Burials Deepen Japan's Tragedy (video)

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YAMAMOTO, Japan (NPR, March 27, 2011) - The funeral for Chieko Mori's daughter and granddaughter was an affront to Japanese sacred customs -- the two were placed in simple wooden coffins that soldiers lowered into a ditch in a vegetable patch as a backhoe poured in earth, burying them alongside scores of other bodies.

Such an unceremonious disposal of the dead would be unthinkable in Japan in normal times. But the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami have left a huge backlog of thousands of bodies in makeshift morgues, leaving local governments no choice but to bury them in hastily dug mass graves.

In small-town Japan, the funeral is an elaborate and highly formalized Buddhist ritual, in which the body is washed, dressed and cremated, the ashes interred at the family tomb. So this -- mass graves, heavy machinery, improvised rites -- is almost unbearable, a tragedy that robs both survivors and the dead of closure. More