You're welcome! Lafcadio Hearn describes the Bon Odori in 1890.
Summer is ghost story season in Japan, I always reread Hearn's ghost stories this time of year.
"Unto what, I ask myself, may this be likened? Unto nothing; yet it suggests some fancy of somnambulism -- dreamers, who dream themselves flying, dreaming upon their feet. ... Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of charm. And verily this is enchantment; I am bewitched, bewitched by the ghostly weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flitting of the marvelous sleeves -- apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. ... And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitations of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place, there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted.
"Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the gray stones where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of their fathers' fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this. Nay! the dust stirred by those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this self-same moon, 'with woven paces, and with waving hands.'
"And the emotion itself -- what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I -- something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes -- all trillings of summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land."