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Dancing With Ghosts: Obon

By PatrickDrazen 1 year, 5 months ago

In Japan it’s always possible to communicate with one’s deceased ancestors through praying at temples, but also the home altar. In an atmosphere in which natural spirits can even be found amid the skyscrapers of downtown Tokyo, and many homes have their own Buddhist altar or Shinto “god-shelf,” it should be no surprise that spirits are presumed to visit the human world. And when they come to visit from the afterlife, as they do every year, they come to party. That party is called Obon.

The Obon festival usually occurs in August, because it’s supposed to coincide with the seventh day of the seventh month. So how does that translate into August? August is, after all, the eighth month—of the Gregorian calendar. Until 1873, Japan used the Chinese lunar calendar, in which New Year’s Day is movable, and falls during the thirty days after January 20, based on the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius. However, as part of Japan’s decision to modernize during the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan adopted the western calendar created by Pope Gregory, even though lunar dates are sometimes still observed.

The “seven-seven” lunar date also coincides with a Chinese festival, commemorating the legendary Weaver, granddaughter of the King and Queen of Heaven, who had fallen in love with a mortal cowherd. They were transfigured into stars (known in modern astronomy as Altair and Vega), which from Earth seem close but are separated by the Milky Way and only able to draw close to each other on one day each year—the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Hence the holiday’s other name: the Star Festival, or Tanabata.

Much as early Christianity may have “borrowed” pagan festivals and made them over into “official” church-sanctioned holidays, there is more than a coincidental similarity between the Chinese “Double Seven” holiday and the Japanese Buddhist Obon celebration. Both, after all, celebrate the very brief time each year that Heaven meets Earth, and when the dead return to the land of the living—in spirit, at least. In Japan, that time is summer, and consequently a lot of ghost stories take place during the warm weather, when spirits are presumed to be traveling the land. And the centerpiece of the Obon Festival is the Bon Odori dance.

According to legend, Bon Odori originated when Maudgalyayana, a disciple of the Buddha, had a vision of his dead mother indulging her own selfishness in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, gorging herself continuously but never satisfying her hunger. (In this story, any food one touches in this cursed realm bursts into flame before it can be eaten.) Greatly disturbed, he went to the Buddha and asked how he could release his mother from her selfish attachment. The Buddha advised his disciple to perform a charitable act in memory of his mother. The disciple gave food to the poor and thus saw his mother’s release from the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He also began to see the many sacrifices that she had made for him in her life—sacrifices for which she had tried to compensate as a Hungry Ghost. Maudgalyayana, happy because of his mother’s release after death and grateful for his mother’s kindness toward him in life, danced with joy. From this dance of joy comes Bon Odori or the Bon Dance, a time in which the ancestors and their sacrifices are remembered and appreciated.

Of course, the dead celebrated in Obon aren’t exclusively parents or grandparents. Parents revisit dead children, and widows and widowers spend time again with dead spouses.

Today Obon festival participants continue the old custom as they dance in traditional Japanese dress, including yukata (cotton kimono made for Japan’s sweltering summers) and happi coats (short jackets). The dances may also include the use of fans, straw hats, and even local additions, such as castanets in southern California.

As the festival ends, in some places paper lanterns are painted with the names of the deceased; the lanterns are then set adrift in a river or seacoast, to guide the ancestor back to the land of the dead, until next year. This resonates with another legend about the dead in Japanese folklore. When a person dies, the spirit has to cross a river to get from the land of the living to the afterlife. This sounds similar to ancient Greece and the River Styx. Japan’s river between the two worlds is called the Sanzu. The difference, however, is more than just a name.

But that, as they say, is another blog.

Note from the author: The TV never explains it as such, but it’s clearly an Obon dance. The characters being Misty, Ash, Pikachu, Officer Judy & Nurse Joy emphasizes that the dance is a community event.