The dead become kami.
After the memorial years are kept — traditionally to the thirty-third or fiftieth — the individual dead loses its particulars and merges into the ancestral kami of the household, which then protects it. A person who dies wronged and unattended does the opposite, and becomes something that has to be pacified.
The ordinary dead are dangerous for a while and then become protective. The spirit is understood as rough and polluting immediately after death, which is why funerals belong to Buddhism and why mourners throw salt over themselves on returning home. Over the memorial years — traditionally kept to the thirty-third or the fiftieth — the individuality wears off, and what remains merges into the household ancestral kami or the collective kami of the region. In mountain villages the ancestors are said to go up the local mountain and come down to the fields at planting. The system's dark side is the goryō: a person who dies wronged, unmourned, or violently does not complete the transition and stays individual and furious, which is what produced the shrines to Michizane and Masakado. The Japanese summer festival of Obon, when the dead visit and are seen off with floating lanterns, is Buddhist in form and this in substance.
The same ground, other faiths
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