You will need flash to view this element
Photo Credit:Bon Odori Dance in Osaka - Japan
Bon Odori Dance Festival in Japan
Learning Japanese langauge on Saturday's in London just got even more fun with our weekly guest speakers, (there will be one in each class) since they talk about Japanese cultural themes. It is likely that one of your guest speakers will talk about Japanese religious events. One of the most famous of these is the "Bon-Odori" festival which is held every summer throughout Japan. In fact, this festival has strong Japanese religious conotations, a topic which we cover in week five.
"Bon" (盆) or "Obon" (お盆) is a Japanese religious event to honour the deceased spirits of a familys' ancestors, rather like Halloween in Europe and the USA, or 'el Día de los Muertos' in Mexico. The festival occurs during the "Bon" week, August of every year and will last for a week. During this time, all relatives of a family will meet and share a memorial service for their deceased family members.
Families will meet and will traditionally dance to traditional Japanese music, (again this is covered in another of our Japanese lessons). The music should be happy music to welcome the ancestor's souls, and people have a duty to make a happy and welcoming mood. Moreover, the Bon Dance should be held in the night because Japanese people believe that ancestors' souls come back in the night.
-
This Japanese religious custom has evolved into a family reunion holiday during which people return to ancestral family locations and visit and clean their ancestors' burial plots, and when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to revisit the household altars.
The typical "Bon" dance involves people forming a circle around a high wooden scaffold made especially for the festival called a "yagura". The yagura can also be used as the bandstand for the musicians and singers of the Obon music. Not all dances are the same however: some dances are performed clockwise whilst others are counter-clockwise around the yagura or indeed the participants can also simply proceed in a straight line through the streets of the town.
Bon dances can also vary with the different use and types of fans, towels and hats that are used during this festival. The music that is played during the Bon dance is only limited to Obon music, but J-Pop is even used! In fact the "Pokémon Ondo" was used as one of the ending theme songs for the anime series in Japan.
The Bon dance tradition is thought to have begun in the later years of the Muromachi period
as a public entertainment. Over the years the original religious meaning has faded, and the dance has become associated with the summer season.