Obon (Japan) - the August ancestor festival of Bon Odori, spirit horses and lantern floats, kept in three regional calendars

Obon is the Japanese festival of returned ancestors. Over three days in the middle of August the dead are thought to come home: families clean the family graves, light fires and lanterns, set out vegetables for the spirits to ride, and dance the Bon Odori. It is not a public holiday, and yet most people treat it like one.

The one-line summary

Japanese ancestor festival, three days around 13-16 August in the Gregorian Hachigatsu Bon calendar. Religious category, iconic tier. Not a statutory public holiday, but leave is customarily granted. Two other regional Obon calendars survive - July in Tokyo and Okinawa keeping the old lunar date - so \u201cwhen is Obon\u201d has three different correct answers.

Origin

Obon is a fusion of two things: an old Japanese practice of beckoning the dead home twice a year, on the nights of the full moon in spring and autumn, and a Buddhist custom of honouring one's ancestors that arrived with Buddhism. The folk element is arguably the older - the practice of calling the dead home already existed before Buddhism reached Japan - and the Buddhist frame has organised it ever since.

The Buddhist story at the centre is the one of Maudgalyayana, the Buddha's disciple, known in Japan as Mokuren. He looked upon his dead mother with his supernatural sight and found her in the realm of hungry ghosts, suffering. The Buddha told him to make offerings to the monks who had just completed their summer retreat on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. He did, and his mother was released. In his relief and joy he danced - and the Bon dance is understood to have grown out of that dance. In recorded history Obon appears as a Buddhist custom under Empress Suiko, and by 733 it had been adopted as a court holiday.

The word itself is interesting and its popular derivation is almost certainly wrong. It is usually said to derive from a Sanskrit word meaning \u201changing upside down\u201d, as a reference to souls hanging inverted in hell. Several scholars have argued that this is a folk etymology: the Sanskrit word is poorly attested and its ordinary meaning is only \u201cto hang\u201d, which fits poorly with a ritual about helping the dead. A likelier root is a Pali word for \u201clifting up, helping\u201d - which matches what the ceremony actually does.

When it falls

This is where Obon stops being simple. The festival is fundamentally lunar - originally the 15th day of the seventh lunar month - but when Japan switched to the Gregorian calendar at the start of the Meiji era, different localities resolved the new date differently, and three incompatible traditions ended up coexisting.

• Hachigatsu Bon (August Bon, also called Tsukiokure Bon, \u201cthe late-month Bon\u201d), around 13-16 August. This is the most common celebration across Japan and the calendar this brief uses.
• Shichigatsu Bon (July Bon, \u201cTokyo Obon\u201d), around 13-16 July, in Tokyo and some urban areas of the Tōhoku and Hokuriku regions, where the agricultural busy season did not overlap the old date.
• Bun / Usōrō in Okinawa and the Amami Islands, which keeps the original lunar rule of the 15th day of the 7th lunar month. Because it follows the moon it moves every year in the Gregorian calendar and can spill into September.

It is worth being clear about the legal status, because it is the kind of thing calendars get wrong. None of these dates is a statutory public holiday in Japan. They are not in the list of national holidays. What is true is that employers customarily grant leave for Obon, and schools and many businesses close, so in practice the three-day block behaves like a holiday even though it has no legal standing as one. The August dates given here - 13 August 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030 - are the Hachigatsu anchor.

How it is observed

The three days have a structure. The first day is for welcoming the ancestors home; the second, the middle day, is when the family is most together; the third sends them off again. Families clean and tend the family graves, which is the older domestic obligation at the heart of it.

The household altar, the butsudan, is cleaned and dressed with flowers and offerings placed before the memorial tablets - including, in a real detail of the custom, for the souls of people who died who have no relatives left nearby to remember them.

Two objects do the practical work of carrying the spirits to and fro. The first is the vegetable pair: a cucumber fashioned as a horse and an eggplant as an ox, called the shōryō uma, spirit horse, and ushi uma, cow-horse. Set at the entrance, they are the vehicle the returning ancestors ride in and leave by. The second is fire. On the first evening a small fire is lit to guide the souls home - in the past, a line of lights would be laid towards the cemetery so the dead could find the way. On the last day the sending fire, the okuribi, sees them off, and small lit lanterns are floated down a river to carry the spirits back to the world of the dead.

The dance is the public face of it. Bon Odori has a history of nearly six hundred years and began as a nenbutsu - a call-and-response chanting of the Buddha 's name - folk dance addressed to the dead. It is now largely secular summer entertainment, and each place has its own. People circle a tall scaffold called a yagura, which doubles as the bandstand for the musicians, moving clockwise or counter-clockwise, dancing in a ring. Some dances reverse direction partway through; some, like Tokushima's Awa Odori, process in a straight line through the streets instead. Gujō Odori in Gifu Prefecture is famous for dancing all night.

The choreography is often a record of local work, which is one of the more appealing things about it: the dance from the old Miike coal mine in Kyushu moves like miners digging, pushing carts and hanging lanterns, and Hokkaidō's Sōran Bushi mimics fishermen hauling nets.

Beyond Japan

Obon travelled. It is celebrated wherever there are Japanese communities, and it is the same festival under other names across a wide swathe of East and Southeast Asia - the Ghost Festival in China, Tết Trung Nguyên in Vietnam, Baekjung in Korea, Pchum Ben in Cambodia, the fifteenth-day-of-the-seventh-month observances of Laos, Sri Lanka and Thailand. All of them descend from the same Buddhist calendar of the seventh month, so they cluster in roughly the same window, which is why a reader looking at an Asian religious calendar for August and September will find this festival repeated under many names.

In the diaspora the character changes: it becomes less an ancestor rite and more a community festival. The first recorded Obon in the United States was held in 1885 by Japanese emigrant labourers on a sugar plantation at Wainaku, Hawaii. Hawaii today keeps an \u201cObon season\u201d of weekend dances from June to August across the islands. Brazil, which has the largest Japanese population outside Japan, holds Obon festivals in dozens of cities; São Paulo's is the largest. Argentina's biggest is in Colonia Urquiza, near La Plata. These are organised around temples, schools and community associations, and they are frequently as much about fundraising as about the dead.

Sources

• Wikipedia - Obon (the three regional calendars; the Maudgalyayana story; Bon Odori, the yagura and the regional dances; the spirit horse and cow-horse; the sending fire and lantern floats; the diaspora observances from Hawaii to Brazil; the critique of the popular Sanskrit etymology).
• Wikipedia - Ullambana (the Buddhist observance from which Obon derives, as referenced on the Obon page).