242
CHOI CHI CHEUNG
nese News (MA###); reports about the Ghost Festival in Kobe no longer emphasised the role of the Hokkienese. Thus, the secondary identification (identity of being a Chinese and/or of being a resident in Kobe) instead of the primary identification (identity of blood relation and/or of origins) became the central idea of the Festival. Thus the Festival is more inclusive now." The Festival, though including all elements of the secular world as well as the sacred world, stressed only ancestor-worship because only ancestor worship supercedes the boundaries of all social groupings and categories, eases the tension of group competition among the Chinese, and connects all social groupings and categories into one worshipping group which is based primarily on the relationship of the worshippers with Kobe, and secondarily on their territorial identity as Chinese.
NOTES:
The original meaning of 'Yue Lan' is "hanging upside down” (of the hungry ghost in Hell). However, during the festival, participants used terms like: Obon (Mah, Japanese term for the festival), Chung Yuan (†, middle of the year, which is a term mainly used by the taoists for the same event), and/or Kuai Chie (m, ghost festival). Some Cantonese even called it a Chiao (M) (simply meaning a festival dedicated to the Gods). Moreover, the documents used during the festival spoke of it as 'Pu Tu' (#), meaning general offering and place where spirits can cross over to this world, e.g. the papers that hung over the entrance of the Tao Ch'ang (entrance A) wrote "The water and earth Pu Tu is held in this Tao Ch'ang' (*), at the entrance B, it was written 'the Great Occasion of Pu Tu' (E), the invitation card wrote "the great meeting of Pu Tu' (#★#), and the same term was also used in the P'ang.
1 See Kobe Kakyou Ho (#), no. 71, 1976.3.10. In 1974, there were 46944 Chinese in Japan. 8585 of them lived in Hyogo Prefecture of which 7071 were concentrated in Kobe city. The distribution of the origins of the Chinese in Hyogo Prefecture was as follow: Taiwan (41%), Cantonese (21%), Hokkien (11%), Kiangsu (11%), Shantong (5%), Chekiang (4%), others (7%).
See plan at the Appendix to this paper, and Plate 15.
Plate 16.
3 Plates 17, 18, 19.
6
Sometimes informants called the paper-made houses "Cho' () without distinguishing between the house for the 'Newly Dead', and that for the gods. Here, Ming-che is used for the house of the "Newly Dead', and Cho for that of the gods.
7 Plate 20.