The Season the Dead Come Home

Since long ago this period has been a time for welcoming the spirits of the ancestors, spending a few days with them and then sending them off. For these few days we are no longer the masters of our houses, for the masters are the ones returning, and the living take on the role of welcoming, making offerings and seeing them off.

Obon was once a custom in which, at the same time every year, people lit fires to welcome the spirits of the ancestors, entertained them, and lit fires to send them off. It is a fact that this was repeated house by house, village by village, for more than a thousand years. What was imprinted on people over that time was not Buddhist doctrine but a bodily sense that "we are not the subject."

In a sense, the coming and going of the ancestors at a particular season made their living descendants repeat that bodily sense again and again. The modern subject called "I" believes it stands alone, but we are only one part, at this moment, of a band woven of the ancestors. Through ancient ancestor worship and the Obon that flowed into it, this sensibility poured the sense of "not being the subject" into the bodies of the Japanese over thousands of years.

According to the Nihon Shoki, in 606 every temple was to hold a sai, a meal offering, on the eighth day of the fourth month and the fifteenth day of the seventh, both dates in the old lunar calendar. "Holding a sai" means, simply put, inviting monks and offering them a meal. What the first record tells us, then, is not the splendor of a ceremony but the single fact that monks were fed.

About half a century later, in 657, the record says that an image of Mount Sumeru was built west of Asukadera and an urabon'e (盂蘭盆会) was held. Mount Sumeru is the mountain that towers at the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology. A stone model of it was built, and in the evening of the same day the court entertained people called the "Tohara" who had drifted ashore at Tsukushi, on the coast of what is now Fukuoka. The Tohara were people with origins in what is now northern Afghanistan, and their landing in 657 is on record. The first urabon'e in the state's records, in other words, was not a household rite for welcoming ancestors. It was a day for welcoming and entertaining people who had drifted in from a distant foreign land.

Then, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of 659, monks in the temples of the capital expounded the Ullambana Sutra and had people give thanks to their ancestors back to the seventh generation. What is interesting is that, where two years earlier the event had been held in one place, this was held everywhere at once, by imperial command. It was the moment the state first decided to whom people should pray.

The decisive year was 733. Under Emperor Shomu, the urabon offering was assigned to the Daizenshiki, the office in charge of the court's meals. Until then, urabon had been only an order an emperor issued when it occurred to him; now it became the routine work of a government office. A religious event had turned into an item of budget and staff.

Becoming an annual court observance also meant that the emperor himself took the seat of host at the rite for the ancestors. An emperor's legitimacy rests on his continuity with the ancestors.

Obon is a rite in which ancient Japanese ancestor worship fused with Buddhism, and it came to be called Bon by shortening the Buddhist term urabon'e.

For I believe that a sensibility for welcoming the spirits of the ancestors already existed in Japan before urabon arrived. The essence of urabon's arrival, in other words, is that a foreign vessel scooped water from a spring that was already full. What I attend to here is not the content of the doctrine but the acts our ancestors repeated.

Every time a marebito visited, the village made a decision with its survival at stake. In fact, villages once held rites in which the master of the house judged whether the marebito who appeared at the gate would bring a festival or a calamity, and only then was it welcomed into the house or driven away.

A marebito once welcomed in is entertained by the people of the house, but it always leaves. No one decided this, and it is not an institution. The sense that a visiting god always leaves was cultivated as a bodily feeling from ancient Japan on. What was done at Asuka in 657 has the same structure. Strangers who drifted in on the sea are welcomed before a mountain modeled on the center of the Buddhist world, feasted and sent off. At first glance it looks like a new custom the court created, but in truth it is what each village had been doing since far antiquity.

To face what is absolutely different as different. What lies there is not tolerance, love or harmony but extreme tension. For that relation to arise, you must know your own roots deeply. When I look at the marebito and at the customs of Obon, what I see them truly telling us is that the relation between person and person is, at its core, a confrontation staked on one's life.

The waves of Westernization and modernization after the Restoration deeply affected obon customs. With the adoption of the solar calendar in 1872 (Meiji 5), the observance moved from the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month to July 15 or August 15 of the solar calendar, bringing confusion as dates diverged across regions.

In today's society, where faith in ancestors has drifted away from daily life and finding a place of belonging in the city has become difficult, this season feels as if the ancient ancestors are trying to tell something to those of us who, since Meiji, have let go of what matters most.

In the course of its transmission through China, the rite fused with Confucian filial piety and Daoist beliefs in spirits, undergoing a complex transformation before reaching Japan in the Asuka period. In Japan, it further merged with ancient ancestral beliefs and folk practices, developing into a uniquely Japanese obon.

In contemporary obon, not everyone is acutely conscious of its religious roots, yet its core—a time to remember ancestors and confirm family bonds—remains unchanged. In gestures such as the welcoming and sending fires, offerings, and visits to graves, the view of ancestral spirits held by the Japanese for more than a thousand years continues to breathe.