Time as Purification: A House Built on Land Where Human Remains Were Found

The other day, I was walking through my neighborhood when something made me stop.

A substantial-looking detached house had been built on a lot that had served as a coin-operated parking lot for many years. Everything about it looked brand new.

I was born and raised in this area, so I remember what the neighborhood used to look like.

The moment I saw the house, one thought came to mind:

Does the person who bought it know that skeletal human remains were once found here?

When I Was a Child, This Place Was in the News

When I was a child, an old wooden apartment building stood on that spot.

It was scheduled for demolition, and during the work, skeletal remains were discovered in the ground.

It became a major local incident. The discovery was covered on television news for days, and naturally, everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.

Even though I was only a child, the memory stayed with me vividly.

Eventually, the apartment building disappeared. The incident stopped making the news, and the lot became a coin-operated parking lot.

Then a great deal of time passed.

A car would enter, park, and leave. Then another car would take its place.

No one lived there.

Years became decades, and before long, the people who remembered the incident were in the minority.

Japan’s Unease with “Stigmatized Properties”

Japan has a term, jiko bukken, for a “stigmatized property”: a home associated with a death or another disturbing event.

Many people avoid homes where a murder or suicide occurred. In real estate transactions, such a history may be treated as a form of psychological stigma, and Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has issued guidelines on when it must be disclosed.

But beyond the law and the practicalities of buying property, I suspect there is something much older behind this Japanese sensitivity.

It is the idea of kegare.

Kegare does not simply mean dirt, nor is it quite the same as sin. It is a form of ritual impurity, and death has long been one of its strongest sources in Japanese tradition.

This is why Japan also has the idea of misogi: ritual purification, traditionally associated with washing away kegare.

When something disturbing has happened in a place, people may try to purify it. They scatter salt. They call a Shinto priest. They hold an oharai, a Shinto purification rite.

Most people in Japan today do not consciously organize their daily lives around Shinto doctrine. Even so, the feeling that “I would rather not live in a room where someone died” remains powerful.

What is interesting is that this is not a physical concern.

Replacing the walls does not necessarily help. Neither does installing a new floor. Even if the entire building is demolished, hearing that “something happened on this land” can still make people uneasy.

Dirt can be washed away.

Kegare is not so easily removed. It calls for purification.

Did the Years as a Parking Lot Serve a Purpose?

That made me think about the parking lot.

Why had the site remained a parking lot for so long?

I do not know the real reason. It may have had something to do with the owner’s circumstances, or operating a parking lot may simply have been the most practical use of the land.

In retrospect, however, that long interval seems to have served a curious purpose.

Imagine building a new house immediately after the incident and advertising it as “a newly built home on the site where skeletal remains were discovered.” The association would be overwhelming.

But then ten years pass.

Then twenty.

Then thirty.

All the while, the land remains a parking lot.

People who remember the incident move away. The children who heard about it grow up. New residents arrive. The story becomes so old that it is difficult to find even through an online search.

Then one day, a new house appears.

The land is the same. Its latitude and longitude have not changed.

Yet people experience it completely differently.

It is strange when you stop to think about it.

Time as Misogi

An oharai ceremony can be completed in less than an hour.

But sometimes that is not enough to erase what remains in human memory.

Perhaps what is needed then is time.

Rain falls. Summer arrives. Winter follows. Thousands of cars pass over the ground.

Ordinary moments, entirely unrelated to the incident, gradually accumulate in that place.

The land once known as “the place where remains were found” becomes “that parking lot,” and eventually “the place where a new house was built.”

The place has not moved, but the memory attached to it is being overwritten.

Seen this way, the decades during which the land served as a parking lot begin to look like a kind of misogi in themselves.

Not a washing with water, but a washing with time.

A long wait for human memory to fade.

If You Do Not Know, There Is Nothing There

There is one more curious aspect to this.

Suppose the person who moves into the new house knows nothing about the old incident.

To that person, it is simply an ordinary new home.

It does not feel disturbing. Being alone there at night is not frightening. Digging in the garden causes no hesitation.

But the instant someone says, “Skeletal remains were once found here,” the very same house begins to look different.

The building has not changed by a single millimeter. The land has not changed either.

The only difference is one new piece of information in the person’s mind.

That alone can make someone afraid of a place that seemed perfectly normal the day before.

Perhaps, then, kegare does not cling to the land at all. Perhaps it clings to human memory.

When the memory disappears, the impurity disappears with it.

And time wears away human memory more reliably than any purification ceremony.

After a Few Decades, Even an Incident Becomes an Old Story

As I walked past the new house, I felt a little strange.

I know what happened there.

I remember the old apartment building from my childhood. I remember the uproar when the skeletal remains were found. I remember the long years when the site was a parking lot.

But to the new residents, it may all be a story from before they were born.

They will eat meals in that house. They will watch television. Children may grow up there. Flowers may be planted in the garden.

As those ordinary days accumulate, they will become the land’s new memories.

Perhaps this is how cities have always been made.

In a place like Tokyo, where people have lived for centuries, digging into the ground will uncover any number of traces left by those who came before us.

We simply do not know about most of them.

And because we do not know, we can go on living our ordinary lives.

Was the kegare of that land washed away by the passage of decades?

Or did we simply forget?

To the land itself, the two are probably the same.

Perhaps, in the end, it is not ritual purification but human forgetfulness that cleanses a place.