The dancers keep their faces hidden. Beneath deep woven hats or black hoods, they move through firelight without revealing who they are. They have been doing this for seven hundred years in a quiet farming town in Akita, and the effect is not festive so much as it is haunting. You watch the procession pass and find yourself thinking not about who is dancing, but about why. Obon is the season when the dead return. Perhaps the hidden faces are a way of saying that in this moment, the living and the dead occupy the same ground. One of Japan's three great Bon dances. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.