32 Asia The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020
2E
veryaugustthespiritsoffallen
ancestors rise all across Japan. During
obon, the living commemorate them
with offerings of food at altars, gather for
festivals, and perform collective dances
known as bon odori. Many stream back to
their home towns to be with family and
visit cemeteries to pay respects to their
dead. “Graves are a place to talk,” says
Yamazaki Masako of Zenyuseki, a tomb-
stone carvers’ trade association.
This year covid-19 has upset the rou-
tine. Japan’s viral caseload is relatively
small, with just 1,148 total deaths,
roughly America’s daily average. But a
recent rise in infections, especially in big
cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, has
spread the jitters. Citizens have been
discouraged from travelling home and
festivals have been cancelled. Family
reunions have been held online to pro-
tect vulnerable elderly relatives.
Failure to visit grave-sites creates “a
different type of stress—different from
not being able to travel”, laments Ms
Yamazaki. To help relieve the pain of
missing those obligations to the past, her
association turned to futuristic tech-
nology. For ¥25,000 ($236) it will produce
a virtual-reality experience to let you
visit a grave from the comfort of your
home. “You can see it from all directions,
360 degrees,” boasts Ms Yamazaki. “It’s
like you’re actually there.”
Others have hired proxies to visit the
dead on their behalf. With Japan’s pop-ulationageingandurbanising,online
graveyard visits and tombstone-cleaning
services were already doing brisk busi-
ness. Goendo, one such firm, says in-
quiries and website traffic have doubled
this year. Its agents can be hired to weed,
pick up rubbish, wash tombstones,
arrange flowers and light incense
sticks—then live-stream it all for fam-
ilies by video-chat. Kurashi no Market,
an online services marketplace, reported
that demand for grave visits in this year’s
obonhad nearly tripled. Reviewers have
raved. “I was so relieved to see the image
of a beautifully cleaned grave with flow-
ers,” wrote a client who had fretted about
not being able to visit in the flesh.
Obon came to Japan via China along
with Buddhism. The word is thought to
derive from the Sanskrit ullambana
(deliverance from suffering). First prac-
tised in Japan in the seventh century, the
custom fused with local folk traditions.
“At another tap of the drum, there begins
a performance impossible to picture in
words, something unimaginable, phan-
tasmal—a dance, an astonishment,”
wrote Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-century
chronicler of Japan, who was in awe of a
bon odori.“All together glide the right
foot forward one pace, without lifting the
sandal from the ground, and extend both
hands to the right, with a strange floating
motion and a smiling, mysterious obei-
sance.” Today’s live-streamed moves
might seem equally phantasmal.Virtualrespectforthedead
JapanTOKYO
Amid covid-19, Japan gets creative in commemorating ancestorsethnic-Shan group. In October 2018 both
withdrew from the peace process.
Since January 2019 the Tatmadaw has
also stepped up the confrontation with the
Arakan Army, an ethnic-Rakhine group,
one of the six prevented from signing the
nca in 2015, leading to the bloodiest fight-
ing in Myanmar in decades. “They’ve not
been pursuing peace, they’ve been pursu-
ing conflict,” says Priscilla Clapp, who ad-
vises the Asia Society, an American think-
tank. The commander-in-chief views Ms
Suu Kyi as a rival, and does not want to
hand her any political victories.
Moreover, the Tatmadaw has always
been viscerally opposed to federalism. It is
committed to the idea of Myanmar as a un-
itary state, dominated by the ethnic major-
ity, the Bamar. “I don’t think they want a
genuine peace,” says Naw K’nyaw Paw, the
general-secretary of the Karen Women’s
Organisation.
The Tatmadaw leaves Ms Suu Kyi little
room to manoeuvre. Yet she has made
many missteps. At first she set about jump-
starting the peace process with gusto. She
hoped that a deal would be the swiftest
route to constitutional reform, the only
way to curb the power of the army, some-
thing she longs to do. The army has said
that ending hostilities is a precondition for
reform. But as the scale of the challenge of
brokering peace impressed itself on her,
Ms Suu Kyi’s enthusiasm waned. She
turned her attention to other matters.
Even as her government neglected
peace negotiations, it inflamed relations
with ethnic minorities. In March the gov-
ernment declined to give state legislatures,
some of which are dominated by ethnic
parties, the right to choose their chief min-
isters. Ms Suu Kyi has failed to acknowl-
edge the long-standing grievances of eth-
nic minorities or to tackle concerns among
ethnic groups about the army’s breaches of
the nca. She has not sketched a vision of
what a federal union might look like. “A lot
of ethnic voters feel betrayed,” says Mr Kra-
mer. “We are disappointed in her,” says Ms
Naw K’nyaw Paw.
The prospect of facing voters at the polls
with nothing to show for years of peace
talks has stirred Ms Suu Kyi into action.
There are promising signs. In January the
knu and rcss returned to the negotiating
table, apparently reassured by the govern-
ment’s willingness to tackle some of their
concerns. But none of the principles likely
to be agreed on at Panglong goes beyond
what is already in the constitution or exist-
ing law. And as Ms Naw K’nyaw Paw says, if
the process does not include every armed
group, “we are wasting a lot of our time.”
She suspects that the government has con-
vened this week’s conference merely to
“save face” ahead of the election. It will do
nothing to stop the fighting that she la-
ments is “always” present in Myanmar. 7