Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Expanding our Educational Outreach | Page 21

Prominent Japanese Funeral
Directors Visit Mount Auburn
Director of Education & Visitor Services Bree Harvey
gave the group a tour of the grounds and the crematory.
Coming from land-scarce Japan, the delegation was in awe
of the spaciousness and beauty of the Cemetery. “They
thought it was just stunning,” says Vice President of Cem-
etery Services Richard Dalton. “For them to experience
this ‘park’ was extraordinary.”
In Japan, the funeral industry and the wedding industry
are run as joint businesses. Three or four companies host
the majority of funerals in the country, in “funeral halls.”
Katsuhiko Matsui, the president of Sun-Life Corporation,
one of Japan’s largest such companies, visited Mount Au-
burn with the group. The average cost of a funeral in Japan
is $25,000, and people save for this milestone throughout
their lives. Japanese funeral customs are becoming more
westernized, and funeral directors in Japan are replicating
certain aesthetic aspects of, for example, British customs.
One company has imported two British Victorian Gothic
chapels, stone-by-stone, to be used as settings for weddings.
On the other hand, in this era of globalization and
marked cultural diversity within the United States, Richard
Dalton stresses that Mount Auburn, too, can learn from
other cultures as it increasingly accommodates people of
diverse traditions.
Eight Japanese funeral directors visited Mount Auburn on
October 21, 2007, as part of a nationwide tour to learn
about “excellence in management within all aspects of
funeral service.” The seven-day visit, arranged through The
Dodge Company of Cambridge (founded in 1893 and the
largest supplier of funeral equipment in the United States)
in cluded stops in cemeteries in St. Louis and southern
California and a tour of the National Museum of Funeral
History in Houston, TX. Most Japanese funerals end in
cremation, so the group wanted to see how Americans are
dealing with the increasing popularity of that practice.
Craig Caldwell of The Dodge Company chose Mount
Auburn as a stop because of “the vast difference between
a Japanese cemetery and Mount Auburn. It is not com-
mon to find a garden setting cemetery in Japan, nor is it
often that a Japanese cemetery would have a wide range of
monuments and differing burial areas, such as mausoleums,
ground for burials, and so on. And their culture has such
a great respect for the past that I thought Mount Auburn
would be a perfect fit for their visit.”
People and Happenings
(L to r) Mount Auburn’s Director of An-
nual Giving Jennifer Gilbert, Curator of
Historical Collections Meg Winslow, and
photographer Richard Cheek (of Belmont,
MA). Photos by Jennifer Johnston
On September 26, Bill Clendaniel
spoke at a dinner at the downtown
Harvard Club in Boston on “Mount
Auburn Cemetery at 175 Years.” In
conjunction with the talk, the club
hosted an exhibition of color pho-
tographs taken by Richard Cheek
featuring seasonal views of the
Cemetery, dated 1996-2007. The
exhibition was curated by Curator
of Historical Collections Meg L.
Winslow, and ran from September
26 to November 13.
Visitors come to Mount Auburn for many
reasons, people interested in birding, history,
botany, gardening, art and architecture. This
summer we had a request from an Englishman,
David Bostok, for permission to propose mar-
riage to his girlfriend atop Washington Tower.
We told him he could and later we received
the following email: “It was a perfect evening!
She said yes! And was completely surprised
and overwhelmed by the setting. Thank you so
much for allowing me this privilege.”
Fall 2007 | 19