Setsubun

Around February 3rd, in a hundred thousand Japanese living rooms, a father puts on a demon mask and his children pelt him with roasted soybeans.

The formula is shouted:

> 鬼は外！ 福は内！ > > *Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi! > > Demons out! Fortune in!*

And then everyone eats the beans — one for each year of your age, plus one for the year ahead.

This is the oldest continuously running program in this whole collection, and it is currently being performed by more people than any other item in it.

Why beans

There's an origin legend: a monk of Mount Kurama, in the tenth century, who blinded oni by throwing roasted beans at them.

And there's a pun holding it up, which is how these things get fixed.

Mame — beans — puns on 魔滅, which reads ma-metsu: "destroy the demon."

Roasted, specifically. The roasting matters — an unroasted bean could sprout, and you do not want the thing you threw at a demon taking root under your floor.

It's a Chinese court rite that went domestic

The lineage runs like this.

Tsuina — a Chinese court exorcism — imported into Japan in the eighth century. A formal ceremony, performed at the palace, by officials, at the turning of the year.

Through the Muromachi period it took folk form.

And by the Edo period, bean-throwing was general — everybody, in their own house, with beans from the shop.

Which is a genuinely interesting trajectory. The state's exorcism escaped the palace and became a thing families do in the kitchen. Most rituals travel the other way, or die when the court stops funding them. This one got out and democratized.

The rest of the kit

Ehōmaki — a thick sushi roll, eaten whole, in silence, facing the year's lucky direction. No cutting, no talking. (This part is much more recent than the beans and owes a great deal to twentieth-century supermarket marketing, which does not stop it being enormous fun.)

Hiiragi-iwashi — a sardine head on a sprig of holly, fixed by the door.

The holly's spines prick the demon's eyes; the sardine's smell repels it. It's a real recorded ward, and it works on the same principle as most of this tradition's counter-measures: household substances, not holy ones.

The regional variations are the best part

Hokkaido throws peanuts. In the shell — which, in snow, is a considerably more practical projectile to find again afterwards.

Aizuwakamatsu chants "Blind the demons' eyes!" rather than the standard formula.

And then the one that reverses everything.

"Demons IN"

Some temples and shrines — those that shelter reformed or enshrined oni — famously invert the chant.

> *Oni wa uchi. > > Demons in.*

Because at those places, the demon lives there. It was pacified, given a shrine, and taken onto the staff — and you do not stand in a god's own house shouting at it to get out.

That's the entire doctrine of this tradition, audible in the liturgy, once a year: you don't destroy the dangerous thing, you enshrine it — and then you have to update your festival chant accordingly.

And there is a family exempt by inheritance

This is my favourite piece of living folklore in Japan.

Families surnamed Watanabe traditionally skip the ritual entirely.

Because their ancestor is Watanabe no Tsuna — the swordsman who cut the arm off the demon at the Rashōmon gate, and kept it in a box, and refused to give it back until it came to him disguised as his own aunt.

He so thoroughly terrorized demonkind that, by tradition, oni do not approach Watanabe households.

No beans required. The protection is hereditary.

There are people in Japan right now, with ordinary jobs, who do not do setsubun, because of a duel their ancestor won at a gate in Kyoto around the year 1000.

And it's one half of the year

Setsubun, February: demons out. Expulsion.

Obon, August: ancestors in. Welcome fires, an open altar, a cucumber horse.

Push out what doesn't belong. Bring home what does.

Everything else in this collection lives in the space between those two dates.