Quote:
Walter Martindale wrote:
The chopsticks thing - as explained in a video I saw on a documentary TV program about funerals in Japan, the sticks left in a bowl resembles the post-cremation long bones in a large urn, that are passed around the family in some kind of ceremony, and the sticks in the bowl either remind, or are symbolic, of death..
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Hi Walter,
This is the explanation of why you don't pass food around with chopsticks. At the funeral, after the cremation, you line up and then with another person, pick up a piece of bone with chopsticks and stick it in the urn. The first time, I was so afraid I was going to drop it! And then what would I have done? Pick it up with my fingers?