A Study on Japanese Death Culture: Using the Movie Departures as an Entry Point
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes the Japanese film Departures as a point of entry to explore the multiple dimensions of contemporary Japanese death culture. In particular, it examines cremation as the dominant funerary practice in Japan, situating it within broader processes of institutionalization and social transformation surrounding death, religion, and social relations. The discussion highlights shifting attitudes toward religion to provide a comprehensive context for understanding how "death" has been perceived, regulated and practiced in Japan since the Meiji era. Furthermore, the paper approaches the subject from a socio-economic perspective, paying close attention to changes in family structure and the challenges of population aging. Taken together, this analysis demonstrates how Japanese death culture is being reconstructed at the intersections of tradition and modernity, religion and secularity, as well as individual and collective values. In the 80 years after World War II, with the development of the nuclear family and the aging population with fewer children, the Japanese people's views on life and death became increasingly diverse. It is of great significance for people to accurately understand the profound meaning of Japanese death culture for the diversified development of Japanese society and the integration of foreign talents under the background of globalization in the 21st century.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".