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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual
receives that recognition which was denied him in the flesh.
In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in the house and duly
worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of
their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both places
the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs are
temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not
simply to rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general
jollification. And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still
half as sentient as his dutiful descendants suppose, that his
earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended well.
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