Obon

Obon, or Urabon-e, is a Japanese summer tradition: the ancestors are welcomed home, the family spends a few days with them, and on the last day they are sent back across to the other shore. The name has long been read as a transliteration of Sanskrit ullambana — 'hanging upside down', a reference to the inverted torment of the hungry-ghost realm, with the festival itself understood as the rite that releases that suffering. In 2013, however, the scholar Karashima Seishi proposed a new etymology: he traced 'urabon' to the Middle Indo-Aryan olana, a bowl of cooked rice, putting the emphasis on the act of offering rather than on the torment itself. The question is still not settled.[2]

The scriptural source of Obon is the Ullambana Sūtra^[1]. It is traditionally attributed to the Western-Jin translator Zhu Fahu (third century), but modern scholarship treats it as most probably an apocryphal text composed in Central Asia or China. The heart of the sūtra is the story of Mokuren — known in Sanskrit as Maudgalyāyana, the one among Śākyamuni's ten chief disciples most famed for supernatural sight. Looking into the other world, Mokuren^[5] saw his mother Seitai-nyo hanging upside down in the realm of hungry ghosts. The Buddha told him to make offerings to all monks on the fifteenth day of the seventh month; when he did, his mother rose dancing in joy. That dance is one of the cited origin lines of the Bon dance itself.

The earliest reliable record of Obon in Japan is a notice in the Nihon Shoki for Saimei 3 (657): an image of Mount Sumeru was raised west of Asuka-dera, and an Urabon-e was held. Two years later, on the fifteenth of the seventh month of Saimei 5, the Ullambana Sūtra was expounded at every temple in the capital. By Tenpyō 5 (733) under Emperor Shōmu, the Daizenshiki was instructed to perform the rite, and from that point Obon became a fixed item in the court calendar, observed every fourteenth of the seventh month. The Heian aristocracy made it a regular event; the Kamakura and Muromachi courts brought it down through warrior houses, temples, and townspeople; by the Edo period it had settled fully into household practice.[2]

Obon usually refers to the four days from August 13 to 16. The 13th is the 'welcoming day' (mukae-bon), the 14th and 15th are the 'middle days' (nakanohi), the 16th is the 'sending-off day' (okuri-bon). That is the common shape, but the country is not uniform.[6]

The current distribution is a residue of the Meiji calendar reform. The government made December 3 of Meiji 5 (1872) into January 1 of Meiji 6 (1873) by adopting the solar calendar. Old-calendar July 15 falls around mid-August on the new calendar, so most of the country adopted a 'one-month-late Obon' (tsuki-okure bon) and fixed it on August 13 to 16. Tokyo, Kanagawa, the urban parts of Hokkaidō, Kanazawa, the urban parts of Shizuoka — the cities directly under the government's eye — kept it on the new-calendar July 13 to 16 instead. Most of the rest of Hokkaidō, all of Tōhoku, Niigata, Nagano, and the Kansai region went with the August schedule. The rough rule still holds today: where the government was watching, July; everywhere else, August. Okinawa keeps to the old calendar still, observing 'old Bon' on the 13th through 15th of the lunar seventh month.[6]

On the evening of the 13th, a welcome fire^[7] is lit at the gate of the house. The classic method is to break peeled hemp stalks (ogara), stack them, and set them alight; in the Kantō region, wheat straw is sometimes used in their place. In the cities, where open fire risks setting things alight, families do it on a horoku — a flat clay dish — or skip the fire entirely and hang an electric lantern instead. The point of the flame is simple: it is a guide light, set out so the ancestors, who only return once a year, can find their way to the door.

The 14th and 15th are the days the family spends in the company of the ancestors. The family bows to the Bon altar, eats together, often setting one extra serving of food on the shelf for the dead. Through these days a Buddhist priest goes from one parishioner household to the next to read sūtras at the altar; this practice is called tanagyō. It is an Edo-period inheritance, rooted in the Tokugawa parish-registry system, and was widely practised in every major sect except Jōdo Shinshū — Sōtō, Rinzai, Jōdo, Shingon, Tendai. In the cities, where the bond between parish temple and household has thinned, only families observing their first Obon for a recently deceased relative (hatsubon) tend to ask for it now.[6]

On the evening of the 16th, a farewell fire^[8] is lit to send the ancestors back to the other shore. The form runs from the small fire at one's own gate to the great regional events: Kyoto's Five-Mountain Okuribi^[9], Nara's Takamadoyama Daimonji, Nagasaki's Shōryō-nagashi^[10]. The Kyoto fires light at 20:00 from the Daimonji on Mount Nyoigatake, then at five-minute intervals — Myō, Hō, the ship-form, the left Daimonji, the torii-form. Three origin theories compete: Kōbō Daishi, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, an abbot of Shōren-in. The earliest reliable record sits in the early-Edo gazetteer Yōshū-fushi, but no firm year can be set. The fires were suspended from 1943 to 1945 under wartime light-control orders and restored in 1946.[11]

What returns at Obon is not a single undifferentiated 'dead'. Folklorists have long distinguished three kinds of dead who pass through the town across these four days at once: the ancestors, the newly-deceased, and the unconnected — muen-botoke^[12]. The ancestors have descendants and names that are spoken aloud; they return home. The newly-deceased are those who died in the year just past; they are the central figures of the hatsubon. The unconnected are the dead whom no one memorialises, trapped in the hungry-ghost realm in perpetual hunger; they have no home to go to.

What institutionalised the distinction was the Segaki-e rite^[13]. It rests on Amoghavajra's translation of the Saving-the-Hungry-Ghosts Dhāraṇī Sutra and on the story of the disciple Ānanda meeting a hungry ghost. The rite took shape in China and entered Japan; from the Kamakura period it merged with Urabon-e and settled into a single practice: offerings are made not only for one's own ancestors but for every homeless dead. The 'water-children' offering laid on the Bon shelf — raw rice and chopped eggplant and cucumber on a lotus leaf — is the visible trace of this Segaki layer. The ancestors are welcomed inside the house; outside, a bowl of food is set out for the homeless dead who pass by. That double gesture is the underlying logic of every Obon practice.

Yanagita Kunio^[14] sets out this three-part division explicitly in Senzo no Hanashi (1946)^[15], a book written under the Tokyo air raids in the final phase of the Pacific War. The wartime context was not abstract. Whole families had been wiped out, leaving great numbers of dead with no one to memorialise them — exactly the unconnected category — and Yanagita's concern was the rupture this created in the ancestral system. State-built memorials, he argued, could not stand in for that vanishing relation. The book remains the reference point for any discussion of how the Japanese think about their dead.

The protagonists of kaidan are, almost without exception, the unconnected dead. Enchō^[3]'s Botan Dōrō^[4] turns on Otsuyu — a young woman who died early, leaving her fiancé behind, with no one left to memorialise her. Because she has no home to go to, she is able, only on the night of Obon (the thirteenth of the eighth month), to walk in her clogs to her lover Shinzaburō's gate. Oiwa of Yotsuya Kaidan^[16] and Okiku of Sarayashiki belong to the same type — the homeless dead. Japanese kaidan are not, at heart, the praise songs of the ancestors. They are the unfinished business of the unconnected, retold.

The Bon altar — the spirit shelf, shōryō-dana^[17] — is the temporary altar set up to welcome the spirits during Obon. It sits in front of the household Buddhist altar, along the veranda, or in a corner of a room. A low stand is laid with a mat woven from wild rice (makomo); on it the household places the mortuary tablets from the Buddhist altar, the three altar implements — incense burner, candlestick, flower vase — and an array of food offerings. Edo-period illustrations show a more elaborate form: a small desk with green bamboo posts driven into the floor, a rail of cedar leaves around it, lanterns painted with lotus hanging above.

The signature object on the altar is the spirit horse^[18]. A cucumber is given four legs of hemp stalk (or matchsticks, or broken chopsticks) and made into a horse; an eggplant is made into a cow. The meaning is simple: the ancestor rides the cucumber horse home quickly, then sets out slowly on the eggplant cow when it is time to leave. A descendant's quiet wish: come fast, leave slowly. It is mainly an eastern-Japan tradition; some parts of western Japan do not make them. Jōdo Shinshū households generally do not set out the altar or the spirit horse — the school holds that the dead enter the Pure Land at once through Amida's vow, so the premise that the ancestor returns from the other shore does not apply.

Another important offering on the altar is the 'water-children' (mizu-no-ko): raw rice and chopped eggplant and cucumber on a lotus leaf, in some regions topped with a little water. This is not food for the ancestor. It is set out outside the house — for the homeless hungry ghosts passing by the gate. The ancestors eat inside; for those with no home left, at least there is a bowl outside. The Bon altar is also dressed with hozuki, the bright orange Chinese-lantern berries. The hozuki may stand in for a lantern, the red fruit serving as a light; in another reading the hollowed-out fruit is a vessel for the spirit to enter.[13]

In the modern city, the apartment-dwelling family rarely sets up a full Bon altar. At most a small shelf is placed in front of the Buddhist altar, or only the cucumber horse and the eggplant cow are made and nothing more. In recent years a parallel tradition has emerged on social media: photographs of 'creative spirit horses' shaped as animals or vehicles. (In Yamagata Prefecture, a long-standing folk variant lets families substitute toy vehicles for the orthodox cucumber-and-eggplant pair.) The form keeps mutating, but the playful undertow of the original folk practice remains.[18]

There is more than one origin theory for Bon-odori^[19]. A Buddhist line traces it to the dance at Urabon-e; a folk line attributes it to the kayoi-utagaki song-and-dance gatherings of antiquity; another sees the residue of older animist rite. Documentary records run no further back than the Muromachi period, but each theory points to deeper material. The most defensible developmental line runs from the Heian-period nembutsu-odori of the monk Kūya (903–972) — striking a bowl in time with chanted invocations, fusing folk devotion with Buddhist practice in a way that was Kūya's own.

In the Kamakura period, Ippen (1239–1289)^[20] took this form, now called odori-nembutsu, across the country. From 1274 he travelled as an itinerant preacher for fifteen and a half years. In 1279, at Tomono-shō in Shinano, he first danced the odori-nembutsu; in 1284, on reaching the capital, he brought the form into the city at the Shaka-dō in Shijō-Kyōgoku. He erected 'dance pavilions' wherever crowds gathered. The Ippen Hijiri-e of 1299, a National Treasure, records many of these dance scenes — figures stamping the floor, chanting the nembutsu aloud, ringed in a circle.

Under the early Edo regime, Bon-odori reached its peak. Whole villages danced through the night; in the cities, the entertainment quarters danced through the night too. The Tokugawa shogunate kept a wary eye on it from the start, regulating by place and by hour. Men and women dancing together until dawn was both a potential vector for uprising and a known threat to public morality, and the dance's open association with sexual licence made it one of the principal targets of Tokugawa morality policing. Shimokawa Kōshi's Bon-odori — A Folklore of Promiscuity gives the academic treatment.[19]

In 1874 the Meiji government banned Bon-odori outright. Men and women noisy through the night, some cross-dressed, all of this was judged unbecoming of a modern nation. In some districts, by the early twentieth century, the dance had been forgotten altogether. A revival began in the late Taishō era, framed as rural entertainment. Today, Nishimonai (Akita), Kemanai (Akita), and Gujō (Gifu) are designated National Important Intangible Folk Cultural Properties; Awa-odori^[21] (Tokushima), originating in the region, has spread nationwide. Each line preserves its own descent.

The first sustained Western record of Bon-odori is Lafcadio Hearn^[22]'s 'Bon-Odori', the sixth chapter of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894)^[23]. During his teaching years in Matsue, Hearn watched a Bon-odori in the Izumo countryside and wrote one of the book's most-quoted lines: nothing in Japan, he said, had moved him so deeply. The chapter conveyed, in literary English, the dancers' sense of merging with the dead — the first such transmission of the Japanese view of the dead to an English-language readership.

Today Bon-odori has diversified. Among the Japanese diaspora, the dance is danced still: across the five Hawaiian islands (every weekend from June through August), at Brazilian Japanese festivals, on the West Coast of North America (California, Washington State) at 'Japan Festivals'. In Okinawa, what is danced is Eisā^[24] — a wholly separate tradition in which young people parade through the streets with drums tied at the waist, on the nights of the seventh lunar month. Within Japan, Nagoya invented a 'Thriller Bon-odori' to a Michael Jackson track in 2010, and Tōkai in Aichi runs a 'silent Bon-odori' on wireless headphones. The residue of a thirteen-hundred-year-old religious rite continues to mutate.[19]

Summer nights, and the nights of Obon above all, are the time when the Japanese feel closest to the dead. The ancestors are home; the unconnected dead wander; hungry ghosts circle the house for a meal. Across those four days, the membrane between this shore and the other shore was felt to thin. For a kaidan, no occasion fits better.

Enchō's Botan Dōrō, composed in the late Edo and transcribed in 1884^[4], sets its story on the night of Obon, August 13. Otsuyu — dead and unmemorialised — walks in her clogs, the sound 'kara-kon, kara-kon' against the wood, to the gate of her fiancé Shinzaburō's house. That she can come at all is because it is the night of Obon: the folkloric premise is doing the structural work. The piece was originally a twenty-two-part long-form composition, intended for a summer-run series at the yose. Enchō's Shinkei Kasanegafuchi (first performed 1859)^[25] is another long-form kaidan piece and was likewise a standard fixture of the yose summer programme. After Enchō, 'Obon = the yose ghost-story season' became fixed, and the postwar television tradition of the 'summer kaidan special' grew out of the same root.

Haiku settled the connection at the level of language. The words kaidan, ghost, hyakumonogatari, and kimo-dameshi all entered the saijiki as summer season words from the late Edo through the Meiji period. From Torikai Dōsai's Kaisei Getsuryō Hakubutsusen (1808)^[26] to Takahama Kyoshi's New Saijiki (1934)^[27], across one hundred and twenty-six years, 'summer = kaidan' was set down as a linguistic norm. On a humid August night, the temples were performing Segaki rites, the yose was running Enchō's kaidan, the household was setting the water-children offering on the Bon altar. Obon and kaidan are not separate. They are two sides of one festival.

In contemporary Japan, Obon is no longer a statutory holiday (it was dropped from the list in 1873). But as an informal social convention it has stood firm: most companies close their offices around August 13 to 16. The salaryman returning to his hometown to clean the graves and bow at the Bon altar — the kisei rasshu, the 'homecoming rush' — is a phenomenon that grew naturally out of the postwar high-growth relation between the cities and the provinces. The shinkansen, the flights, and the highways between Tokyo and the regions move tens of millions of people during these four days.[6]

In the cities, for a long time, Bon-odori had shrunk to a small neighbourhood-association event. From the late Heisei era into Reiwa, a city-centre revival has been gathering pace: Shinjuku, Roppongi, Ikebukuro, Shibuya — every year, dances on the scale of several thousand participants. The Thriller Bon-odori from Nagoya, the silent Bon-odori in Aichi, and the new style that grafts anime soundtracks onto the traditional choreography — these experiments keep blurring the boundary between traditional and contemporary.[19]

Among diaspora communities, Bon-odori is the chief means of feeling 'the home country' in the body. In Hawai‘i, the major Buddhist temples (Honpa Hongwanji and others) on all five inhabited islands have run the dance every weekend from June through August for more than thirty years now, as a settled community event. The Festival do Japão in São Paulo incorporates Bon-odori under the rubric of 'Matsuri Dance', folded together with anime and pop-culture events, drawing younger participants in. On the American West Coast — San José and Los Angeles in California, Seattle in Washington — second- and third-generation Japanese American communities have kept Bon-odori running as part of the Japan Festival programmes.[19]

Okinawa's old Bon runs on an entirely different system. It falls on the 13th (Unkē), 14th (Nakanu-hī), and 15th (Ūkui) of the lunar seventh month. The family gathers in front of the household altar — called tōtōmē in Okinawan, rather than butsudan — laying out food. Okinawa's own dance, Eisā^[24], is performed in nightly processions through the streets in the seventh lunar month: young men with drums slung at their waists, marching past in formation. Music and movement alike are different from the mainland tradition; the result is a fusion of Ryūkyū culture and Buddhism, a festival that has gone its own way.[6]

Visiting the graves at Obon is usually done on the morning of August 13 or the evening of the 12th. Water is poured over the headstone, incense is set burning, flowers are arranged. In the temple precincts, Segaki rites are commonly held through the period; most temples open them to general worshippers. A polite 'May I just offer incense?' will almost always be welcomed, even from a foreign visitor.[13]

Lantern-floating is the rite of carrying spirits away on a river or out to sea. Nagasaki's Shōryō-nagashi^[10] on August 15 — spirit-boats afloat amid firecrackers and gongs — Kyoto's Arashiyama lantern release on August 16 (in concert with the Daimonji okuribi), Hiroshima's lanterns for the atomic-bomb dead on August 6, the Sumida River release in Tokyo: each is open viewing. Private households now rarely float their own lantern, but the public ceremonies are easy to attend.

Bon-odori is not something you watch. It is something you dance. Almost every Bon dance allows drop-in participation: a yukata is welcome but not required; you needn't know the choreography; you can stand in the back row and follow the people in front. The three nationally designated dances — Nishimonai, Gujō, and Awa-odori^[21] — are large in scale and weight, but the small neighbourhood-association dances of the countryside are closer to the form's original life. At Awa-odori, visitors can sometimes drop into one of the local ren — the dance troupes — for a stretch. There is a saying at Gujō: '踊らにゃ損々' — to refuse to dance is to lose out. That is the essence of Bon-odori.

Temples, shrines, and graves during Obon are, for the household receiving its dead, an intimate space. Restraint with photography (especially at altars and during recitation), low voices, modest dress — these minimums are enough. Kyoto's Five-Mountain Okuribi^[9], Nagasaki's Shōryō-nagashi, and Okinawa's Eisā are all large events organised for the public; the small neighbourhood Bon-odori, and the welcome fire at someone's gate, are closer to private rite. The distinction is worth holding in mind.