Women in Japan may have made great strides in deciding how they live their lives, but such freedom has yet to translate into their final resting place.
Take for example a 60-year-old Saitama Prefecture woman whose husband passed away a year ago. She tried to acquire her own grave at a temple in Saitama but was refused on the grounds she had no offspring to inherit it.
"I don't want to be buried in my husband's family grave in the Kansai region because I don't feel I belong there," the woman said. "I also hate thinking that my mother-in-law, who often picked on me, might still treat me like her son's wife after I die (if we are in the same grave.)"