Also called Bon, O-bon, Bon Festival, mukaebi, okuribi, shōryō uma
Obon is the Japanese Buddhist season, usually in mid-August, when the spirits of ancestors are believed to return home. Families light a small welcoming fire, set out a cucumber horse and an eggplant cow for the spirits' journey, dance the Bon Odori, and send the spirits back with fires and floating lanterns.
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Take care: Obon is a living Buddhist family observance, so honour your own ancestors and join public Bon Odori as a respectful guest. Keep the welcoming and sending fires very small, in a clay or metal dish, away from anything flammable, and put them out fully. Do not float lanterns on your own; join an organised tōrō nagashi where they are collected afterwards.
From 8 pm on 16 August, five giant bonfires are lit on the mountains around Kyoto in the shapes of the character dai (great), the words myō and hō (wondrous dharma), a boat and a torii gate. Hereditary families organise each fire, which sees the ancestors back to the spirit world.
At the end of Obon, many towns float paper lanterns down rivers or out to sea to guide the spirits home. Most events now gather the lanterns downstream afterwards so they do not pollute the water.
Uses: Paper floating lanterns
Japanese plantation workers held the first recorded American Obon at Wainaku, Hawaii, in 1885. Reverend Yoshio Iwanaga led the first public Bon Odori at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco in 1931. Temples now stagger their festivals through the summer so neighbouring communities can attend each other's dances.
Obon blends an older Japanese belief in ancestral spirits returning home with the Buddhist Ullambana story. In it, the Buddha's disciple Maudgalyayana, called Mokuren in Japan, saw his dead mother suffering among the hungry ghosts and freed her by making offerings to monks at the end of their summer retreat on the fifteenth day of the seventh month; he danced for joy, which is said to be the origin of the Bon Odori. Obon was first held as a Buddhist observance in the reign of Empress Suiko (592 to 628).
When Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in the Meiji era, regions kept Obon at different times, so Tokyo often holds it in mid-July and most of Japan in mid-August. It is not a public holiday but most people take leave to travel home. The cucumber horse and eggplant cow, the welcoming and sending fires and the floating lanterns all express the same idea: bringing the dead home with care and seeing them off with gratitude.
Tanabata is Japan's Star Festival on the seventh day of the seventh month, honouring the weaver Orihime and the herdsman Hikoboshi, lovers who meet once a year across the Milky Way. People write wishes on narrow paper strips called tanzaku and hang them on bamboo.
A small, regularly tended shrine where a family remembers its dead with photographs, light, water and offerings, a practice shared in different forms by Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, African, Afro-Caribbean, Mexican and modern pagan households.
Chuseok is Korea's harvest festival on the full moon of the eighth lunar month. Families give thanks to their ancestors with a morning charye table of new-harvest food, tend the family graves, and make half-moon rice cakes called songpyeon for a bright future.
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