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| Donna S. Mote Project Title: This project is a comparative study of the evangelical Protestant (notably Methodist) camp meeting tradition in rural Georgia and the Obon (Buddhist Festival of the Dead) tradition in rural Hiroshima prefecture, Japan. It blends several disciplines -- practical theology, cultural anthropology, comparative religion and culture, documentary studies --and examines the ways that families and faith groups create meaning and inculcate values through rituals and practices. Much of the power in both camp meeting and Obon can be found in the ways they wed the common and everyday with the timeless and eternal. For four of my five years in Japan I lived in the small city of Miyoshi in rural Hiroshima and was repeatedly struck by cultural and religious similarities between that area and the piedmont area of Georgia. From the numerous expressions of hospitality to an enduring connection to “a home place,” from a certain respect for elders and old ways to a genteel earthiness among farming and working-class folk, I observed a continuity of living traditions that seemed quite familiar and that stands apart from the blurred pace of (post-) modern life in the metropolises. Nowhere were these similarities between rural western Japan and the rural southern U.S. more striking for a person who grew up in the camp meeting tradition than in hearing about and observing Obon, the Buddhist Festival of the Dead. As I listened to people talk about their Obon observances—going home; staying under one roof with members of multiple generations; invoking the spirits of the ancestors; storytelling; playing traditional games; preparing and enjoying traditional foods; gathering at local temples for the bon dancing; and observing the long-lived customs of extended family groups and of the larger community - I heard the stuff of camp meeting. Both these celebrations are rites in which those who attend honor the dead by gathering with the living. And both these annual gatherings engender among their participants a “feelingful” awareness of both immanence and transcendence that cannot quite be articulated. Since World War II and the rise of the nuclear family in both the U.S. and Japan, the camp meeting and Obon traditions have each been presented with new challenges. In both countries generally, and in Hiroshima and Georgia specifically, there has been a remarkable trend on the part of people of working age to take jobs in the cities. In doing so they quite often give up not only the farming lifestyles of previous generations but also the generations-long custom of living at or near the ancestral home places of their families. Family groups that previously ordered their collective lives around the planting and harvest seasons now find their members working in a variety of jobs where schedules are much more regimented and official days off from work are few and far between. In both rural Hiroshima and rural Georgia there has been an appreciable movement from close-knit and personal (gemeinschaft) relationships and institutions to a much more atomized (gesellschaft) culture. As a result, the annual Obon and camp meeting observances, which rely upon and nurture extended families, tend these days to put new stresses upon nuclear families. Although each tradition has historically been about going home to honor the dead by gathering with the living, in times past most people lived only a short distance from their families' home places and their sacred gathering spots for camp meeting or Obon. Today, however, going home for these summer observances typically involves journeys of many miles, across several states or prefectures or the entire length or breadth of the country, if not international travel. I am interested in investigating how, in the current milieu, participants in both traditions strike a balance between the current tensions of extended family and nuclear family life. And I am interested in examining participants’ own ideas about the abiding values and meaning of their respective traditions.
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