Japan Muslims faced with the lack of burial places

The growth of the Muslim population in Japan, which has tripled since 2010 to around 350,000 people, raises a major cultural challenge: access to funeral spaces in accordance with Islamic rites.

The Japanese Muslim community is mainly composed of immigrants from Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia), South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh) and the Middle East. In recent years, the relaxation of migration policies to compensate for the lack of workforce has particularly favored the arrival of Indonesian workers, from the largest Muslim country in the world.

In a country where cremation concerns more than 99% of the population, the Muslim community comes up against considerable obstacles to practice burial, strictly prescribed by the Koran. Miyagi Governor Yoshihiro Murai recently mentioned the possibility of creating a new cemetery in his prefecture, located in the Tohoku region, about 300 kilometers north of Tokyo. This initiative echoes the 2023 agreements with Indonesia concerning the reception of workers.

This evolution also reflects the rapid transformation of the Japanese religious landscape: while in 1980, the country had only four mosques, there are today about 150. Among Muslims residing in Japan, 54,000 are Japanese converted, testifying a progressive diversification of Japanese society.

However, projects often come up against local resistance. In Hiji, in the prefecture of OITA, a project carried out by the Muslim association of Beppu was suspended indefinitely, mainly due to environmental and health concerns expressed by residents. “We cannot abandon the question of burials for future generations,” says Tahir Khan, representative of the association and professor of a naturalized Japanese. This situation highlights the gap between the policy of opening to foreign workers and the reality of the infrastructure necessary for the reception of a truly multicultural society.