Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (66 page)

While Tanabata is magical, as a child, nothing seemed more romantic to me than Obon, a Buddhist celebration. In most parts of Japan, Obon is commemorated over several days, often from August
13 to the 17, with the peak of the festivities taking place on the seventeenth. Some parts of Japan hold Obon in July; the difference depends on whether or not a region follows the old lunar calendar or the Gregorian one for celebrating festivals.

My understanding of Obon as a child was limited. To me, it was an excuse to get to wear a kimono. My mother would dress me and put up my hair. In the afternoon, my grandmother would invite over one of her young students to teach me how to dance.

The culmination of Obon was a large outdoor dance, in which men, women, and children circled around an elevated platform outfitted with speakers, lanterns, and a musical band. The musicians played
taiko
drums and flutes, and a singer wailed songs of longing and heartbreak into a microphone. Many of the dance moves are borrowed from agriculture: hoeing, planting, harvesting. I loved to dance with all the women and the few men who joined in. I loved to see the ferocious older women in their beautiful kimonos dancing with such precise and extroverted confidence as if to say, “I know how this is to be done. Watch me.” I wanted to be that way one day.

I did not know that we were dancing for the dead. Obon is not about dressing up, or kimonos, or showing off dance moves. Obon isn’t even another permutation of Shint
’s many festivals. It is a Buddhist celebration, originating in China, during which the Japanese welcome home the spirits of the dead. It is in August that the ghosts come home, that all lovers and beloveds are reunited. During Obon, much of Japan shuts down to accommodate the flood of travelers going home to visit with their loved ones one more time.

A
UGUST OF 2012
would be the second Obon after my grandfather died. We had not managed thus far to bury his bones, but finally Semp
felt comfortable enough about the radiation situation in Iwaki to dig up the ground by the family cemetery plot. My
grandfather’s bones were finally getting a burial. In preparation for this event, I had decided to take in as many Obon-related activities across Japan as I could, to try to understand the tradition more fully. I started my trip in Japan’s old capital, Ky
t
, at K
daiji temple, long a personal favorite.

It was once believed that if a chair or a table or any object had been around for one hundred years, it had the right to get a soul. As a result, people in Japan sometimes destroyed things that turned ninety-nine, in order to avoid having to put up with them being alive. Very often, the destroyed ninety-nine-year-old things were resentful to be relegated to the trash heap. Their chance at mortality thwarted, the indignant parasols and notebooks turned into mischievous spirits hell bent on revenge.

I asked my mother how a human could stand to gain in this situation. On the one hand, people wanted to avoid a knife with a soul, but surely it was even worse to have a knife that was now an evil spirit lounging around in a recycling bin. My mother explained that a literal interpretation wasn’t the point. The message was to always try to take care of chairs and umbrellas and other things, since even an inanimate object deserves dignity, and how you care for objects says as much about you as how you care for people in your life. This is also why Mount Doom includes a special shrine just for chopsticks and combs.

During Obon, most temples across Japan are preoccupied with welcoming home the dead, but K
daiji commemorates the eerie potential that all material objects have to haunt you in your life. The temple grounds are transformed into a haunted house. The already-dark hallways are illuminated with hazy, orange lanterns and populated with half-dilapidated benches and mashed lanterns. Ghostly images are projected onto the exterior of the buildings. There is also an art display, for among K
daiji’s many treasures are numerous ghostly paintings: octopus ghosts stealing children, a woman in
a white kimono with no feet, and hand scrolls depicting the angry ghosts of these discarded items. Furious cherry blossoms march side by side along bamboo shoots, both trailing a broken-down palanquin with a woman’s tongue sticking out. There is a parasol hopping on its one foot, an eye open on the crumpled paper skin. You might have seen this parasol before. He is a character in the very modern Japanese anime
Gegege no Kitar
. The one time I went to see these hand scrolls with all their terrifying, if charming, inanimate objects out to terrorize the living, I thought that it was no wonder the Japanese are such good craftsmen—and so very responsible about disposing of their trash.

O
BON CAN ONLY
begin when you call home the dead, and there are just so many days that you can do
omukae
, or “the honored receiving.” The word
omukae
is similar to the Japanese word used for meeting someone at an airport or coming off a train.

“Today I have to go to Narita for
mukae
.”

But there is only one great greeting, the
omukae
. In the great greeting, you bring home the people who left you during
owakare
, the great parting. Generally,
omukae
is supposed to take place between August 7 and the 15. My mother remembers her father lighting a small fire on the corner outside her childhood home. The smoke was a signal to the ancestors that they needed to come back. My grandmother made a horse out of a cucumber and a cow out of an eggplant, and these were placed next to the fire. The spirits flying overhead were supposed to follow the smoke down from the sky to the mortal realm, and then sit on the cucumber horse and eggplant cow, which were moved indoors to the family altar. After about a week, the ancestors were sent home, and the cow and the horse sent floating down a nearby river. In other parts of Japan, people light fires on graves or go to a temple to bring home the dead.

I began Obon at Rokuharamitsuji temple, in Ky
t
. To get there, I had to walk up Goj
D
ri, Ky
t
’s Fifth Street, through a throng of porcelain sellers in town for a street fair that has been around for almost one hundred years. Goj
D
ri is on a slight incline. It’s the main street that leads up to Kiyomizu temple, the Zen temple supported by hundreds of wooden pillars made out of the zelkova tree.