Every year, our local Jodo Buddhist Temple has celebrates O-Bon, with the accompanying Bon festival. O-Bon is a time when the spirits of our dead ancestors actually return to this world to visit their posterity and make sure that everything is okay. We prepare for those visits in very special ways, and one of them is the Bon festival. It is kind of like a going away party for the spirits as they return to the world in which they now live, and a big part of that is the Bon dance. The dancers form a large circle around the stand where the musicians perform, or in our case, a guy with a CD player, and wearing traditional Japanese clothing dance a synchronized dance in a big circle. Think of it as Japanese line dancing, with traditional music and some modern compositions are performed. The dancing can last late into the evening, and when it is over, we bid farewell to our ancestors for another year.
At our Bon festival, we usually have one or two shaved ice stands. The profits we make from the shaved ice go to help fund our youth group activities for the coming year and usually brings in a lot of money for us. We usually have enough ice for the whole night, but this past year, we had about one hundred students from Japan on a home stay program show up, and I guess they were homesick, because they ordered enough shaved ice to put us out of business after only a couple of hours. We had to call an ice delivery service to come and deliver several more blocks of ice in order to make it though the evening. They came to the rescue, and we ended up making more money with that project than we ever have before. To make matters even better, we were able to exchange contact information with the students, and they were able to send us some more contemporary Bon music that does not sound like it came from the nineteenth century. They even sent us a video with some more contemporary dances as well, so next year, we are going to be doing a whole new repertoire.
I am looking forward to next summer. Hopefully, we will have more home stay students show up, and when they do, we will have the ice delivery service on call to make sure that there is more than enough shaved ice for everyone.
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