More deathly thoughts

I guess I'll have to reference not only literary and artistic (high culture) sources on death as much as possible. I wonder to what extent that will be possible in relation to premodern Japan?

I guess it's also a question of how much I want to focus on "popular culture," and what the definition thereof might be, particularly for earlier times.

I think I need to examine changes over time in:

heroic death
>death in religion
>>death in folk religion—particulalrly in Tohoku: Osorezan, Hiraizumi, etc.
death in literature
>both High and popular
medical death?
>changing concepts of medical nature of death?
>terminal care and conceptions of death?
>something else?

and how all of these change over time, are internally inconsistent (not monolithic), inform each other, and lead to personification of Death/death.

I'll need first to establish the non-anthropomorphic nature of death prior to the last several decades.

I have to worry about the objections that personifying death is (a) visual culture strategy, and (b) artistic pastiche. Have to show it's relevant that, despite veracity of both claims, the choice (conscious or non-) to make death more human is both influenced by precedent and becomes precedent in itself.

In this way, the oversimplified feedback loop proposed by Johnson is actually kinda useful. I'll post a better image if someone wants it, but I'm referring to the chart below. It describes the chicken-less, egg-less loop in which Johnson conceives cultures as being created. The important thing for my argument is the way in which lived cultures feed back into cultural production. It's self-evident on a certain level, and easily co-opted for profit by the robber barons in control of the means of production, but as a visual it is nonetheless helpful.