Authors: Patrick Drazen
CHAPTER 3: SHALL WE DANCE
One principal reason that ghost stories in Japan are associated with summer is the annual summer celebration of the return of the spirits of the departed to earth. It’s a holiday, complete with carnival atmosphere, refreshments, fireworks, music—and dancing. The centerpiece of the festival is the Bon Odori, a community dance.
02. My Mother, the Hungry Ghost
According to legend, Bon Odori originated when Maudgalyayana, a disciple of the Buddha, had a vision of his dead mother indulging her own selfishness in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, gorging herself continuously but never satisfying her hunger.
[5]
(In this story, any food one touches in this cursed realm bursts into flame before it can be eaten.) Greatly disturbed, he went to the Buddha and asked how he could release his mother from her selfish attachment. The Buddha advised his disciple to perform a charitable act in memory of his mother. The disciple gave food to the poor and thus saw his mother’s release from the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He also began to see the many sacrifices that she had made for him in her life—sacrifices for which she had tried to compensate as a Hungry Ghost. Maudgalyayana, happy because of his mother’s release after death and grateful for his mother’s kindness toward him in life, danced with joy. From this dance of joy comes Bon Odori or the Bon Dance, a time in which the ancestors and their sacrifices are remembered and appreciated.
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Of course, the dead celebrated in Obon aren’t exclusively parents or grandparents. Parents revisit dead children, and widows and widowers spend time again with dead spouses.
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Today Obon festival participants continue the old custom as they dance in traditional Japanese dress, including yukata (cotton kimono made for Japan’s sweltering summers) and happi coats (short jackets). The dances may also include the use of fans, straw hats, and even local additions, such as castanets in southern California.
As the festival ends, in some places paper lanterns are painted with the names of the deceased; the lanterns are then set adrift in a river or seacoast,
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to guide the ancestor back to the land of the dead until next year. Meanwhile, it’s always possible to communicate with the deceased through praying at the altar that is still kept in many homes.
The Obon festival usually occurs in August, because it’s supposed to coincide with the seventh day of the seventh month. So why August? August is the eighth month—of the Gregorian calendar. Until 1873, Japan used the Chinese lunar calendar, in which New Year’s Day is movable, and falls during the thirty days after January 20, based on the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius. However, as part of Japan’s decision to modernize during the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan adopted the medieval calendar created by Pope Gregory, even though lunar dates are sometimes still observed.
The “seven-seven” lunar date also coincides with a Chinese festival, commemorating the legendary Weaver, granddaughter of the King and Queen of Heaven, who had fallen in love with a mortal cowherd. They were transfigured into stars (known in modern astronomy as Altair and Vega), which from Earth seem close but are separated by the Milky Way and only able to draw close to each other on one day each year—the seventh day of the seventh month.
[9]
Hence the holiday’s other name: the Star Festival, or Tanabata.
Much as early Christianity may have “borrowed” pagan festivals and made them over into “official” Church-sanctioned holidays, there is more than a coincidental similarity between the Chinese “Double Seven” holiday and the Japanese Buddhist Obon celebration. Both, after all, celebrate the very brief time each year that Heaven meets Earth, and those who are dead return to the land of the living—in spirit, at least. In Japan, at any rate, that time is summer, and consequently a lot of ghost stories take place during the warm weather, when spirits are presumed to be traveling the land.
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For an example of what can go wrong if the proper rites aren’t observed, look at
Bleach
, a manga by Noriaki “Tite” Kubo, which inspired an anime popular enough to inspire in turn (among other spinoffs) a live musical. Its teenaged hero, Ichigo Kurosaki, sees dead people, and that’s the opening hook that gets him involved with the Soul Society, but all the subsequent business of Hollows and Reapers are basically window dressing. This is a case of using a ghost story to communicate to the audience what is considered important by the larger society—in this case, by Japanese society.
03. Don’t forget me
Look at the story-arc in
Bleach
involving Sora and Orihime. First of all, if you’re Japanese, the name Orihime is loaded. I mentioned Obon commemorating the one day a year when the mortal who loved a goddess could be with her, while they spend the rest of the year as stars in the sky separated by the Milky Way. The goddess’s name in Japan was Orihime, so, of all the names that the modern schoolgirl character could have been given, this was a meaningful choice.
Sora was her older brother until he was killed in a hit-and-run. Orihime would pray for his soul daily at the Buddhist altar in their home. This gave Sora peace, knowing that she still remembered him. Gradually, though, there were other demands on Orihime’s time, her prayers were less consistent, and Sora became jealous, eventually transforming into a serpentine monster. It was only when Orihime finally told her brother that she still cared for him, even though they had quarreled on his last day on earth, that—without any intervention from Ichigo or anyone from the Soul Society—Sora was able to abandon his jealousy and stop being a monster. This isn’t even a subtle message; it reminds the audience not to abandon the old ways, since the spirits of the dead could take offense and cause problems in this world.
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Rumiko Takahashi uses an Obon celebration in her romantic comedy manga
Mezon
Ikkoku
to put a comic twist on the legend of Okiku and the plates (we’ll hear more about this famous ghost in a later chapter).
An early episode of
Pokemon
has the main character (Ash in America, Satoshi in Japan) hang around home long enough to attend a local festival. However, it’s more than just a festival. To those in the know, it’s clearly an Obon dance.
Akachan
to
Boku
, a manga by Marimo Ragawa published in English as
Baby
and
Me
, is an unlikely manga whose audience is teenaged girls, since there’s hardly a female character in it that isn’t in nursery school. The series found a home in Japan in
Hana
to
Yume
(
Flowers
and
Dreams
), a girls’ manga magazine, and has been animated for television by Studio Pierrot in a rare Japanese-Italian co-production. The English version of the manga appeared in
Shojo
Beat
magazine and in paperback anthologies published by VIZ.
It’s the story of the Enoki family: widowed salaryman Harumi Enoki, his older son (ten years old when the series starts) Takuya, and Takuya’s toddler brother Minoru. Still living in the shadow of the death of Harumi’s wife, they muddle through as best they can. The focus is on Takuya, growing up and taking care of his baby brother, being something of a surrogate mother as well as a big brother.
Even this idyllic family tale isn’t ghost-free; in this case, the ghost is not that of the boys’ late mother. While the family is on summer vacation, they spend a weekend at an old traditional inn with an
onsen
(hot springs). But this story involves a special kind of ghost; we’ll look at it later.
04. “Don’t shoot!”
The
Patlabor
anime series started in 1988, with a series of direct-to-video episodes created by a group that included manga artist Masami Yuuki and anime director Mamoru Oshii. The title is a compressed version of the words “patrol labor,” which refers to the machine suits worn by members of a special police unit in the future.
A later broadcast anime series based one episode on stories of the haunting of a rural police training camp, and set that episode in the summer, when other trainees would be away on break and the one remaining squad would have to cope with a large, empty facility. Ghostly things start happening that seem to match up with legends about a training mishap a few years earlier. It’s said that cadets were sparring, while wearing the Patlabor suits (think of the machine that Ripley wore in
Aliens
, except twenty feet tall). One Patlabor was knocked down, and its weapon went off accidentally. Even though it was an oversized paintball gun, the story goes that the pellet was enough to kill a spectator, a beautiful young woman. Her ghost is seen through windows, and is heard to say, “Don’t shoot!” In addition, the bath (the size of a small swimming pool) turns red; it looks like blood, but later it’s found to have the chemical composition of the dye used in paintballs.
In the end, the stories about the dead girl turn out to be just that: stories. The unit’s officers had devised the elaborate scheme about a ghost as a way to impress the troops, who were getting over-eager and therefore careless, with the need to be more cautious when using their suits. It certainly worked: getting the troops caught up in unearthly voices and inexplicable mysteries certainly made a deeper impression than any number of safety lectures would have.
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Not every attempt to create a ghost works so well. Early in the popular anime series
Fullmetal
Alchemist
, based on a manga by Hiromu Arakawa, the Elric brothers run into an apparent case of a cemetery haunting, on a holiday similar to Obon.
05. Blue Roses
Early in their search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the legendary amplifier of alchemical processes, Edward Elric (who lost two limbs to alchemy) and his younger brother Alphonse (who lost his entire body, and whose soul is now anchored in a suit of armor) traveled to a village in search of Majihal, an alchemist knowledgeable about the Philosopher’s Stone. They arrive at the village on the eve of a festival celebrating the dead. However, this village has some supernatural problems. Decades ago, Karin, a beautiful woman from a neighboring village famous for cultivating a rare strain of blue roses, tried to drive a cart down a washed-out road and slid to her death. Her ghost (or perhaps zombie) has recently been seen near the town cemetery.
The truth is actually less hopeful for the Elric brothers. Majihal has had no luck in bringing Karin’s spirit back; he had been trying to do so in order to embed it in the life-sized dolls he had built to commemorate Karin and her beauty; people see these dolls near the cemetery at night. The irony was that alchemy couldn’t retrieve Karin’s spirit anyway, because Karin is alive. She was not killed in the carriage accident years before but suffered a memory loss. Majihal failed to recognize her even though she was alive and nearby, because she had aged and was no longer the youthful beauty he had fallen in love with. Majihal attempted to kill Ed for revealing these inconvenient truths, but the weapon slipped and killed Majihal instead.
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Rumiko Takahashi has long been meticulous in structuring not only her plotlines, but also in dressing the sets, with cues referring to the time of year as well as events meaningful to the Japanese psyche. These hints are often overlooked in the west, but are especially important to understanding the ghostly plot of one episode of the anime version of her popular manga
InuYasha,
“Soul Piper & the Mischievous Little Soul”
.
06. “I’m running away!”
During this episode of a series which mostly takes place in Japan’s feudal past, high school student Kagome Higurashi and the dog-demon Inuyasha are in the modern world for a while during the summer. Kagome’s little brother Sota is seen carrying a big “Get Well” present. One of his school friends, a boy named Satoru, was caught in an apartment fire six months ago but is still comatose and hasn’t fully recovered from smoke inhalation. That’s bad enough, but medical equipment in his hospital room keeps breaking down and his school friends are afraid to visit him because they think he is cursed somehow. Not one to believe in curses (even though he’s on a first-name basis with the demon Inuyasha), Sota wants to visit Satoru, but he isn’t old enough to ride the train by himself; Kagome agrees to take him after school.
While they are at the hospital, Kagome notices a spooky little girl dressed in a down vest (unusual clothing for summer) lurking around the hospital. Earlier, the same girl was seen attacking a group of children playing with fireworks. Fireworks may mean Independence Day in the United States, but in Japan they carry a very different, specific meaning: summer festivals and Obon.