Shinsōsai is instructive precisely because it is rare — only a few percent of Japanese funerals — and the reason is a thousand-year-old division of labour in which Buddhism handles death because Shinto treats death as the primary pollution. The rite exists all the same, developed largely in the Edo and Meiji periods by nativist scholars who objected to the Buddhist monopoly. The spirit is summoned into a wooden tablet, the mitamashiro, in a rite performed at night; offerings are food rather than incense; mourners bow and clap silently, without sound, which is the funeral form; and salt is used for purification afterwards, a practice that survives in the little sachets handed out at ordinary Japanese funerals of any denomination. Memorials follow at ten-day intervals to the fiftieth day and then at the first, second, fifth, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth and fiftieth years, at which point the dead is held to have completed its transition into an ancestral kami. Priests themselves are buried this way; ordinary parishioners generally are not.