Cultural Balance

Here’s a delicate situation: your Japanese family thinks you should have a Buddhist funeral with traditional protocols. Your overseas family thinks you should have a Christian burial in your hometown. You’re not particularly religious and honestly just want people to remember you fondly.

Who’s right?

Everyone and no one. Different cultures have different ways of honoring the dead, and all of them are valid within their own contexts. The problem is when these different approaches conflict and nobody knows what you actually wanted.

This is especially complicated for foreign residents because your death affects people from multiple cultures who might have very different expectations.

Your Japanese colleagues might expect to attend a formal funeral service. Your family back home might expect to have a memorial service in your hometown. Your international friends in Japan might prefer something more casual and personal.

To be honest, it’s exactly the same way with inter-cultural weddings.

There’s no rule that says you can only have one service or that everyone has to participate in the same rituals. You can have a Buddhist ceremony in Japan and a memorial service back home. You can have formal and informal gatherings. You can accommodate different cultural expectations without forcing anyone to choose.

It’s smart to think about this in advance and communicate your preferences clearly.

Otherwise, well-meaning family members from different cultures will try to do what they think is appropriate, and they might end up stepping on each other’s toes or creating conflicts that reflect cultural misunderstandings rather than genuine disagreements.

Plan for multiple audiences with different expectations. Give people permission to honor you in ways that make sense within their cultural context.

Everyone wins when everyone feels included.