JULY 19 — I was running late. It was already past 8pm. I’d left home an hour earlier but had seriously underestimated the Saturday evening traffic leading up to the stadium; it was horrendous.
I parked several roads away and hoofed it the rest of the 1.3 kilometres to the arena. (I’m used to walking everywhere so it didn’t really matter.)
Thank goodness the party was still in full swing. You could hear the songs and the beat of the drums two blocks away.
A couple of my friends were already there, as was my Japanese teacher. Others were still trying to make it.
An unending stream of people, dressed to the nines in yukata in all colours perceptible to the human eye, came and went. The gates beckoned, wide and welcoming.
After a much-missed absence of two years, the Bon Odori Festival had come home again to the Panasonic Stadium in Shah Alam.
The people who turned up were a telltale cross-section of Malaysian society. Parents and grandparents of all ethnicities bringing the kids over for a good time.
Teenagers, expats, young adults rocking their traditional Japanese outfits. People who were there to dance. People who came to have a picnic (the Sushi King booth was quite a hit).
People who were just curious and wanted to check out the scene. Noticeably, a good number of the crowd were Malay women and girls glamorously attired in their tudung and yukata in matching colours.
One Malay vendor was making a killing selling yukata and kid-size kimonos for RM30. The celebratory mood was infectious. It was, in every sense of the word, a glorious sight to behold.
Which makes you wonder why, on this blessed Earth, there are people out there in the shadows, away from the paper lanterns and fairy lights of the stadium, who don’t want their fellow clanfolk to join in the merriment.
The prevailing argument in that camp is that Bon is a Buddhist festival that Muslims should not partake in, lest it might lead to shirk (duplicity of faith).
But here’s the thing. With the passage of time, Bon has evolved from its notional Buddhist origins into a cultural dance festival, a celebration of age-old traditions and the arrival of the Japanese summer.
Whatever Buddhist connotations there may be have long been relegated to the background, and Bon, like anime, yakitori, Nintendo, and reliable family cars, should simply be regarded as another wonderful Japanese import that everyone should be free to have access to.
Besides, even if you consider for a moment the religionist perspective, would you not argue that there are many rituals or adat in Malay society that had their origins in other religious customs?
Is mandi bunga not an ancient Nusantara ritual predating Islam, practised for millennia by the various peoples of the archipelago from here to the Moluccas?
We pay scant attention to these aspects of what we do, eat, or what our kids read for literature studies, because any religious associations they may have had have been diluted with the passing of time, and a healthy dose of good old common sense. Why can we not say the same for Bon Odori?
The festival has been running smoothly for going on four decades now, and no one had ever rained on their parade.
Why the sudden horde of party poopers this year? I believe social media, that double-edged mainstay of our internet-dominated lives, may have played a part.
Consider, for instance, that before 2019, there were no (public) Facebook postings questioning the permissibility of attending the festival from a Muslim point of view. Spend ten minutes in the bottomless cesspool of Malaysian social media comments and you’ll see what I mean.
In the end, it took the Sultan of Selangor himself to put out the flames. HRH saw that this foolishness was getting out of hand and, quite frankly, told everyone to stop being so ridiculous.
He even invited Datuk Idris Ahmad, Minister for Religious Affairs in the PM’s Department who was one of the most vocal critics of the festival, to come and see things for himself.
Predictably, Idris was a no-show. Understandable, I guess. Special mention should go to JAIS, however. Our collective hats off to you for being such good sports and seeing nothing wrong about the festival.
Still, there were casualties, to be sure. Some government schools opted to lay low and did not send any delegates this time round. Chatter has it that there were some dissenting voices in the background, despite what officialdom said.
Yet this hardly made a dent on the attendance. If the Sunday morning reports were anything to go by, the crowd was in the thousands. By my count, roughly a third of them were Malays. Impressive by any measure.
It shows that people can and do make their own judgment calls, refusing to blindfold themselves and let myopic people lead the way and do the thinking for them.
As the festivities wrapped up, the final song was sung, and the night came to an end, I walked back to my car, past a couple with their beaming young son, showing off his own customised mini-yukata. I could not help overhearing their conversation.
Adik seronok tak menari malam ni? Seronok.
He smiled. I smiled. Tolerance and multiculturalism had won out. That evening, at least for a few precious hours, song and dance banished the dissonant grumblings of pseudo-religious puritanism to a distant echo, as Malaysians and Japanese alike swayed to the beat of the drums, hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder, long into the balmy night.
There’s still hope. See you next year. Jumpa lagi. Mata aimashō.
