How Not To Celebrate Obon In Japan

Misadventures in the mountains during Japan’s festival of the dead

Obon had arrived just in time. The festival of the dead. The Japanese week-long holiday to welcome back the spirits of ancestors by guiding them with the light from fires big and small. A cool, if not creepy holiday that is celebrated with great zest throughout the nation. For me, I was just happy to get a week off of work in the dead of 40 degree summer.

I had originally planned to travel to Kyoto and Osaka but it’s even hotter there at this time, and being Obon, everything doubles in price and the crowds can be overwhelming from what I hear. In the end I decided on a nice relaxing stay-cation as there is plenty to do and explore around here anyway.

At the end of the work week my manager, and also the only person I know that speaks English, invited me to a BBQ in the mountains of her town, Chino. We had never hung out outside of work but I welcomed the opportunity to meet some new people and soak up some more Japanese culture. It was Obon week!

Until this point I just kind of figured my manager had hated me. I’m constantly micromanaged, she watches my every move and generally doesn’t have many nice things to say to me at work. Having said that she had always been friendly to me — but there was no mistaking the fact that she was trying to break me down and mould me into a Japanese worker bee.

She picked me up at the Chino train station with her mother in tow. I was taken aback when I saw her dressed in what looked like some kind of very casual, green, flowery, hippy-like kimono. I had only previously seen her in the formal work wear that we are forced to endure.

She drove us up a winding mountain path as the non-English-speaking mother and I tried awkwardly to communicate. I think she told me she saw a very nice garden in Canada once. I said that was great.

We arrived at our destination — a beautiful spot nestled in the hills with an enormous canopy over top of numerous BBQ pits to protect against the ever present threat of rain. There was a modest amount of people at this time as it was early, probably 1:00 p.m. I dumped my beer and wine into a cooler and was guided over to one of the picnic tables where I was introduced to an array of friendly people that I couldn’t communicate with. Except for the monk. The monk could speak a small amount of English. I knew he was a monk because the first thing he did when I was introduced to him was take off his hat and point to his bald head and say, “monk!” I didn’t know what to say as this was my first monk. I believe I said something to the effect of “monk!”

Time passed and I was enjoying the spoils of the local harvest vegetables: spicy Japanese pickles, pink coloured rice, corn on the cob, and of course delicious yakiniku — Japanese BBQ. Beer turned into wine and then wine into whiskey. Before long the sun was beginning to set and I was whisked down a path to a quaint amphitheatre type thing where I was told some musicians would be performing.

This was where I first met nose-flute man. A friendly looking pot-bellied man in a Pinocchio mask playing the guitar and whistling angelic notes through his nose. It seems that something surreal happens every five minutes or so in Japan. But his music was great and after a few numbers he came down off the stage and struck up a conversation with my manager and I. He surprised me with his very decent English and said he had learned from his years of traveling to America through his job. Before long he was teaching me the nose flute which I felt like I picked up with prodigious speed. He offered me my very own nose flute and told me to keep practicing.

As the wine and whiskey flowed, lips loosened and before long I was realizing why I had been brought here in the first place. By this time I had realized my manager was not the person that I thought she was. Her friends were musicians and DJs, hippies. She herself was being revealed as a hippy which was twisting my mind.

To my dismay she told me her true feelings about work and complained vigorously about Japanese work culture. Every five minutes or so reminding me that what I was witnessing was the real her. The real her was pretty cool, as were her friends, and for the first time I felt a little bit like I could relate to someone in Japan. Her DJ and percussionist friends played mellow jazzy hip hop on the stage and in between jam sessions I’d chat with them while groups of young men skateboarded in front of the stage.

That’s when I made my first mistake of the night. I mentioned that I myself had once dabbled in the art of the skateboard. Which was a very small half-truth at best. I could ollie at one point, I do know that much. This lit a flame in a man called Taka who announced to the crowd that “Lion” (Ryan) was going to be attempting to ollie over a skateboard.

“Sugoi,” my manager said. I knew I was in too deep and there was no turning back. I also knew that skateboarding after six or seven drinks was probably hard. I also knew that I hadn’t been on a skateboard in 15 years.

Everyone clapped and egged me on. I got on the board and tested my balance. This isn’t so bad I thought. My balance seemed okay and I could visualize myself pushing the board, gaining speed and jumping over that skateboard just like I did in the old days. “Just like the old days,” I whispered to myself under my breath. The young Japanese men would have a great story about a foreigner that had showed up and dazzled. The old dog’s still got a few tricks up his sleeve I thought to myself.

The fear was now gone as I had visualized myself doing it and I knew that I could. I slowly rode the board about fourty feet back as the crowd awaited me. Go time. I began pushing the board, faster, and faster yet. The skateboard that I was to jump was stood up on its side and it was approaching rapidly. I pushed three more times and braced myself for the triumphant ollie as the target was only about ten feet away.

Suddenly things went black. I didn’t pass out but I think I was already repressing the memory of something that happened 0.5 seconds before. What I think happened was my board hit a small rock which locked the wheels five feet before my jump and catapulted me forward rolling my cartoon body unceremoniously just far enough to gently knock the skateboard over.

More whiskey eased my humiliation, and the sun going down helped conceal my shame. Before I knew it, Taka was comforting me with the prospect of contraband.

“Lion, do you like weed?”

Four of us gathered in what I remember to be some sort of small hut behind the stage. Taka, another man and a short moderately attractive woman wearing an over-sized hat and camouflage shorts. We passed the joint around. I don’t have many rules but one of my rules is to not do drugs in Asia.

“What would happen if the police caught us smoking this,” I asked.

“Two months in jail,” said Taka. “Second time, five years in jail.”

Fantastic.

Taka then pulled out a pipe and packed it, which I felt to be a little excessive.

“More weed?!,” I said.

“Super weed, be careful,” he said.

Super weed. I didn’t like the sounds of this but being from Canada and having indulged on BC’s finest, I didn’t pay much attention to the warning. Mistake number two.

Five minutes previously I had been the life of the party, chatting boisterously, laughing with zeal, skateboarding. Now I couldn’t feel my face and my three new friends all sounded and looked like they were under water. I heard only muffled voices and saw blurry outlines of their short bodies. And worse yet, my manager was back at the party expecting me.

Paranoia hit me like a tsunami and I wanted nothing more than to rewind my life a couple minutes back to before I smoked the super weed. What the f-ck was I going to do? All the saliva in my mouth had evaporated in a matter of seconds and I literally couldn’t talk. “Mmsta mmsta mmsa,” were the exact words I said the first time I tried. I never tried again. Just nodded to my blurry friends, not hearing a word they were saying while trying to buy time and figure out a plan. I had never wanted to be home alone more than I wanted to at this very second. The thought of going back to the party was unbearable. Impossible. I couldn’t even talk.

Panic set in and I did what I knew was my best option. My only option. I gave a half-wave to my new friends, said something unintelligible through pursed lips, put my head down and walked into the forest for ten minutes in the opposite direction of the party.

I chastised myself while sitting on a log for falling for the old weed trick again. Mary Jane had turned on me again.

I sat on the log for what must have been at least an hour waiting to turn back into a normal human being. Finally I felt I was half-presentable and gave myself a locker-room half-time speech to get myself back to the party.

I trekked back and inserted myself into the assembly of people undetected. As far as I could tell they were none-the-wiser that I had just spent the last hour on a different planet.

After shooting off a few very dangerous hand-held fireworks, the night wound down and it was time to go home.

“Ryan, he lives near you and will drive you home,” said my manager, Miyuki.

She pointed to one of the gentleman (not Taka) that I had recently smoked super weed with.

Great.

I can’t remember my driver’s name, if I ever knew it at all, but he had long stringy hair and a baseball cap on. He spoke zero English and if was anything like me, was still very stoned.

We got into his micro car and hit the road. There was a lot of silence at first and I tried to break the ice by saying things like “Ramen, amiright?” and giving him the thumbs up sign. He looked blankly at me and then took out his phone and talked on it for the remainder of the trip.

The path home was dangerously twisty and narrow with six-foot brush on both sides of the road. It must have been a secret route. It would have been unsettling on a good day but in the middle of the night with a speeding super-weed driver talking on the phone it was downright harrowing.

Every time he’d take a tight corner he’d stop talking on the phone, grip the wheel tightly and breathe in through his mouth as if noting he’d just dodged a real bullet by not killing us. He did this every three minutes for the rest of the drive home. I didn’t like it.

Thirty minutes later I was safely back to my lake-side apartment which I joyously entered through my unlocked door.

That was Obon.