Obon: calendars and remembrance

Obon brings together Buddhist services, household remembrance of the dead and local communal events. Urabon-e names the service associated with the Yulanpen Sutra; the wider season also incorporates customs of welcoming and sending off ancestral spirits. Denomination, locality and household shape what takes place.

Common schedules run from around 13 July or August to the 15th or 16th. Following the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1873, regions observed July Obon, month-late August Obon or the older lunisolar dates. Month-late August dates are fixed in the Gregorian calendar; old-calendar Obon moves against it from year to year.

Okinawa’s basic schedule is the 13th–15th days of the seventh old-calendar month. Unkē welcomes the ancestors on the 13th, Nakanuhi is the middle day, and Ūkui sends them off on the 15th. Relatives visit with mid-year gifts and gather at the house with the family altar. A travel date needs the particular year’s calendar conversion.

Some households welcome spirits with a small fire or lanterns, provide a temporary offering shelf with food and flowers, then send them off. Fire customs vary: they may take place at gates, graves, riverbanks or other sites. Some localities light only a sending fire, or neither fire. This is a family of local practices rather than one nationwide sequence.

Sōtō Zen guidance assigns families the cleaning of the altar and grave and the preparation of offerings. Teishōin in Yokohama describes adapting the setting to a smaller home: a table can stand beside or before the altar, or the existing altar can be used. The temple arranges visits to first-Obon households in advance. A priest’s home visit to chant sutras is called tanagyō. Preparing the setting and food, and chanting, are different contributions to the observance; this denominational example does not prescribe what every household must do.

Some offering shelves include a cucumber horse and an aubergine ox. Jōdo-shū explains the horse as a quick welcome and the ox as a slower departure. The first Obon after a death and the forty-nine-day mourning period is called niibon or hatsubon. Some communities use white lanterns for it and prepare a more elaborate observance.

The Hongwanji-ha branch of Jōdo Shinshū does not use shelves and meals intended to receive returning spirits. It presents Obon as an occasion to remember the dead, hear Amida Buddha’s teaching and recite the nenbutsu, rather than a brief annual return by the deceased. The altar and observance follow that denominational understanding.

Bon dancing was associated with entertaining and sending off spirits; it also became a setting for community dance and gathering. Kyoto’s Gozan Okuribi uses hillside fires on the night of 16 August: Dai, Myōhō, a boat, another Dai and a torii shape. These large communal fires differ in scale from a household gate fire.

At Niino in Anan, Nagano, dancing continues through the nights of 14–16 August, ending on the morning of the 17th. Five or six lead singers stand on a platform in the street. Dancers form a long ring, moving as they sing the answering lines, without instrumental accompaniment. The final morning brings the Noto dance and a spirit-sending rite; the sending procession uses gongs and drums. Sung responses coordinate the shared dance, while the departure rite closes this local Obon observance.

The Yulanpen Sutra tells how Mokuren saw his deceased mother suffering as a hungry ghost. Following the Buddha’s instruction, he made offerings to the monastic community on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, and the merit rescued her. The word urabon has several proposed derivations; the familiar “hanging upside down” explanation is not an uncontested etymology.

The Nihon Shoki entry for 606 records temple feasts on the eighth day of the fourth month and fifteenth of the seventh; its 657 entry explicitly names urabon-e. The service spread among Heian courtiers. In the later medieval period, services for feeding hungry ghosts (segaki) acquired a stronger memorial role and became associated with Obon, although segaki and urabon-e drew on different scriptures.

The Edo period saw the development of tanagyō, priests chanting at household offering shelves during Obon. Kyoto’s sending fires became an established summer observance by the early modern period and appear in Miyako Meisho Zue. Household offerings, temple services and local fire rites have developed through different histories.

The calendar differences continue, while August Obon is also a period when many people take leave for family visits or travel. An Okinawan market photograph dated to about 1933 is tentatively identified as a pre-Obon temporary market. A 1971 record concerns taxi companies applying for additional vehicles for old-calendar Obon. Preparations and transport form part of the season’s documented history.