I sense the order of a well-run place: a map laying out the grid, toilets and water taps well-marked, and row upon row of family headstones.

Yet, just as mosquitoes break the stillness of the air, a degree of neglect punctuates the place. While many plots are well-tended—gravestones washed, greenery neatly clipped, remnants of flowers and incense—others are overgrown, a jumble of weeds, with headstones broken or missing altogether. These are “abandoned graves” (akihaka) that no one cares for due to the family dying out or moving away.

Walking through Tama Reien, I also discover another category of dead: those who enter the ground abandoned already. When someone dies kinless and unclaimed, the municipality assumes responsibility and buries them in the zone for the “disconnected dead” (muenbo). A single marker designates the collective, anonymous remains gathered here. Devoid of the tenderness of flowers and care, the plot feels lonely. While saddened, I’m nonetheless drawn to it.

Later I ask my friend Yoshiko Kuga about it. She tells me that more and more Japanese are worried about meeting this undesirable fate.

Sociality, or the relations humans have with other humans, has long interested me. As an anthropologist, I’ve researched social hierarchies, gender, and capitalism in urban Japan for several decades. Yoshiko, who I became fast friends with during an earlier fieldwork project, is the one who first pointed me in the direction of my recent research on how the practices surrounding care for the dead, once dependent on family relations, have radically changed due to demographic and socioeconomic shifts in the population.