Bon Odori Uptown: The New York Buddhist Church, and a Statue That Survived Hiroshima

Almost everything we do happens on Ludlow Street. This one was uptown, on West 106th between West End and Riverside, and it was one of the better days we have had all year.

The New York Buddhist Church held Bon Odori '26 on Sunday, August 9, from 12:30 to 4:00. Traditional bon folk dancing, a Japanese cultural presentation, and a street full of people. It was their second year running it outdoors on 106th rather than inside, and the difference showed. They told us the turnout was substantially bigger than the year before.

What Bon Odori Actually Is

Obon is the summer observance when ancestors are said to return to visit the living. Bon odori is the dancing part of it: people gather in a circle, usually around a raised platform with taiko, and move through steps that repeat until anyone can join in. That is the whole design. The steps are simple on purpose, because the point is not performance. The point is that everybody dances, including the people who have never done it before and are watching the person in front of them to work out where their hands go.

If you have only seen it in a film, the thing that surprises you in person is how unhurried it is. It goes on for hours. People drop in and out. Kids run through the middle of it.

The Church on 106th

The New York Buddhist Church has been in this city since 1938, founded by Rev. Hozen Seki and his wife Satomi at a point when New York had no center for Jodo Shinshu Buddhism at all. Jodo Shinshu is the True Pure Land school, founded in Japan by Shinran Shonin in the early thirteenth century.

I did not know most of that before this year. I do now, and it changed how the day felt.

Why "Church" and Not "Temple"

I asked David about this. He is the current chairman, and a regular of ours, so I had someone to ask.

He said the name was a deliberate choice at the founding. In 1938, "church" was the word people here recognized. A Buddhist temple was not something most New Yorkers had any reference for, and calling it a church made it legible to the city it had just arrived in. It stayed.

I like that a lot. It is a nearly ninety-year-old decision about how to be understood by your neighbors, and it is still sitting there in the name.

The Statue Out Front

If you walk past 332 Riverside Drive you will see a bronze figure in traveling robes and a wide hat, fifteen feet of him, twenty-two tons. That is Shinran Shonin, and the statue has been standing there since 1955.

It was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, a mile or two from the hypocenter. Accounts differ on the exact distance. What they do not differ on is that at that range almost nothing else came through it.

It survived.

A Japanese businessman named Seiichi Hirose donated it afterwards. It was offered to the United Nations first, as a symbol of peace, and the UN turned it down for want of a suitable space. So it came here instead, to a quiet stretch of the Upper West Side, where most people walking past have no idea what it has been through.

I think about that statue a lot now. It is standing on a residential street in Manhattan and it is one of the few things in this city that was physically present for that morning.

What We Brought

We served our signature karaage and our yuzu lemonade.

We sold out in two hours.

I want to be honest about that rather than dress it up as a success, because it was not one. I under-prepared. We had a queue, the food ran out at roughly the halfway point of a three and a half hour event, and people who came looking for us in the back half of the afternoon found an empty table. That is on me. I misjudged what a bigger crowd meant in practice, and the fact that the church had told me to expect more people is exactly why I have no excuse.

Next year I bring considerably more of both. Write it down.

The karaage travels better than you would think, which was the one thing I got right. It is the potato starch coating, which stays crisp longer than flour does. The yuzu lemonade was the right call for standing outside in August.

Why We Were There

We get asked to do things fairly often and we say yes to a specific kind of thing: the ones where the people organizing it care more about the event than about what they get out of it. That is what this was. It is a temple that has been serving this city for nearly ninety years, running a street festival that exists so people can dance together in August.

We were the food table. That is a small role and it is the right one.

Thank you to everyone at the New York Buddhist Church for having us, and to everyone who came and found us before the karaage ran out. To everyone who came after: I am sorry, and I will fix it.

Read more about our karaage, or about the rest of the people we work with.