Como Park Japanese Obon Festival

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About

We will be selling ONLY ADVANCED TICKETS. Tickets will go on sale in July. We will not be able to take cash at the gate for admission. If you arrive without your advanced ticket, we will have QR codes at the gate for you to scan with your phone that will lead you through the ticketing purchase process. You will need a credit card for this process.

Bonsai, martial arts, singing, dancing, drumming, delicious food and other aspects of Japanese culture, will be featured at the annual Como Park Japanese Obon Festival, a family-friendly event, reminiscent of Japan’s annual Obon holiday, on Sunday, August 17, 2025 on the grounds of the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park from 3:00pm – 9:00pm. At the end of the Obon festival, the lanterns are released into the water so that the spirits can return to the other world.

Obon is an important Japanese cultural and family holiday, at which ancestral spirits are said to revisit their families for three days. Families pay their respects at grave sites and put out offerings of food and drink on a tray before household altars. They also light lanterns or small fires outside the house to symbolically guide the souls to the home. On the last evening of Obon, lanterns again guide the spirits back to their resting places.

The Obon Festival encompasses Japanese tradition—through music, dance, crafts, martial arts and lanterns. Entertainment in the Charlotte Partridge Ordway Japanese Garden and on the main stage will include several taiko drumming groups, koto (Japanese zither), shakuhachis (bamboo flutes), traditional and contemporary dance and singing. Martial arts, Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging), origami demonstrations and a host of other cultural exhibits and demonstrations will line several paths through the grounds. Japanese food and dozens of culturally-related items will be for sale.

The day will culminate at dusk with the main event—the lantern lighting. Six stone lanterns and floating (on the water, not in the air) paper lanterns throughout the Japanese garden pond and the Frog Pond will create a vision of peacefulness and harmony to commemorate the dead.