Wining and dining spirits — Japan observes the festival of the dead

During that time, they are welcomed with rice wine, fresh vegetables and fruits at altars erected in the homes of their descendants.

After a week or so of wining and dining the spirits, the holiday is capped off with midnight visits to ancestral graves, where incense and paper lanterns are burned.

“Walking around graveyards at night isn’t something I would normally do,” Yoshio Shimomura said before heading out to his family plot in this village on the central Japan coast. “But this is special.”

Most Japanese observe the holiday, called `O-bon,’ more as a social tradition than a religious event, a much-needed respite from the heat of thesummer and the demands of Japan’s relentless work ethic.

“Everybody comes home for O-bon. It’s tradition,” said Nobuo Iwasa, a Buddhist priest.

“People use O-bon as a chance to relax and enjoy themselves, but they also pay the proper respects to the dead.”

O-bon is not an official holiday, but workers tend to plan their summer vacations around it and most private businesses close down for several days.Stages are set up in town squares or vacant lots, where small, neighbourhood-sponsored festivals are held. There, dancers twist and sway in colorful summer kimonos to the loud pounding of drums.

O-bon is also time for the national high school baseball championships, which has long been one of Japan’s most popular sporting events because it provides fans at home for the holidays a chance to root for their home town teams.

In years past, paper lanterns representing the departing spirits were set afloat on rivers or streams on the final night of O-bon. That practice has been stopped in many places,however, out of deference to environmental concerns.

Because of the increasing tendency since World War II for people to move out of the small towns of their roots and into the bigger cities, millions must simultaneously hit the highways, airports and train stations to get home for O-bon.

This year, officials say, the crowding hasn’t been so bad.

Even so, traffic jams stretched as long as 45 kms long highways heading out of Tokyo earlier this week.

Flights out of the city have been almost fully booked, and long-distance trains packed to as much as 150 per cent their seating capacity meaning vacationers have to stand in the aisles or squat in the decks between cars, often for several hours at a time.

“Bon voyage,” quipped a headline on the front page of one Tokyo newspaper. The headline was accompanied by a photo of a huge traffic snarl outside of the capital.

For those city dwellers who have no countryside hometowns to return to, the O-bon exodus provides a special bonus.

“My train is usuallyso crowded I can’t move,” said Tokyo office worker Yuji Yamashita. “But during O-bon, the ride is comfortable. I can get a seat if I want, and read the paper.”

The rush back to the cities is expected to peak on Monday.