Japanese believe that every autumn the spirits of fallen ancestors rise all across Japan
By Nazarul Islam | USA
Japanese believe that every autumn the spirits of fallen ancestors rise all across Japan. During this season of the dead spirits called Obon, the living commemorate them with offerings of food at altars, gather for festivals, and perform collective dances known as bon odori.
People all over Japan stream back to their home towns to be with family and visit cemeteries to pay respects to their dead. “Graves are a place to talk,” says Yamazaki Masako of Zenyuseki, a tombstone carvers’ trade association. Nearly five years ago, covid-19 had upset the routine.
Japan’s viral caseload was relatively small, with just 1,148 total deaths, roughly America’s daily average. But a second rise in infections, particularly in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, spread the jitters. Citizens had been discouraged from travelling home and festivals have been cancelled. Family reunions had been held online to protect vulnerable elderly relatives. Failure to visit grave-sites created “a different type of stress—different from not being able to travel”, lamented Ms. Yamazaki.
To help relieve the pain of missing those obligations to the past, her association had turned to futuristic technology. For ¥25,000 ($236) it produced a virtual-reality experience to let you visit a grave from the comfort of your home. “You can see it from all directions, 360 degrees,” boasts Ms Yamazaki. “It’s like you’re actually there.”
Others had hired proxies to visit the dead on their behalf. With Japan’s population ageing and urbanizing, online graveyard visits and tombstone-cleaning services were already doing brisk business. Goendo, one such firm, had remarked that inquiries and website traffic had doubled that year. Its agents can be hired to weed, pick up rubbish, wash tombstones, arrange flowers and light incense sticks—then live-stream it all for families by video-chat.
Kurashi no Market, an online services marketplace, reported that demand for grave visits in this year’s obon had nearly tripled. Reviewers have raved. “I was so relieved to see the image of a beautifully cleaned grave with flowers,” wrote a client who had fretted about not being able to visit in the flesh.
Obon came to Japan via China along with Buddhism. The word is thought to derive from the Sanskrit ullambana (deliverance from suffering). First practiced in Japan in the seventh century, the custom fused with local folk traditions.
“At another tap of the drum, there begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal—a dance, an astonishment,” wrote Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-century chronicler of Japan, who was in awe of a bon odori. “All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance.”
Today’s live-streamed moves might seem equally fallacious!
Read: Our ego-driven lives
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
