I therefore consider the hotoke to be members of a category that I will call the “ordinary transcendent.” Death has taken them across the threshold from one life to the next, but the hotoke remain very human in their desires and needs, in addition to their requiring constant food, company, and care. Rather, these are the spirits of everyday people, mothers and fathers, grandparents and children. But the hotoke are also strikingly “ordinary.” These are not gods, spiritual virtuosos, or even charismatic public figures. The spirits of the Japanese dead, known as hotoke, share many of the qualities that we commonly understand as “transcendent,” existing as they do beyond the sensory limitations of human existence and experience. By analyzing the semiotic relationships between the ihai and the iei, between the memorial objects and the deceased, and between the living and the dead, I seek to understand how these material objects mediate how the Japanese represent and experience the transcendent in both memorial ritual and in their daily interactions. This article attempts to provide an understanding of the way these memorial objects “work” in everyday life and in ritual practice. While periods of mass urbanization and fluctuations of economic fortune over the past seventy years have altered the way funerals are performed and memorial rites are observed, these two objects remain easily recognizable and accessible to the average Japanese. Even today, ihai and iei remain nearly ubiquitous in Japanese households, as common even as tables, cooking utensils, and televisions.
For centuries, memorial tablets ( ihai) and memorial portraiture ( iei) have been mainstays of Japanese funerary ritual.
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