Hello Kitty tombstone

Death can be cute when it's commemorated with a Hello Kitty gravestone. (The video offers a glimpse of an Easter Island style tiki gravestone, too!) Link (Via JapanSugoi)

• [Anonymous]

  awesome. i’m totally down with this. i must have hello kitty standing guard over my carcass for all eternity.

• [Porori]

  And yet another mistaken assumption made about Japan.

  Most stone carvers (whose main source of income is usually gravestones) also, on the side, carve “art” pieces. Some of these pieces act as advertising for the shop, and are occasionally picked up as garden decorations, etc. Almost every gravestone shop (or rather, stone carver, as that`s what they usually call themselves) in Japan sells these sort of pieces along with grave stones.

  These ARE NOT used for graves. You will see them quite often in the grounds of kindergartens, in small parks, in apartment play areas, etc.

• [nagaijin]

  Don’t be too sure, Bob. I’ll bet it’s also popular with Hello Kitty fans of all ages (especially women in their late 20s). This is, after all, Japan. Fans here are obsessive – even unto death!

• [Kyle Armbruster]

  Yeah, I don’t think they’re necessarily for children. I would imagine that if anyone actually buys these things, it is for middle-aged women.

  That being said, although almost every stoneworks place (and there are a lot of them!) has a display like this, I have never actually seen something like this in a cemetery (and there are a lot of those, too!). I think they serve more to brighten up the store and to display their stonework skills.

  I have, however, seen a Doraemon statue like this out in the open. In front of a business. As a garden ornament. It’s not necessarily even intended for a grave, I don’t think.

  In other news, now I’m getting hit by the “text entered was wrong” bug…

• [a_user]

  @ #1 actually windmills are often used to mark children’s graves.

  I remember visiting Koya-san, a very prestigeous cemetary near Nara in Japan, as well as holding most of the literary, political and business elite, it had the corporate tombs of Nissan and UCC (a coffee beverage company). Atop the UCC tomb was an enormous granite coffee cup and clustered around it were can after can of the company products, a tableau which got a laugh out of myself and most the visitors walking past.

• [Calton]

  What Kyle said. I mean, geez, I passed by two such shops in Kawasaki every day on the way to work, and they had on display a Pokemon, a soccer ball, a beautiful rendition of (I believe) a parrot fish, and Mickey and Minnie Mouse — the latter two being identical to the ones in the front garden of a house I also passed on the way to the office.

  They’re sculptures, and forcing them into the western “funereal-use-only” framework — not to mention the old “whacky Japan” framework — is limited thinking.

  Besides, didn’t you do this same thing a couple of years ago?

• [Takuan]

  resonance of Jizo

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Zojoji_01.jpg

• [Coal]

  #2
  Don’t know which part of the country you’re living, but I’ve only ever once or twice seen anybody over the age of about 15 sporting Hello Kitty goods for themselves. It’s only in the west that it’s popular with adults.

• [Bobdotcom]

  Not too many other uses for a Hello Kitty gravestone than to mark the graves of children. I find this incredibly sad to consider.