Japan’s most quirkily empathetic monk is back to keep bad mojo away from us as the year ends.
There are a lot of different ways to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Japan. If you want to get orthodox, tradition says you should make a midnight visit to your local temple to literally ring in the new year, offering prayers seeking peace and prosperity while a bell is sounded to drive off wickedness and impure temptations. There’s the cozy approach of a quiet evening at home with family, maybe with your legs tucked under a kotatsu heated table with a big bowl of mandarin oranges within arm’s reach to munch on. And in recent years, lively New Year’s eve parties at bars or street events have also gained traction in Japanese society.
Or, if you’re looking for a more terrifying alternative, this year Japanese TV broadcaster Tokyo MX will be showing the 1999 cinematic classic Ring 2 on New Year’s Eve. The second entry in the film franchise that catapulted J-horror to international acclaim, Ring 2 continues the original’s tradition of creepy video cassettes, unnerving child phantasms, and people dying miserable deaths.
It’s pretty much the archetypal mix of tension and catharsis that makes the horror movie genre beloved by fans…but might closing out the year by watching a movie about people watching a video and then dying also curse you with an influx of so much bad mojo that it carries over into the new year? If such concerns have you on the fence, Tokyo MX is happy to provide some peace of mind, as they’ve arranged for an actual Buddhist monk to chant sutras and offer memorial prayers every single time someone dies onscreen in Ring 2.
If this mix of quirky playfulness and surprising empathy sounds familiar, you might be recalling the previous time we talked about Zen monk Bon Higanda. Before he was providing his credential-backed condolences to the victims of Ring 2’s supernatural slayings, he was doing the same for all the Koopas, Goombas, and other creatures on the receiving end of video game violence from Nintendo’s Super Mario, in a playthrough of the original Super Mario Bros. in which he would stop and recite sutras whenever he accidentally killed an enemy.
While Ring 2 is airing on December 31, the Tokyo MX official YouTube channel (found here) will also be streaming a video of Higanda. While not a live performance, the video is timed so that Higanda’s sutras will synch with the onscreen deaths, leaving no souls unmourned and hopefully breaking the cycle of murderous resentment, or at least keep it from affecting viewers.
Ring 2 begins airing at 6 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and Higanda’s video will start streaming 10 minutes earlier, at 5:50.
Source, images: PR Times
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