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Pentax AF200T
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If you're going to be a graven image on a tombstone (no pun intended), you're in for a long and dull assignment so you may as well get comfortable.
Just as in space for the living, space for the dead is at a premium in Japan and has become more so as the population of both categories has grown. While individual or married couple tombs used to be the norm, these days the common practice is to entomb the bones of many family members beneath a common family tombstone and then to engrave information about the members either on the stone itself or on a separate stone slab to the side.
It is very common to find family tombs where the plot has been reorganized by purchasing a modern style tomb and moving into it the remains of ancestors who have for the most part been forgotten but who are still taking up space with the old style individual tombs.
Families typically retain the old stones, many of which are so severely weatherbeaten that not only is the engraving no longer legibile often you can't even tell where the engraving had been. The normal practice is to arrange these old stones around the new one.
