Join Us For A Dance of Death?

Last Saturday Mitch gave me a buzz asking if I wanted to check out a mystery bon dance that their group was performing at. He described where in Millilani it was supposed to be. It didn’t sound familiar at all, I tried looking it up. There wasn’t anything in any of the bon dance listings for this year. Tried looking on map using Mitch’s directions, but I was looking at wrong gulch, there’s nothing there. Dave texted back, is it this Daikon Festival thing that he linked to? Picked up Mitch at his place and he confirmed that was it, weird! Looked it up on maps, Honbushin International Center, who?

Found it, had to turn around for missed street, but found it. The street ran up along hillside, lined with flags and fence and came up to a open iron gate. Gave it a somewhat defensive feel. It was already dark, but the grounds seemed pretty nice. Mitch had to hustle to get ready as his group was up to perform, so I strolled about. The food offerings were limited but decent enough. I got the french fries oknomiyaki style. Sorry for the odd colors, the lighting they have seems to play havoc with white balancing. Potato fries drizzled with tonkatsu sauce, mayo and ao nori. Pretty tasty actually.

The crowd seemed on the fairly young side, lots of families with young kids. There was no yagura, instead a central column was set up with Daikon Festival and Gratitude Festival signage where strings of laterns were tied to. I took a look at some of the propoganda they had up in one area, hmm, there doesn’t seem to be any reference to a god, just lots of stuff about happiness, gratitude to nature, love. I had also noticed in the info about the event the absence of any wording of a bon dance, just dancing and “cultural performances”. So this definitely wasn’t Buddhist, and didn’t seem all that Shinto either.  Aside from the invited groups that performed, the prerecorded songs that played for the dancing were unfamiliar to me, none of the ones you usually hear at the bon dances around town.

Was this a Japanese New Hope, was this a cult? A brief search later would show that it might be a bit of all of that.

Honbushin apparently is a splinter Shinto group that formed only recently, about 50 years ago. They have someone that is their divine mediator.  Hmm, they seem benin enough though.

The night concluded with an excellent taiko performence. Oh, and no daikon. I did pick up a bunch of green onion and bananas farmed on their land.