The Paradox of Abundance in Landscapes of Absence: Food Offerings and the Temporal Politics of Waste in Contemporary Japanese Buddhism

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.