Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018

The Old Ways: The Lantern Ghost by Linda Raedisch
Lammas

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE Halloween without jack-o’-lanterns. Nor would the Japanese festival of the dead, Obon, be Obon without an array of paper lanterns. Obon was originally celebrated during the seventh lunar month. Some towns and cities still celebrate it in July, but since Japan’s switch to the Gregorain calendar in 1873, it has been more common to hold it in August. It remains to be seen if the old “Bon in July” will survive, as our Old Christmas and Old Hallowmass have not. Like the Catholic All Souls’ Day, Obon originated in the Buddhist Ullambana but, like our Halloween, it has absorbed many of its accoutrements from native Paganism.

Obon is a three-day festival and candles burn throughout. Lanterns are hung inside the home, at front doors and gates and in the cemetery. Their glow lights the way for the departed souls to follow out of the realm of the dead and back again. Prettily arranged offerings of flowers, sandalwood incense, and vegetables are placed on the family’s Buddhist altar to welcome them. The Japanese wouldn’t dream of shouting their ancestors out of the house at the end of the festival as the ancient Greeks did at Chytroi. Instead, they are lovingly ushered away along a path of lights. The departing spirit might even be provisioned with a snack of rice balls packed in a little straw boat with a tiny paper lantern at the prow.

Lanterns in Japan come in all shapes and sizes, culminating in the huge painted lanterns-turned-parade floats of the Nebuta Festival that precedes Obon in the Aomori Prefecture. But the lantern that concerns us here is the humble round or egg-shaped chochin. Some are painted with Chinese characters, flowers, and ornamental grasses, but the most basic chochin is the plain white of the paper from which it is made.

To qualify as a chochin, you must be portable, and you must be one 100 percent collapsible, otherwise it would be impossible to light the little white candle mounted in your base.

This is how you are made: Your form exists before you do, for you are shaped around a mold composed of wooden slats, each resembling the silhouette of a banana. Each slat fits into a notch in a Tinker Toy-like cylinder at top and bottom. This is your temporary skeleton. Now, the master lantern-maker winds a thin, continuous strip of bamboo around and around your skeleton. He spins it quickly, for he is a master, but not too quickly for he must make sure that the bamboo strip sits in each of the grooves carved in the outer edges of the slats. This ensures that the empty spaces in between will be even, and you will have a smooth, regular surface.

When your new bamboo skeleton is complete, it’s time to give you a skin of white paper and glue smoothed on with a horsehair brush. When you’re all dry, your old wooden skeleton is collapsed with a twist and pulled out. Now you can be fitted with a lacquered ring at top and bottom, a handle and a tassel.

But, of course, you won’t remember any of this. You’re just a paper lantern. You won’t become a sentient being for another one hundred years. If you can make it to your one hundredth birthday without mildewing, bursting into flames, or disintegrating in the rain, you will become a chochin-obake. We’ve already defined “chochin,” but what is an obake?

I once taught an evening course called “Magical Origami” in which we folded figures from Japanese folklore: a talking spirit fox, a raccoon-dog hat, and a model I adapted from a kimono into a ghostly, hooded figure. I called it an “obake.” I have since learned that this was incorrect. Although obake is usually translated into English as “ghost,” it is the yurei who appears in white burial kimono to haunt the living. An obake, on the other hand, is not the spirit of a dead person—at least, not usually—but a monster, a shapeshifter, a supernatural being that might appear as something other than what it really is, like a fox, a teapot or, you guessed it, a paper lantern.

The Chochin-obake belongs to a special class of obake: it is a tsukumogami, a household object that, having attained the ripe old age of 100, has acquired a spirit of its own. Some tsukumogami are dangerous, but the Chochin-obake is more of a buffoon. He likes to stick his tongue out through the tear in the paper that has become his mouth and roll his single eye at startled visitors.

That said, the woodblock printer Hokusai (1760—1849) has left us a horrifying depiction of a Chochin-obake. When I first saw it, I mistook it for a creature that was half lantern, half severed head. It was actually a portrait of the famous ghost Oiwa, who liked to haunt her faithless husband in the shape of a paper lantern.

Here’s what happened: The beautiful Oiwa was married to the good-for-nothing rogue samurai Iyemon. With the collusion of his wealthy mistress, Iyemon killed Oiwa by putting poison in her cold cream. Had she died immediately, Oiwa might have gone quietly to the underworld, but before she expired, she glimpsed the hideously scarred half of her face in a mirror. She haunted Iyemon for the rest of his miserable life until his brother-in-law finally killed him. A movie about Oiwa is still shown on Japanese television during the festival of Obon, just as the old black and white A Christmas Carol is still shown in English-speaking countries in December. Her hauntings continue to this day.

But if you, humble lantern, are still hoping to become a Chochin-obake, I’m afraid the odds are against you. Your smooth finish will not protect you from the elements forever. And there’s always the risk that the grandchild of whoever bought you in the first place will pull you out of a closet one day, pop you up and say, “Hey, this lantern’s looking pretty beat up. Must be really old. Better throw it away before it turns into a Chochin-obake.” But if you do get tossed on the rubbish heap, you will not be entirely without recourse. Some household objects who find themselves broken or discarded at the age of 99 are so peeved they manage to turn themselves into tsukumogami by sheer force of will.

Because it is made to last, a good chochin does not come cheap. The fragility of its materials requires that it be made by hand, so it’s worth every yen. If an authentic chochin is beyond your means, dear reader, there is another way that you, your friends and family can celebrate the dead this August. You can host a Hundred Ghost Storytelling Party, a popular summer pastime in Japan in the days before air-conditioning when the heat and humidity made sleep impossible. Here’s what to do: light as many tea lights as you have ghost stories to tell. It doesn’t have to be “one hundred,” which in Edo period Japan could be interpreted as “a lot.” After each story is told, put out one of the candles. As the night wears on, the room will get darker and darker, the stories more terrifying.

In Japan, the spookiest part of the night is the Hour of the Ox, which is actually two hours, 1:00 am to 3:00 am. Somewhere in there you’re going to want to break for a snack of tofu over shaved ice or maybe some cold orange slices. Look out the window. Is that the moon shining out from the dogwood tree? No; it’s a paper lantern. I wonder who could have put it there ...

Resources

Ross, Catrien. Supernatural and Mysterious Japan; Spirits, Hauntings, and Paranormal Phenomena. Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1996. (Warning: There is a photo of a pre-posthumously mummified monk on page 95. I have glued a piece of paper over it. I recommend you do the same.)