Obon, Obon it’s festival day!
We will gather friends all along the way
and bring fruits and vegetables for the shrine.
Like Mogallana many, many years ago.
Obon, Obon it’s festival day!
All our humble thanks we will here convey,
to our dearly loved ones who lived in the past.
With nembutsu, nembutsu ‘pon our lips.
Obon, Obon it’s festival day!
O’ the streets are lined with our lanterns gay,
and the wind bells twinkling a top the trees.
Sway to and fro, to and fro in the breeze.
Obon, Obon it’s festival day!
Words and music by Yumiko Hojo
Some of you may remember this song from our old temple service books. However, we have not held an in-person Obon dance for the past two years. For myself, it feels as though without our annual Obon festival, the dance and the service, a large part of the temple’s life and culture have been missing. We have celebrated the Hatsubon service, which is the first Obon after someone dies and I believe this is a somewhat sad occasion. However, this sadness is balanced with the joy of the Obon dance, which we have missed for two years.
For those of us who grew up at the temple, although we are taught that the most important holiday at the temple is Hoonko or Gotan E, I bet that eighty or ninety percent of you reading this aren’t sure what either of these holidays are about and I’m not going to tell you. If you want to know, you will have to look it up. But, if I were to mention Obon and Hanamatsuri, you would probably be able to give me some sort of explanation. However, would you know what Kangi E was? Hint, hint, look at the title of this article.
This song I began this article with is the only Obon song I know in English. I knew Mrs. Yumiko Hojo, when I was a minister at the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. She is still alive and over 100 years old. Her husband was Rev. Eijitsu Hojo, the first Rinban of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. He was one of the ministers that I deeply respected. He helped and guided me a great deal when I was a beginning minister. Mrs. Hojo would invite me to their home for dinners. When I would thank her, she would always tell me it was Rev. Hojo’s excuse to buy some good alcohol to drink. These are wonderful memories. Although when I arrived in San Jose, they were retired, they were what we now call a “power couple”. Mrs. Hojo was a classically trained pianist, having graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. After they married in 1941, she helped Rev. Hojo with his ministry at the Stockton Buddhist Temple and the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. She also worked to develop music for the Buddhist Churches of America. As a side note, Rev. Hojo was also a minister for a short time in Salt Lake, in the late 1930s. It’s interesting how so many of our lives are connected to one another. Mrs. Hojo was also a good friend of our temple member Mr. Kay Terashima and his brother Ben. They both worked on Mrs. Hojo’s family farm in Suisun, California. I believe these connections to one another are the essence of our Obon Festival and the name that our sect of Buddhism Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji Ha calls Kangi E (gathering of joy).
Many of you know the origin of Obon comes from the Ullambana Sutra and the story of Shakyamuni Buddha’s disciple Moggallana, also known as Maudgalyayana or Mokuren Sonja in Japanese. This is a sutra that emphasizes filial piety. It is the story of Moggallana using his psychic powers to find his mother after her death, finding her in the world of the “Hungry ghosts”. Not knowing what to do, he asks the Buddha for guidance. The Buddha instructs him to feed the other disciples as a form of Dana (selfless giving). Having done as he was told, Moggallana once again looked for his mother and found that she had been freed from being a hungry ghost and he began to dance in Joy. Thus begins the tradition of dancing at Obon.
However, I believe that the idea of dancing and joy and Bon dancing is much more than just a Buddhist or Japanese story. Within each of our lives, we find joy and sadness. This life we live is a balance of both. During Obon we hold the memorial service for the members of our temple who have passed away over the previous year. It is a time when we remember those who have done many things so that we may live. To begin to understand our lives we must look at this legacy and how so many people, places and things have had to be just right, so we could be live. It is an intricate balance that is almost impossible to realize. For us as Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, the fulcrum of this balance of life, death, good, evil, joy and sadness is what we call the Nembutsu (Namo Amida Butsu). I believe that this need for balance is necessary for all of us as human beings.
A few years ago, 2017 to be exact, Disney released an animated movie called “Coco”. I love Disney but I don’t especially like animated movies, I have a tendency to fall asleep in them. However, a good friend of mine Rev. Dr. David Matsumoto told me I should watch “Coco”. I have expressed many times, Rev. Matsumoto is one of the smartest people I have ever met. I believe he is also the finest Jodo Shinshu scholar in the Western world. I’m lucky because he is one of my best friends and he knows me well. In one of our conversations he said, “Jerry, you should check out the new movie “Coco”. It will make you cry.” Although I secretly cry at movies, it’s something I was surprised David would know. And I watched this movie, which is about a young Mexican boy and his experience of the Mexican holiday Dios De La Muertos (Day of the Dead), I cried. In this movie Miguel the young boy, travels across a bridge into the land of the dead, to find his great, great grandfather. Within this movie, there were so many ideas and images that reminded me of our own Obon traditions. It is about love, family, the land of the living and the land of the dead, our connections to one another that although we may not be consciously aware of; make us who and what we are.
I may be in the minority, but I have always believed that if concepts and ideas in our Western culture, which is usually very Judeo-Christian, our culture should also reflect concepts and ideas from our Jodo Shinshu culture. Otherwise, Jodo Shinshu culture would just be another way of saying Japanese. And although I am ethnically Japanese, I am Japanese American, with emphasis on American. Well, to make a long story short, I told a friend of mine Reiko Iwanaga whose professional dance name is Hanayagi Reimichi, how much I liked the movie and it would be great if someone would choreograph an Obon dance to the song “Remember Me” from this movie. To my surprise, she called me a few months ago and told me she had created a dance for this song. So this year at Salt Lake and Ogden’s Obon Festival, we will be introducing this new dance. I hope you will be able to join us, hopefully before we are holding your Hatsubon!
Rev. J.K. Hirano
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder