Setsubun

Setsubun marks the eve of the beginning of spring in the traditional calendar, at the start of February, the seasonal turning point (setsubun means division of the seasons). Its best-known observance is mamemaki, the scattering of roasted soybeans, thrown at doorways and within the home, and sometimes at a family member wearing an oni (demon) mask, to a cry that sends the demons out and calls fortune in.

The intent is purificatory: to expel the misfortune and malign influences of the departing year and season and to invite good fortune for the new one. Temples and shrines hold public bean-throwing events, sometimes with celebrities, and other customs have attached to the day, including the eating of a whole uncut sushi roll (ehomaki) facing the year's lucky direction. Setsubun draws on older court and Buddhist rites of demon-expulsion at the year's turning, adapted into a widely kept popular observance.

Bean throwing to drive out misfortune did not originate as a household custom at all; it descends from an exorcism ceremony imported from continental Chinese court practice, tsuina, adopted into the Japanese imperial court's own New Year ritual calendar centuries ago, in which court officials ritually drove out disease bearing demons at the year's turning point, a solemn state ceremony rather than the family activity mamemaki has since become. Over the centuries that court rite filtered downward and outward into popular practice, its ritual demon expulsion simplified into the throwing of roasted soybeans at a person, often a family member, wearing an oni mask, accompanied by the now familiar chant calling for demons out and good fortune in, a domestication of an originally elite court ceremony into an annual household activity performed by ordinary families and by shrines and temples for large public crowds.

A much more recent addition sits alongside these older layers: eho maki, an uncut sushi roll eaten facing that year's auspicious direction in silence, is a comparatively modern practice, promoted heavily by convenience stores and retailers expanding a regional custom into national popularity mainly in the latter part of the twentieth century, making a single evening's observance today a genuine composite of an ancient imported court rite, a folk domestication of it, and a recent commercial addition.