The Bon Festival, which is celebrated in midsummer, is essentially a Buddhist holiday. However, it includes some elements of Shinto, and is imbued with the Confucian spirit of reverence for one's ancestors. During the holiday, people return to their place of birth, visit family graves, and pray for the peace of the souls of their ancestors. At the time of the Bon Festival, as during the celebration of New Year's Day and the equinoxes, it is said that the spirits of the dead return to their ancestral homes to see how their relatives are faring. In preparation for this, an effigy of a horse is made from eggplants, cucumbers, and reeds and is put on the family altar. The dead arrive on the back of the horse, and when the holiday is over, they return to their world in small wood and paper boats bearing a lighted candie, which are set to sail on bodies of water.
Students of Japanese culture cannot fail to discover that for the Japanese the group often takes precedence over the individual. The group is usually the family, those tied by blood relationships, but the concept of the group widened in the course of time to include the clan, and later, the entire nation as represented by the emperor or the shogun. As the group is most important in life, it is the group that grants the Japanese her existence in the afterlife as well.
The notion of an individual salvation has relatively little place in the Japanese view of death. (Religions in Japan do not present the picture, so familiar in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the deity as a force superior to nature, observing the individual and judging him after death for his most private thoughts.) In Western societies, the idea that dying is a purely personal matter may be the cause of the near taboo on the very subject of death, much like the taboo on the subject of sex.
The Bon Festival, which is celebrated in midsummer, is essentially a Buddhist holiday. However, it includes some elements of Shinto, and is imbued with the Confucian spirit of reverence for one's ancestors. During the holiday, people return to their place of birth, visit family graves, and pray for the peace of the souls of their ancestors. At the time of the Bon Festival, as during the celebration of New Year's Day and the equinoxes, it is said that the spirits of the dead return to their ancestral homes to see how their relatives are faring. In preparation for this, an effigy of a horse is made from eggplants, cucumbers, and reeds and is put on the family altar. The dead arrive on the back of the horse, and when the holiday is over, they return to their world in small wood and paper boats bearing a lighted candie, which are set to sail on bodies of water.
Students of Japanese culture cannot fail to discover that for the Japanese the group often takes precedence over the individual. The group is usually the family, those tied by blood relationships, but the concept of the group widened in the course of time to include the clan, and later, the entire nation as represented by the emperor or the shogun. As the group is most important in life, it is the group that grants the Japanese her existence in the afterlife as well.
The notion of an individual salvation has relatively little place in the Japanese view of death. (Religions in Japan do not present the picture, so familiar in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the deity as a force superior to nature, observing the individual and judging him after death for his most private thoughts.) In Western societies, the idea that dying is a purely personal matter may be the cause of the near taboo on the very subject of death, much like the taboo on the subject of sex.