Hosting the Dead

Most descriptions of Obon call it a festival of the dead. I’d say it’s a hospitality protocol. A household receives guests who cannot be seen, cannot eat in the ordinary sense, and must not be allowed to overstay. Nearly every element of the four days solves a specific logistical problem inside that protocol: how the guests find the address, where they sit, what they consume, who entertains them, how they are made to leave, and what to do about the guests nobody invited.

Read that way, the ritual grammar becomes legible in a way that the usual “ancestors return, families gather” summary never quite manages.