Bringing Offerings to the Bon Festival

Two young women walk together dressed for the Bon Festival, an event celebrated in late summer and dedicated to the ancestral spirits. One carries a lantern, used at night to guide the spirits back to earth; the other carries a tray of Chinese lantern blossoms (hōzuki 鬼灯), a common offering for the departed. An example of the popular genre of bijinga 美人画, or images of beautiful women, the pair are shown as idealized types, not as individuals. Indicative of the nostalgic yearnings of the period, the women are dressed in summer cotton yukata and perform traditional cultural activities in a pastoral setting. The combination of flowers and youthful beauties with a subtext of seasonal change and death also suggests impermanence (無常 mujō), a Buddhist-infused theme that recurs in Japanese art and literature.

Despite the traditional subject, the women are walking through a field of ripe corn, a plant that was not widely cultivated until the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Due to its superiority to rice in a colder climate, corn contributed to the colonization of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. The inclusion of corn here gives this otherwise conservative, escapist vision a very modern twist.