Bon Odori

The traditional account of bon odori begins with Maudgalyayana, in Japanese Mokuren, one of the principal disciples of the Buddha. In the story told in the Yulanpen or Ullambana Sutra, he uses his newly acquired supernatural sight to look for his dead mother and finds her suffering among the hungry ghosts, unable to eat. The Buddha tells him he cannot free her alone and instructs him to make offerings to the assembled monastic community at the close of the summer retreat. He does, his mother is released, and in his relief he dances.

That story gives the season its name, its date and its dance in one movement, and it is why Obon falls in the seventh month, around the middle of August in most of Japan and the middle of July in others where the older calendar reckoning was kept. The observance was established in Japan by the seventh century and had become general by the medieval period, when it absorbed local ancestral customs that had nothing to do with the sutra. What resulted is a season with two layers that Japanese practice has never felt the need to separate: a Buddhist memorial rite performed at the temple and in front of the household altar, and a village dance in the open air that anybody can join.

A bon odori is held in a school ground, a temple precinct, a park or a car park, and it is put on by the neighbourhood association or the temple parish. At the centre stands the yagura, a wooden scaffold two or three metres high, hung with lanterns and with red and white cloth, on which the taiko drummer and the singers stand. The dancers move around it in concentric rings, all facing the same way, repeating a short sequence of steps and hand gestures through the length of a song. There is no audition and no rehearsal; the outer rings are for people who are learning it by copying the ring in front.

The dances are regional and the differences matter locally. The Awa Odori of Tokushima is danced in moving lines through the streets rather than in a ring. The Gujo Odori of Gifu runs through the night on certain dates. The Nishimonai Bon Odori of Akita is danced by figures whose faces are covered by a hood or a woven hat, and is understood as a dance in which the living and the dead are not distinguished. The songs are often about a local trade, a mine, a fishery or a river crossing. Modern events use recorded music through a public address system and add recent songs to the old ones, and a Japanese diaspora observance in Hawaii, Brazil or California is often the largest annual gathering of that community, which is part of what the dance now does.