Beans and Demons

Every February, adults throw roasted soybeans at invisible demons and eat sushi rolls in silence facing southeast

South-southeast this year. I checked twice. You hold the roll with both hands, face the lucky direction, and eat the whole thing without stopping. No cutting. No speaking. I stood in my kitchen on February 3rd, facing the wall where the fridge meets the window, and ate a sushi roll in silence for three minutes. If anyone had walked in, I don't know what I would have said. In California, the strangest food ritual I had was eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, and even that came with conversation.

The Chant

Setsubun means "seasonal division." It falls on February 3rd, the eve of spring by the old lunar calendar, though February in Japan feels nothing like spring. The core ritual is mamemaki - bean throwing. You take roasted soybeans, open the front door, and hurl them outward while shouting oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi. Demons out, fortune in.

Then you close the door. Then you throw beans inward, inviting the good luck inside.

At temples, this becomes spectacle. Sensoji in Tokyo draws thousands. Sumo wrestlers and television personalities stand on elevated platforms and throw beans into outstretched hands. Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto features geiko in full regalia. The crowd presses forward, catching soybeans in plastic bags, in baseball caps, in cupped palms.

At home, it is stranger. In many households, the father puts on a paper oni mask and the children throw beans at him. The protector performs as the threat. He stumbles backward through the doorway, pelted by his own family, while everyone shouts the chant. Then he takes the mask off and comes back inside for dinner.

I grew up without this. Nobody was throwing beans in Sacramento.

The Sushi Roll Problem

The ehomaki tradition feels ancient. It is not. The practice of eating a fat sushi roll in silence while facing a compass direction was a regional Osaka custom of uncertain origin, possibly promoted by the local nori industry in the early twentieth century. It stayed obscure until convenience store chains - 7-Eleven chief among them - began marketing ehomaki nationally in the late 1990s^[1]. By the early 2000s, it was everywhere.

This is the part that interests me. A tradition manufactured within living memory, promoted by the same companies that sell onigiri and egg sandwiches, that now carries the weight of something you are supposed to do. Supermarkets run special counters. The direction changes each year - south-southeast in 2026, determined by the Chinese zodiac^[1] - and people actually look it up.

I keep thinking about what separates a manufactured tradition from a real one. Whether there is a difference. My American Christmases had centuries of inheritance behind them and still felt hollow some years. Ehomaki has a marketing meeting behind it and I did it alone in my kitchen, facing a wall, completely sincere.

Holly and Sardines

The oldest layer of setsubun is the one fewest people practise. Hiiragi iwashi - a sardine head skewered on a holly branch, placed at the doorway. The sharp leaves prick the demons' eyes. The smell repels them. Folk magic of the most literal kind^[2].

I passed one last February on a side street in Tennoji. A dried sardine head on a twig of holly, tucked into the frame of a sliding door. The building was otherwise unremarkable - a two-storey house with laundry on the second-floor railing. But someone had taken the time. Bought the sardine, grilled the head, found the holly, mounted it by the door.

Nobody was around. The sardine stared at the street with its single cooked eye.

What Stays

After you throw the beans, you eat them. One for each year of your age, or your age plus one, depending on who taught you. By your thirties, this is a lot of soybeans. They are dry and faintly nutty and not particularly pleasant in that quantity.

But you eat them. You stand in your genkan, picking roasted beans off the floor where they bounced, counting the years. It is not meditative exactly. Just a thing you do because someone once did it and then someone else did it and here you are, an adult, eating beans off the floor on a Tuesday in February.

The grand rituals survive because institutions maintain them. Shrine visits, national holidays, ceremonies with priests and incense. The small domestic ones have nothing behind them. If you stopped, nobody would notice or care.

I think about this differently now than I would have at twenty, in California, reading about setsubun in a textbook. Back then I would have found it charming. Quaint. Something my culture did that I had missed. Now I do it, and it isn't charming. It is odd and private and faintly ridiculous, and I do it anyway, alone, facing a wall, because the alternative is not doing it, and that feels worse for reasons I can't quite articulate.

The beans were still on the genkan floor the next morning. I swept them up before work.