Illness, death and fear surround us these days like so much miasma. This past weekend, Japan celebrated Obon, and for me, that put a different spin on the current situation. Obon has its roots in Buddhism, has been observed here for at least 500 years, and is one of Japan’s biggest annual festivals. During Obon, the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead gets a little thinner, and ancestral spirits are believed to return to earth to visit family members — similar to Día de los Muertos in Mexico.
Obon is a family holiday, and in normal years people return to their hometowns, and there are dances and festivals and all kinds of celebrations to mark the holiday. This year, the Governor of Tokyo requested that residents refrain from traveling to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus, and from what I’ve read, travel out of Tokyo to the rest of Japan was significantly reduced. One article, which I unfortunately can’t find to link here, estimated that this year only 2% of Tokyoites, or about 300,000 people, traveled for Obon. In normal years the number is closer to 19%.
Since I wasn’t sharing the holiday with a Japanese family, my experience of Obon was by necessity limited to public displays, but from these alone, it was clear that beautiful lanterns (somehow made even more prosaic by the balmy summer nights) are central to the celebrations. Light and fire are important to guide ancestral spirits home, and then help them find their way back to the realm of the dead. Many temples and shrines hold evening illuminations at this time of year for this reason.
Thinking about Obon and its relationship with the dead reminded me of one particularly moving passage from Richard Lloyd Parry’s haunting Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. Parry is the Asia Editor for The Times of London, and his comments about death and Japanese culture are worth quoting at length:
When opinion polls put the question “How religious are you?,” Japanese rank among the most ungodly people in the world. It took a catastrophe for me to understand how misleading this self-assessment is. It is true that the organized religions, Buddhism and Shinto, have little influence on private or national life. But over the centuries both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.
I knew about the household altars, or butsudan, which are still seen in most homes and on which the memorial tablets of dead ancestors—the ihai—are displayed. The butsudan are cabinets of lacquer and gilt…the ihai are upright tablets of black lacquered wood, vertically inscribed in gold. Offerings of flowers, incense, food, fruit, and drinks are placed before them; at the summer Festival of the Dead, families light lanterns to welcome home the ancestral spirits. I had taken these picturesque practices to be matters of symbolism and custom, attended to in the same way that people in the West will participate in a Christian funeral without any literal belief in the words of the liturgy. But in Japan spiritual beliefs are regarded less as expressions of faith than as simple common sense, so lightly and casually worn that it is easy to miss them altogether. “The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,” wrote the religious scholar Herman Ooms. “It has always made sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do…even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.”
At the heart of ancestor worship is a contract. The food, drink, prayers, and rituals offered by their descendants gratify the dead, who in turn best or good fortune on the living. Families vary in how seriously they take these ceremonies, but even for the unobservant, the dead play a continuing part in domestic life. For much of the time, their status is something like that of beloved, deaf, and slightly batty old folk who cannot expect to be at the center of the family, but who are made to feel included on important occasions. Young people who have passed important entrance examinations, gotten a job, or made a good marriage kneel before the butsudan to report their success. Victory or defeat in an important legal case, for example, is shared with the ancestors in the same way.
When grief is raw, the presence of the deceased is overwhelming. In households that had lost children in the tsunami, it became routine, after half an hour of tea and chat, to be asked if I would like to “meet” the dead sons and daughters. I would be led to a shrine covered with framed photographs, with toys, favorite drinks and snacks, letters, drawings, and school exercise books…Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.
The tsunami did appalling violence to the religion of the ancestors.
Along with walls, roofs, and people, the water carried away household altars, memorial tablets, and family photographs. Cemetery vaults were ripped open by the wave, and the bones of the dead scattered. Temples were destroyed, along with memorial books, listing the names of ancestors over generations. [A Buddhist priest tells the author]…”The memorial tablets — it’s difficult to exaggerate their importance…When there’s a fire or an earthquake, the ihai are the first thing that many people will save, before money or documents. I think that people died in the tsunami because they went home for the ihai. It’s life, the life of the ancestors. It’s like saving your late father’s life” (pp. 107-109).
“It’s like saving your late father’s life”: what a radically different view of death, life, and the relationship between them. In Japan, it seems that you live as long as someone remembers you, and attention to ancestors runs through all levels of Japanese society. When Emperor Naruhito ascended to the throne last year, he visited a shrine in May to report to his ancestors about plans for his enthronement. In November, he visited again to report that the enthronement ceremonies were complete. I find Herman Ooms’ quote striking: death in the West is the negation of life, while in Japan, it can be understood as a variant, and one that is not always far removed from daily life: witness the Tohoku Wind Telephone, a place for people to speak with and grieve tsunami victims. This year’s Obon was muted, but that doesn’t change the holiday’s deeper significance.
While funeral rituals in Japan are evolving (most recently due to COVID-19 but before that due to economic and social factors), traditional practices put family members in close proximity to death and the dead. In kotsuage, a post-cremation ritual, family members use special long chopsticks to remove bone fragments from cremains, moving first foot bones on up to skull fragments into an urn for interment. Japanese American author Roland Kelts gives a particularly moving account of his experience with kotsuage on his blog.
Seeing Obon naturally makes me draw comparisons with my own experience in the U.S., where death is rarely situated within a celebratory context and more often shrouded in fear: Halloween is a primary example. Of course, the U.S. is a diverse place, and approaches to death vary greatly by culture, but Caitlin Doughty, a self-described “mortician, activist, and funeral industry rabble-rouser” (see below for reading recommendations) notes that the modern trend in the U.S. funeral industry has been to sanitize our experience of death by abstracting it. Some may find this comforting, but others may prefer an alternative, and those can be hard to find. Not that long ago (say, before the mid-20th century), the situation in the U.S. was different: death and mourning rituals, including washing and laying out the deceased, happened at home. Death (real death, not TV death) was not an alien element in American lives.
When I was in college, I got to know my paternal grandmother’s oldest brother, my Great Uncle Coy, and in his quiet, earnest way, he gave me a different way to look at death. Uncle Coy lived in Monterey, a small town in rural middle Tennessee, near the place where he, my grandmother and their six siblings had been raised, and where he had built a house, raised a family and mined coal for 25 years. Every time I visited Coy, he used to take me to Falling Springs, a tidy, well-kept country cemetery where six generations of our ancestors are buried, and some of the headstones were carved by my great-great-grandfather. No visit to Monterey was complete without a trip to see the extended family at Falling Springs, and I see in retrospect that this was like our own version of Obon. To Coy, these people were dead but not gone. It made intuitive sense to him that I should know my place among them, and he could effortlessly rattle off who was whose daddy’s daddy, who was a second cousin and that second cousin’s mama, and why that headstone over there gave “Booze” as a first name. Until I first visited Falling Springs at the age of 18, I didn’t know that six generations of my family could be in a single place at once. Experiencing Falling Springs shifted my understanding of my family, who made up my family, and my place within my family.
Growing up, Falling Springs had been central to Coy’s life: it was where his family attended church on Sundays, and where he and his siblings were schooled, since the church functioned as a one-room school house the rest of the week. Every Memorial Day (what Coy called Decoration Day), the extended family would hold a reunion at Falling Springs and adorn the graves of their ancestors with fresh flowers. At some point in the mid-aughts, Uncle Coy had a headstone pre-installed for himself and my Great Aunt Dean. It was an upright stone, with their names joined by hearts. He showed it to me on one of our visits to Falling Springs, and while I initially wasn’t sure how to respond, it quickly put me at ease to see what comfort it gave Coy to know that he and his wife of more than 70 years would spend eternity next to his parents and among both their families, at this place that was so central to his life and to which he tended with such care. Uncle Coy was a product of a different time and culture: death didn’t scare him, and it wasn’t alien. When we buried him at Falling Springs in 2014 at the age of 94, I thought about that day.
I hope Falling Springs continues to stay green and well tended. It’s impossible to think about this ancestral cemetery without thinking of similar cemeteries in rural Japan, where the state of a village’s cemetery can tell you a great deal about the vitality of that village. For more background, see my last post. Caring for ancestors’ graves is a solemn duty, and a cemetery in disrepair is an indication of severe distress. To prevent damage to graves from forest growth, some villages move their cemetery entirely. The idea of a dying village moving its dead is a poignant one.
We all have ways of remembering our ancestors, and we all have ways of dealing with death. That declining villages in Japan put so much care into cemetery maintenance, or that ihai could come before money and documents in a tsunami evacuation highlights a significant cultural difference between Japan and the United States, and their respective relationships with death — differences that are particularly salient during a pandemic Obon.
Good reading/watching
Departures (Japanese movie, won the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film)
Caitlin Doughty, “Ask a Mortician” (YouTube channel)
Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Gretel Ehrlich, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami
Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Speaking of lights and lanterns, these are photos from teamLab’s Borderless installation in Odaiba, Tokyo. Their two-story immersive space features interactive exhibitions involving ever-changing, visually stunning, and often emotionally moving lights. Some are abstract, some less so (I was a particular fan of the whales that gracefully plied the floors and walls). The last photo, of the Odaiba Ferris Wheel, was shot outside. The colors are unfiltered — we emerged from the magical Borderless world at just the ideal moment, as dusk was coming and the sky was clarifying.
Mostly City Stuff 