JAPAN: The Last Sayonara

Hikotaro Hirano was a 22-year-old foot soldier stationed in Manchuria when he died in battle against the invading Russians in the final week of World War II. Late last month his aging parents and a small group of mourners filed through the rain into a peaceful Buddhist temple outside Osaka. There, after a priest sounded a massive gong to begin a memorial sutra, the worshipers paid their silent respects to Hikotaro's memory. According to the Buddhist calendar, it was the 33rd anniversary of his death—the date on which the spirits of the dead are believed to depart forever from the earth.

Similar scenes are taking place throughout the country this year as Japanese pay their final farewells to friends and relatives who died in 1945. The casualties that year were staggering: the Japanese estimate that they lost 300,000 in the Philippines, 20,000 at Two Jima, 200,000 at Okinawa, 140,000 in Hiroshima, 70,000 at Nagasaki and 100,000 in the firebombings of Tokyo.

The memorial services—often followed by lengthy feasts—have proved to be particularly taxing for Japan's 1.7 million Buddhist priests. Most Sundays, Tokyo Priest Kotetsu officiates at five or six services. "By the time I go to bed," he says, "I feel physically dead tired although spiritually aroused." Shoko, the Osaka abbot who presided at the services for Hikotaro, has stopped smoking to protect his overworked vocal cords. The work has its secular compensations. Temple offerings range from $100 to $3,000 per service.

The 33rd anniversary has also meant a boom year for travel agents, who are besieged with mourners eager to visit the spot where their relatives died. According to one Tokyo agency, 100,000 Japanese have already flown to Luzon in the Philippines this year.

Although less religious than other Asians, the Japanese venerate the memory of their dead long and deeply. Thus the vast majority of bereaved would agree with Abbot Shoko in his estimate of the importance of this year's memorials: "I feel as though all of us are coming to the end of an era."