Bon odori, thirty years later

I returned to a tradition after a long absence. What I found shocked me!

Everybody loves bon odori, “bon dance” summer festival.

The time between August 13th and 16th is called Obon in Japan. According to tradition, Obon is when the spirits of our departed relatives take a break from the afterlife, dropping by the world of the living to spend some quality time with their families.

People celebrate Obon in many different ways. Generally, it’s a time to return home for family gatherings, similar to Thanksgiving in America. Many families take this time to tidy up the family grave plot, scrubbing the headstone clean, and pretty it up with offerings of water, flowers, and incense. This isn’t regarded as a somber occasion; people often make a sort of picnic out of it, if the cemetery is green enough, or go out for a holiday meal afterwards.

But most of all, we dance. This is the bon odori, the dance of the obon festival. Nearly every community in Japan will organize a festival around this time. They’re held in any kind of open space, whether natural or man-made, such as a parking lot cleared out for the occasion. Organizers erect a scaffold with a platform for a drummer at top, stringing lanterns out from it in a colorful web. Local merchants set up booths vending fun foods like yakitori or yakisoba, sweet treats for the kids, and of course, plenty of beer. The festivities last for a few days, kicking off around six o’clock every night and winding down at nine or so. While they’re going on, residents take turns atop the scaffold, beating out a rhythm on a wadaiko drum to recordings of folk songs, and everyone dances in a circle around it. It’s a great chance to dress up in traditional fashions like yukata robes and geta sandals.

Bon odori’s roots are spiritual in nature, but more like summer block parties in practice. Perhaps that’s why kids love them so. I certainly did when I was a little girl. Back then, our neighborhood was a lot less developed than it is today, with much more open space, so the community association held the festival in a big empty dirt lot every summer. The music back then was mainly what we’d think of as classics today: stuff like  Tankobushi (“Coal Mining,” 1932), or Tokyo ondo (“Tokyo Song,” 1932). The most recent (then!) was Dai-Tokyo ondo (“Big Tokyo Song,” from 1979). The dances were smooth and slow, the better to keep one’s yukata fitting nicely. 

My all-time favorite was called 21 Seiki Ondo, or “The 21st Century Dance.” The song, written in 1969, looked three decades ahead to the turn of the Millennium, which was “dawning soon,” as the lyrics went. It was bright and poppy, with footwork just a little faster than classic bon-odori songs. 

Dancing wasn’t the only fun thing to do at a bon odori. For kids, it was like a carnival.  Local mom and pop storekeepers would sell all sorts of fun stuff: cotton candy, shave-ice, fruits in translucent candy-syrup. And there were toys: colorful water balloons you’d bounce on a rubber band like yo-yos, plastic masks of cartoon characters, and all sorts of carnival games, like kingyo-sukui, kiddie pools full of shimmering goldfish you’d try to scoop up before your  paper “net” dissolved in the water.  To me and my friends, bon odori was a sort of magical time: getting to dance, eat candy, and the thrill of being outdoors past our normal curfews and bedtimes.

Anzu ame, fruits in translucent candy-syrup, chilled on ice.

A few years later, when I was in middle school, a real-estate developer bought up the empty lot and turned it into a big apartment complex. Our bon odori began moving from place to place, none ever feeling quite the same to me. Even as a youngster this made me sad, and eventually my family and I stopped going altogether. Even though I moved back to the neighborhood with my husband in 2003, it’s been decades since I participated.

A few nights ago, we went to Nakano for their bon odori. Nakano is famed as a subcultural spot because it is home to an “otaku” shopping center called Nakano Broadway. But that wasn’t why I wanted to visit. Nakano is a much bigger, more urban neighborhood than mine, and I simply wanted to see what a modern, recent bon odori might look like. And so for the first time in thirty years, I put on my festival wear – my yukata robe and sandals – and headed out for some fun.

Let me tell you, the Nakano bon odori was way different from the festivals I remembered from my youth. The first thing I noticed was there weren't many vendor stalls, and none of them sold toys or had games. They sold beer and shaved ice by the cupload, but no playthings. This wasn’t for any lack of children. Perhaps it is because kids are more interested in video games and apps these days, or perhaps because toys seem less of a treat when you can get them anytime you want, as you can from ubiquitous capsule toy vending machines. And the food stalls were fun but didn’t feel as necessary — the festivities were in an urban park, surrounded by convenience stores, fast food shops, and cafes. Festival-goers could simply pop in to any one without lining up. It was undeniably convenient, but felt different than the local festivals I remembered.

And then there was the dancing. Rather than a large scaffold of the type you see in neighborhood festivals, Nakano’s featured a slightly raised platform, maybe a meter high, atop which were four professional (or at least well-practiced) bon odori dancers. Everyone else danced around this platform while watching the “pros” for cues as to hand and foot motions. The music wafted over from the speakers of a mega-sized sound system erected on a stage nearby.

They played classics from time to time, but most were remixes, fast and poppy – really fast and poppy. Many bon odori songs, even classics, are based on anime themes or pop songs, so the choice of tune wasn’t shocking. But the moves were! In contrast to the stately shuffle of traditional bon dance, these had many steps forward, backwards, sideways, with a lot of spinning, turning, and jumping. Many participants wore yukata, but the dances felt modern, even cutting edge. I started laughing as I tried to keep up: What is this? Exercise class? 

I hopped right in! That’s me in the blue yukata with white flowers.

In the summer heat, I instantly built up a sweat. I wanted to cool off, but I couldn’t make myself go into a convini. This was bon odori, for goodness sake! Out of nostalgia, I cast about for something “Showa-era” like. I circled the stalls and food-trucks until I found one serving cold ramune soda, the old-timey kind with a marble for a stopper. Even here things felt new: traditionally, ramune is served in glass bottles, but this was plastic. And the irony is I never drank ramune growing up! I had to ask my American husband for help popping the marble down the neck to open it. Plastic bottle or not, the fizzy old-fashioned drink felt refreshing and comforting.

In between dances, the stage would come to life. At one point, a band began playing electrified bon music – live. This was something you simply didn’t see at local festivals, which relied on recordings. Now the crowd turned from the dance platform to the stage, dancing on the spot, like a concert. Some wore Hello Kitty-esqe bows on their head, or flashing rings, both illuminated by multicolored LEDs. (Vendors worked the crowd selling each for a hundred yen.) All the flashing lights and synchronized moves reminded me less of obon than ota-gei, the hyperfans of idol singers waving arms in unison at a concert. But the biggest surprise was yet to come: a middle-aged lady in yukata, who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a tiny local festival, took center stage. Then she led the crowd in a traditional bon odori routine – to the accompaniment of Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer!

Later I learned that playing Bon Jovi has become a “thing” for Nakano’s Bon Odori festival. His name has “Bon” in it, after all, and in a super pop-conscious place like Nakano it was probably only a matter of time before someone made the connection. They’ve been doing it for several years, and it’s grown so popular that the man himself sent over a video message giving his blessing for using the song during the event. Talk about giving love a good name!

All of this reminds me of how prayer and play are so intertwined in Japanese spirituality. From my experience in the West, prayer is a serious and even solemn thing. So perhaps the concept of playful spirituality might even seem sacrilegious. But not here. In Japan, spiritual traditions coexist with modern secular culture in all sorts of ways, such as the vibrant shopping streets leading to many Buddhist temples. Bon odori is another great example. And the inclusion of Bon Jovi songs shows that it goes beyond borders. 

After the Nakano party, as we were nearly home, my husband and I heard the drumming of traditional Obon songs. It could only mean one thing: the local festival was happening right now! We hurried past our house and to the source of the commotion. The festival was much smaller in scale than Nakano’s, with the traditional arrangement. It was being held in a newly-renovated bus stop area, a wide open space, much better than the cramped locations I remembered from my youth. And the kids were really into it! The songs here were if anything even more pop-forward and faster than Nakano’s. At times the crowd even ran around the central scaffold! It was so different than my childhood, but equally raucous and joyous. As I danced, again, I felt like I was witnessing the passing of a torch between generations.

And that’s what Bon is all about. Bon is about connection. Between the departed and the living, between old traditions and new trends, between religious and non-religious, between East and West, and among all of us who participate. I had a thirty-year blank spot in my bon odori history, but these festivities made me feel like I hadn’t missed a beat. It felt like home.

　“Bon Odori.” Print by Shotei Takahashi