

Tōrō nagashi ( 灯籠流し or 灯篭流し) is a Japanese ritual usually performed as part of the Festival of the Dead – O-bon (お盆) or Bon – in summer but also in connection to various other important events. In the ceremony people set lit paper lanterns afloat on a river or on the ocean, simbolizing the souls of the deceased returning to the afterlife. According to traditional Japanese believe, all life comes from the water. The ritual is however not unique to Japan, it is also performed in various forms in China, Korea and Hawaii.
In Richard L. Parry’s book “Ghosts of the Tsunami” one of the interviewees makes a connection between the ritual and the destruction of the town Naburi during the tsunami in 2011:
“An old fisherman named Yuichiro Kamiyama had moored his boat and gone about the houses, chivvying the villagers up the steep hill. From there, they watched the water withdrawing from the harbour, and returning unstoppably to overwhelm first the sea wall, then the road and then the alleys dividing the wooden houses, until it lifted them up and spun them around on its frothing surface. The water rose and rose through the pines on the hillside towards the spot where the dumbfounded villagers were watching. A few feet below where they crouched, it slowed and withdrew.
The sight reminded Kamiyama of the summer Festival of the Dead, when illuminated paper lanterns are set adrift on the tide to guide the spirits back across to the far world. ‘The houses receded all together, along with the sea,’ he said. “They were all in a row, like the festival lanterns, floating out over the sea wall. And the electricity poles too, with the wires between them. Those wires are strong — they didn’t break. They were all taken back intact into the sea. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but it was beautiful.’”
from: Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami. (2017), pp 109
see also this post.
In his beautifully written account of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, northern Japan, and it’s aftermath, Richard L. Parry also describes the role of the cult of ancestory in grievance for those who died in the tsunami. Vacant home addresses for example play a recurring role in how people were dealing with grief and loss. Perry’s account gives an example of societies using old customs and believe systems in sometimes unexpected ways to help them deal with current loss.
The following excpert is from pages 99 – 102 of the 2017 edition of “Ghosts of the Tsunami” by R.L. Parry:
“Haltingly, apologetically, then with increasing fluency, the survivors spoke of the terror of the wave, the pain of bereavement and their fears for the future. They also talked about encounters with the supernatural.
They described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbours, and dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices and public places, on the beaches and in the ruined towns. The experiences ranged from eerie dreams and feelings of vague unease to cases of outright possession.
A young man complained of pressure on his chest at night, as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because of the eyes of the dead, which stared out at him from puddles.
A civil servant in Soma visited a devastated stretch of coast and saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight. When he looked for her again, she had disappeared.
A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died— and the ghostly calls ceased.
A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no long existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the levelled foundations of a destroyed house and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.
At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbour would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.
Such stories came from all over the devastated area. Priests — Christian and Shinto, as well as Buddhist – found themselves called on repeatedly to quell unhappy spirits. A Buddhist monk wrote an article in a learned journal about ‘the ghost problem’, and academics at Tohoku University began to catalogue the stories. In Kyoto, the matter was debated at a scholarly symposium.
“Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,’ [priest] Kaneta told me. ‘I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school – the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died – they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.’
He said: ‘So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are. But there are countless such people, and their number is going to increase. And all we do is treat the symptoms.’
When opinion polls put the question ‘How religious are you?’, Japanese rank among the most ungodly people in the world. It took a catastrophe for me to understand how misleading this selfassessment is. It is true that the organised religions, Buddhism and Shinto, have little influence on private or national life, But over the centuries both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.
I knew about the household altars, or butsudan, which are still seen in most homes and on which the memorial tablets of dead ancestors — the ihai — are displayed. The butsudan are cabinets of lacquer and gilt, with openwork carvings of flowers and trees; the ihai are upright tablets of black lacquered wood, vertically inscribed in gold. Offerings of flowers, incense, food, fruit and drinks are placed before them; at the summer Festival of the Dead, families light lanterns to welcome home the ancestral spirits. I had taken these picturesque practices to be matters of symbolism and custom, attended to in the same way that people in the West will participate in a Christian funeral without any literal belief in the words of the service. But in Japan spiritual beliefs are regarded less as expressions of faith than as simple common sense, so lightly and casually worn that it is easy to miss them altogether. ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,’ wrote the religious scholar Herman Ooms. “It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do… even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.’
At the heart of ancestor worship is a contract. The food, drink, prayers and rituals offered by their descendants gratify the dead, who in turn bestow good fortune on the living. Families vary in how seriously they take these ceremonies, but even for the unobservant, the dead play a continuing part in domestic life. For much of the time, their status is something like that of beloved, deaf and slightly batty old folk who cannot expect to be at the centre of the family, but who are made to feel included on important occasions. Young people who have passed important entrance examinations, got a job or made a good marriage kneel before the butsudan to report their success. Victory or defeat in an important legal case, for example, is shared with the ancestors in the same way.
When grief is raw, the presence of the deceased is overwhelming. In households that had lost children in the tsunami, it became routine, after half an hour of tea and chat, to be asked if I would like to ‘meet’ the dead sons and daughters. I would be led to a shrine covered with framed photographs, with toys, favourite drinks and snacks, letters, drawings and school exercise books.
One mother commissioned carefully photoshopped portraits of her children, showing them as they would have been had they lived – a boy who died in primary school smiling proudly in high-school uniform, an eighteen-year-old girl as she should have looked in kimono at her coming-of-age ceremony. Another decked the altar with make-up and acrylic fingernails that her daughter would have worn if she had lived to become a teenager. Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.”
It might be time for a clarification. Since flood myths play quite a big role in cristian creationist ideology and since there is a lot of material online on the subject hosted on creatonist propaganda websites, I feel I need to distance myself from the creationist idoelogy once and for all. I am arguing in this blog that mythology and folklore are aesthetic reflections of natural events like tsunamis, high tides or other extreme weather phenomena. In othe words, most myths are most likely creative renditions of lived experience. This does however not mean that myths are true or – for that matter – that the bible is right. In fact I am opposed to any creationist ideology, particularly of the US-American Christian ultra-right, and fundamentally opposed to the idea of founding ethical codes of conduct on religious authority.
Having said that much, here is an online source of a chapter from Sir James George Frazer‘s book “Folk-Lore in the Old Testament” from 1918. (On a creationist website…)
The Scotish scientist Frazer is one of the founding fathers of anthropology and his study “The Golden Bough” (1928) became one of the most influential and popular texts in anthropology.
This is the section from “Folk-Lore in the Old Testament” on the flood myth. In it he gives a very detailed account of several flood myths from all continents:
https://creationism.org/books/FrazerFolkloreOT/FrazerFolkloreOT_4.htm
The bronze statue in the center depicts Mazu or Matsu, the chinese sea goddess, who is particularly popular in Taiwan and Chinese communities outside of mainland China. This monument is at Chengshan Peak (成山头 Chéngshāntóu), in the harbur city Weihai on the Chinese east coast. According to wikipedia: “Today, Mazuism is practiced in about 1.500 temples in 26 countries around the world, mostly in the Sinosphere or the overseas Chinese communities such as that of the predominantly Hokkien Philippines.” The first mentions of Mazu are from the 10. Century AD.
Pak Permadi, an Indonesian expert for paranormal
events from Java made the following statement at a seminar at Jogjakarta University in 1995: »If people are not happy with their treatment by those in power but cannot defend themselves, their anger, which expresses itself as energy, is taken up by nature. If nature is angry, disasters such as a volcanic eruption occur because nature is not afraid of human rulers.«
In this oppinion, an animated nature or deity does not cause disasters directly and intentionally to comment, punish or influence human vices, but rather nature is the transmitor of a human justice. Interestingly enough, this view resonates with current climate change discourse, wherein it is human behaviour that has cuased nature to react in disastrous ways.
See: Hans-Rudolf Meier, The Cultural Heritage of the Natural Disaster: Learning Processes and Projections from the Deluge to the »Live« Disaster on TV (2007) and Judith Schlehe, Cultural Politics of Natural Disasters in Indonesia (2008)
The legends around the mermaid goddess Kidul – also Ratu Kidul – are mostly linked to the 16th century Javanese Mataram Sultanate. However, anthropological studies suggest that the myth of the Queen of Java’s Southern Seas probably originated from older prehistoric animistic beliefs in the pre-Hindu-Buddhist female deity of the southern ocean. The fierce waves of the Indian Ocean on southern Java’s coasts, its storms and sometimes tsunamis, probably had raised in the locals awe and fear of natural power, and locals attributed it to the spiritual realm of deities and demons that inhabit the southern seas ruled by their queen, a female deity, later identified as “Queen Kidul”. (from wikipedia)
In Burmese Buddhism, the water ceremony, called yay zet cha, which involves the ceremonial pouring of water from a glass into a vase, drop by drop, concludes most Buddhist ceremonies including donation celebrations and feasts. This ceremonial libation is done to share the accrued merit with all other living beings in all 31 planes of existence. While the water is poured, a confession of faith, called the hsu taung imaya dhammanu, is recited and led by the monks. Then, the merit is distributed by the donors, called ahmya wei by saying Ahmya ahmya ahmya yu daw mu gya ba gon law three times, with the audience responding thadu, Pali for “well done.” The earth goddess Vasudhara is invoked to witness these meritorious deeds. Afterward, the libated water is poured on soil outside, to return the water to Vasudhara. (from Wikipedia)
Burma; Budhism; Ritual, Ceremony
This painting shows a scene from early buddhist texts from the 3. and 4. Century AD: When Mara, the God of Death, attacked Siddhattha, Siddhattha called on Vasundhara, also referred to as Bhumi or Mother Earth, to save him. Vasundhara creates a massive flood by wringing her long hair and ths drowning all the adversaries. Here Siddhattha, later to become Buddha, can be seen seated and meditating in a small tower high above the flood created by Vasundhara. The image is from the 19. Century. As Christian Rohr notes, the image of Vasundhara wringing her hair is particularly popular in modernity. Today it is a popular talisman in Thailand and Burma.
Thailand; 3. Century AD; Buddhist; Painting, Sculpture