Obon

Every ghost in this collection is a spirit that went wrong.

Obon is what going right looks like.

For a few days each summer, Japan's dead are supposed to be here. Expected. Welcomed. Housed, fed, danced for, and then seen off again.

It is the single largest movement of people in the Japanese year — everyone travelling back to the family house, because that's where the dead will be looking.

How it runs

Mukaebi — welcoming fires. Lit at the gate or the doorway on the first evening, so the returning spirits can find the house.

They stay at the butsudan, the household altar, which is opened and cleaned and loaded with offerings.

There's dancing — Bon Odori — in every neighbourhood, around a raised wooden tower, to drums, for several nights.

And then okuribi — seeing-off fires.

In Kyoto that means the Daimonji: enormous characters burned into the sides of the mountains ringing the city, visible from everywhere, lighting the road back.

A city sets its hills on fire so its dead can see their way home.

The cucumber horse and the eggplant ox

This is my favourite object in Japanese religion and I don't think it's close.

Families make shōryō-uma — "spirit horses" — out of vegetables, with legs of broken chopsticks or matchsticks stuck in.

A cucumber is a horse. Fast, lean, quick.

An eggplant is an ox. Heavy, slow, patient.

And the meaning is this:

Come quickly, on the horse. We want you here, don't dawdle.

Go back slowly, on the ox — because you'll be carrying the offerings and we don't want you rushing, and honestly we'd rather you took your time.

That's the whole theology of Japanese ancestor-feeling in two vegetables on a family altar. Hurry back to us. Take as long as you like leaving.

Children make them. They cost nothing. They're thrown away afterwards.

The dance comes from a story about hunger

Bon Odori has been danced for roughly six hundred years, and its founding story is worth having.

Mokuren — Maudgalyāyana, one of the Buddha's chief disciples, famous for his supernatural sight — used that sight to look for his dead mother.

And he found her in the realm of the hungry ghosts. Starving. Unable to eat, because whatever she brought to her mouth turned to fire.

He couldn't reach her himself. On the Buddha's instruction he made offerings to the assembled monks, and through them she was freed.

And when he learned she was released, he danced with joy.

That's the Bon dance. Every summer, in every neighbourhood in Japan, people are performing a man's relief at getting his mother out of hell.

Which also ties the whole festival to the hungriest part of this tradition — the starving dead who can't be fed by ordinary means, and the segaki rites performed specifically to feed them. The dance, the rites, and the hungry ghosts are one system, and Obon is where it resolves.

The lanterns, and the sea's fine print

Tōrō nagashi — paper lanterns, lit, set on rivers and out onto the sea on the last night, to carry the dead who belong to the water.

And here's the shadow clause.

Fishermen do not go out on Obon night.

Because the drowned come back too — and the funayūrei, the ghosts of the sea, rise and ask passing boats for a ladle. If you hand one over, they use it to fill your vessel with water until it sinks.

(The counter is to hand them a ladle with the bottom knocked out.)

The festival that welcomes the dead onto land is also the night you stay off the water. Both halves of that are the same belief taken seriously.

And it's one half of the year

The Japanese ritual calendar runs on two strokes, and they're opposites.

Setsubun, in February: demons out. Beans thrown out of the door, shouting oni wa soto — devils outside, fortune inside. Expulsion.

Obon, in August: ancestors in. Fires lit to guide them, altars opened, food set out, and a vegetable animal so they can travel comfortably. Hospitality.

Push out what doesn't belong. Bring home what does.

Everything else in this collection lives somewhere in between those two dates — in the space where something is neither properly expelled nor properly welcomed, and so it stays out on the road.