Why Japan throws beans, eats a silent sushi roll, and “repairs” the seam of the year
Setsubun isn’t just a cute seasonal event or a yearly excuse to shout and snack.
It’s a small piece of cultural engineering: a ritual designed to tighten the world at a moment when it tends to loosen.
When seasons change, the air changes.
When the air changes, bodies wobble: colds, fatigue, allergies, mood swings.
Society wobbles too: school years turn, jobs shift, people move, relationships rearrange. Even if you don’t “believe” in luck, you can feel the instability.
Older Japan treated seasonal turning points not as quiet calendar updates, but as dangerous seams, places where misfortune can slip in like cold wind under a door.
Setsubun exists to close that gap.
Setsubun was originally four times a year
The word Setsubun literally means “dividing the seasons.”
Traditionally, it referred to the day before each new season began: before spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Today, when people say “Setsubun,” they almost always mean the one right before Risshun (the beginning of spring). That’s because the winter-to-spring shift is the most dramatic boundary in everyday life, physically and emotionally, and it has long carried the feeling of a “new year” threshold.
This is key:
Setsubun is not “a celebration of spring.”
It’s closer to a repair ritual performed right before spring arrives.
Change is both a promise and a risk
Even now, “seasonal transitions” are prime time for things to go wrong.
- Temperature swings disrupt sleep and energy
- Dry air and pollen arrive
- Exams, graduations, transfers, relocations cluster
- Social circles reconfigure
So Setsubun addresses more than weather. It addresses the human consequences of transition.
Its logic is simple and consistent:
- Push out what causes trouble
- Prepare the inside to receive what you want
It’s less “making a wish” and more cleaning the conditions of life.
What is an “oni” (demon), really?
In Setsubun, the oni isn’t a fantasy monster.
It’s a shape given to the invisible things that ruin your days.
- sickness
- accidents
- conflict
- stagnation
- that vague “everything feels off” fog
When a problem has no clear cause, it becomes frightening.
When something frightening is given a recognizable form, it becomes manageable.
In that sense, an oni is misfortune with a face.
And once misfortune has a face, a ritual can aim at it.
Why beans?
Beans are ordinary, small, and strangely powerful. They are food, but also seed. Daily life, but also future.
Setsubun beans are usually roasted soybeans (fukumame, “fortune beans”). Roasting matters: raw beans can sprout, and sprouting implies growth. Roasting symbolically prevents “bad things” from taking root and multiplying.
So beans become a kind of household-scale sacred tool:
something anyone can hold, toss, and later eat.
Not expensive. Not distant. Just close enough to make the ritual domestic.
What people do on Setsubun
The actions are different, but they all do the same job: boundary maintenance
Setsubun customs look varied, but they point in one direction:
reset the threshold between “outside” and “inside,” between “old season” and “new season,” between “bad flow” and “good flow.”
1) Mamemaki (Bean throwing)
Writing a new rule into your space
Mamemaki is the core Setsubun ritual: throwing roasted soybeans to drive away oni (misfortune) and invite fuku (good fortune).
The chant is famous:
Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!
“Demons out! Fortune in!”
But what it’s really doing is spatial programming.
It redraws the invisible borders of the home: what is allowed to remain, and what must leave.
A simple home version
- Open the entrance or a window slightly (create an “exit”)
- Throw beans outward while calling the oni out
- Throw beans inward to welcome fortune
- Close the door (seal the boundary)
The ending matters. Setsubun is not only expelling; it’s also closing the seam.
2) Eating fukumame
Cleaning the inside, not just the room
Many people eat fortune beans after mamemaki, often:
- the number of beans equal to your age (sometimes +1)
Throwing beans resets the environment. Eating beans makes it bodily.
It turns the ritual from “outside of you” to “inside of you.” Health, longevity, steadiness.
3) Ehomaki (Lucky-direction sushi roll)
Locking a wish into an action instead of words
Ehomaki is a thick sushi roll eaten on Setsubun. Its meaning lives in how you eat it:
- Face the year’s lucky direction (ehō)
- Eat the roll uncut
- Stay silent while eating
Why uncut?
Symbolically, you don’t “cut” your luck, your ties, or your fortune’s flow.
Why silence?
Words scatter. Silence holds.
Ehomaki treats a wish like steam in a closed jar: you don’t let it leak.
So this isn’t just food. It’s a choreography for intention.
4) Hiiragi-iwashi (Holly + sardine head)
A rough, physical “do not enter” sign
In some households, people place a holly branch with a grilled sardine head near the entrance.
It’s blunt magic:
- holly leaves prick
- grilled sardine smells sharp
Together they create a sensory barrier, meant to repel oni from the doorway.
If mamemaki is pushing bad luck out, hiiragi-iwashi is keeping it from coming back in.
5) Someone becomes the oni
Making the invisible throwable
In many homes, a family member wears an oni mask.
That’s not just comedy. It’s functional.
- It externalizes anxiety into a visible target
- It lets everyone participate in the same story
- It turns “vague unease” into something you can confront together
Ritual works best when the problem can be seen, named, and acted upon.
6) Community ceremonies (Tsui-na / large bean-throwing events)
When the household ritual scales up
Some temples and shrines hold large Setsubun ceremonies where beans (and sometimes small prizes) are thrown to crowds.
This is mamemaki expanded from a home to a community:
a shared reset, a public cleansing, a collective “new season begins now.”
Setsubun isn’t about believing
It’s about doing
The strength of Setsubun doesn’t depend on religious intensity.
It works even for modern people who treat it as tradition, not doctrine.
Because ritual is a technology:
- it gives shape to unexplainable stress
- it marks a boundary you can feel
- it turns intention into action
- it creates a shared moment of reset
Setsubun doesn’t promise a miracle.
It offers maintenance.
A small annual tightening of the screws.
A way to push the old season’s noise outside, and make room for the next one to enter cleanly.
And that’s why it’s survived.
I’m doing a simple Setsubun bean-throwing at home today, so I’ll share a follow-up post soon.