There is a particular comfort in discovering that other cultures have already solved problems we've barely acknowledged.

In Japan especially, there are rituals and ceremonies for the very life passages Americans tend to ignore or dismiss. We don't like discomfort. And rather than bearing down on it, living through pain in order to grow, we avoid it, hoping it will resolve on its own, only to find, often far too late, that it compounds.

Americans have mastered the art of celebrating society-sanctioned occasions: pregnancy, marriage, home ownership, birth. These transitions feel manageable. They’re bright, positive, fun, largely because we have scripts for them. We know what to say. We show up with gifts and cards.

For the ones where words fail us—not so much.

Below are seven rituals and ceremonies from around the world that caught my attention. Several of them, if not all, will likely become expanded pieces for this newsletter.

1. The Netherlands — De Eenzame Uitvaart (The Lonely Funeral)

In 1990, the city of Groningen created a policy that anyone who died without family or friends would still receive a dignified burial, with flowers and music.

A decade later, the appointed poet of the city, Bart FM Droog, began attending these funerals and writing a poem for each person from whatever scraps existed: a name, an address, sometimes only a police report. The idea traveled to Amsterdam, where a city official named Ger Frits had independently been doing something similar: searching each unclaimed person's belongings for their taste in music, ordering flowers, making the service feel like a real one. He has attended more than five hundred of these funerals.

In 2002, the Amsterdam city poet Frank Starik asked if he could add a poem to each service. Together, he and Frits formalized what became the Eenzame Uitvaart, the Lonely Funeral, with poets taking turns writing and reading at the graveside, addressing the dead directly. After the reading, the poem is placed on the coffin.

Because everyone is worth a poem.

(Starik later stopped crediting Droog and co-opted the project. He died of a heart attack in 2018, at 59. The complicated version is here.)

2. Japan — The Rikonshiki

In 2009, a Tokyo entrepreneur named Hiroki Terai answered a question that had been bothering him since childhood: why does a marriage get a ceremony but a divorce doesn't? Japanese culture, he reasoned, honors both beginnings and endings. So he organized a rikonshiki, a divorce ceremony, for a college friend who was separating from his wife.

The ceremony mirrors a wedding in structure: formal dress, a buffet, speeches from friends, and rings. But instead of exchanging them, the couple joins hands on a mallet and smashes them together. The gavel is decorated with a frog, because in Japanese the word kaeru means both "frog" and "change."

3. Japan — Rui-Katsu

Look who's back.

Hiroki Terai again. The same man who invented the divorce ceremony realized that the social prohibition on visible emotion in Japan, especially in the workplace (!!!!), was making people unwell. In 2013 he began organizing rui-katsu, or "tear-seeking" events: group sessions where strangers gathered to watch sad films together and cry collectively, on the theory that shared weeping released stress in a way solitary crying couldn't.

The insight underneath it is ancient and documented across cultures: grief shared in public diminishes, while grief kept private compounds. What Terai did was give Japanese adults permission to feel out loud.

I'm thinking we should all move to Japan.

4. Finland / Karelia — Itkuvirsi (Lament Singing)

Long before Finland existed as a country, the women of the Karelian region developed a form of ritual singing for the hardest moments of life: weddings, the departure of sons to war, and above all the irreversible crossings where ordinary language was not enough. The songs were called itkuvirsi, lament songs. Nothing in them was named directly. Grief was described as "my middle-insides turned blacker than the blackest oven." A daughter was "my long-tailed duck."

The tradition was sung not only at funerals but at weddings, because leaving your family to join a new one was understood as a kind of death that deserved to be mourned openly. A bride who wept was not being dramatic; she was fulfilling a necessary acknowledgment that her old life was ending.

When Finland ceded Karelia to the Soviet Union in 1940, 400,000 refugees carried the tradition into Finnish cities, where it gradually faded. It is now in revival, used therapeutically for grief, estrangement, and any transition that has not yet been given its proper shape.

5. Japan — Mizuko Kuy

In Japan, there is a ritual for a particular kind of grief that has no formal name in most Western cultures: the loss of a pregnancy, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. It centers on Jizo, a Buddhist deity understood as the protector of children and travelers. Parents visit a temple and make offerings to a small stone Jizo figure: food, clothing, toys, flowers. They speak to the child they lost. The figure is dressed in a red bib.

What the ritual provides is both a name for the grief and a place to take it, something the medical system rarely offers. It has been studied clinically and found to provide genuine relief, particularly for women who carry the loss in silence.

Unacknowledged grief does not disappear, and some losses require a witness.

6. Japan — Naikan

In Japan in the 1940s, a Buddhist monk named Ishin Yoshimoto developed a method he called Naikan, meaning "looking inward." It asks a person to take a specific relationship and sit with three questions:

The third question is the one that most people never ask themselves. Western therapy tends to ask what was done to you. Self-awareness practices also tend to overlook this aspect of growth. Naikan insists on an honest accounting of what you have done.

Yoshimoto first used it with prisoners and found that it reliably produced something unexpected: a genuine desire to repair.

7. Māori (New Zealand) — Tangihanga

During a tangihanga (or tangi), the Māori mourning ceremony, open grieving is not merely permitted but expected. The ceremony lasts three days. Speeches are addressed to the dead in the second person, as if they are listening. On the same night, you laugh at the funny stories and cry about how much you will miss this person.

The ceremony holds laughter and devastation at once, without asking anyone to compose themselves. This is the true meaning of processing—to live through the contours; to feel it all.

Until next week, I will remain…