Obon

Obon is an annual Buddhist observance for the dead. Ancestors’ spirits are held to return for a few days to visit their families. Lanterns are hung to guide them, offerings are made at household altars, families travel back to their home towns to visit graves, and at the end floating lanterns are put onto rivers, lakes and the sea to guide the spirits back.

Obon is kept on two different sets of days because of a calendar change. When Japan adopted the solar calendar — announced in November 1872 — some places kept Obon in the seventh month as the new calendar numbered it, while others moved it to the month corresponding to the old reckoning, which is August. Neither is a variant of the other; they are two answers to the same question.

This entry lists both. The August form, 13 to 15 August, is the one most of the country keeps. For July it lists Arita, in Saga, where the town’s own record states that Obon runs from the 13th to the 15th of July — unusual in a region that otherwise keeps August. Arita is an example and not the whole of the July reckoning: other places keep July, and this archive has not sourced them, so it does not list them.

Two ranges is still a simplification. Arita’s account notes that some regions observe on days outside either range, and one is documented here: in Tanashi, now part of Nishi-Tokyo, Obon runs from 30 July to 1 August — a date chosen because it was when families raising silkworms could take the time off. That is not listed as a date, because one town’s window is not a reckoning, but it is worth knowing that the two-way split describes the common cases rather than a rule.

This is a family observance kept at home and at graves. The archive has not found an institutional source for what is expected of anyone present, so it does not describe that. If you are in Japan during Obon you will notice it mainly as a travel season, when many people go back to where their families are buried. It is not an occasion to attend.

Obon is Japan’s largest annual movement of people, and one of the least public practices in this archive. Families go home to sit with their dead. The public parts — bon odori, lanterns hung or set afloat on the water — are the visible edges of something mostly conducted indoors and in cemeteries.

Obon also carries its history in its dates. An administrative decision in 1872 split the observance in two; a century and a half later, the country still keeps it in two different months. Individual towns may hold to windows of their own for reasons as ordinary as the silkworm season. Very little else in this archive shows a calendar reform still visibly unresolved.