to take place at Buddhist temples and involve cremation, with Shinto funerals being rare. Bocking noted that most Japanese people are "still 'born Shinto' yet 'die Buddhist'." In Shinto thought, contact with death is seen as imparting impurity (); the period following this contact is known as and is associated with various taboos. In cases when dead humans are enshrined as , the physical remains of the dead are not stored at the shrine. Although not common, there have been examples of funerals conducted through Shinto rites. The earliest examples are known from the mid-17th century; these occurred in certain areas of Japan and had the support of the local authorities. Following the Meiji Restoration, in 1868 the government recognised specifically Shinto funerals for Shinto priests. Five years later, this was extended to cover the entire Japanese population. Despite this Meiji promotion of Shinto funerals, the majority of the population continued to have Buddhist funeral rites. In recent decades, Shinto funerals have usually been reserved for Shinto priests and for members of certain Shinto sects. After cremation, the normal funerary process in Japan, the ashes of a priest may be interred near to the shrine, but not inside its precincts. Some Japanese political parties criticized the usage of religious Shinto rituals for the funeral of Emperor Shōwa and the enthronement of Akihito. Ancestral reverence remains an important part of Japanese religious custom. The invocation of the dead, and especially the war dead, is known as . Various rites reference this. For instance, at the largely Buddhist festival of Bon, the souls of the ancestors are believed to visit the living, and are then sent away in a ritual called , by which lanterns are inserted into small boats, often made of paper, and placed in a river to float downstream. Spirit mediumship and healing Shinto practitioners believe that the kami can possess a human being and then speak through them, a process known as . Several new religious movements drawing upon Shinto, such as Tenrikyo and Oomoto, were founded by individuals claiming to be guided by a possessing kami. The is an oracle that is passed from the via the medium. The and are blind women who train to become spiritual mediums, traditionally in Japan's northern Tohoku region. train under other from childhood, memorialising sacred texts and prayers, fasting, and undertaking acts of severe asceticism, through which they are believed