There is a night in early February when households across Japan throw roasted soybeans at a family member wearing an oni mask, while shouting a phrase that translates roughly as 'demons out, fortune in'. Somebody, usually a father, has to be the demon. It is very silly and it is also one of the oldest surviving pieces of practical folk magic anywhere, and I think about it constantly, largely because in that scenario I am the one holding the mask.
It is a New Year, technically
Setsubun means the division between seasons, and the one everybody observes marks the day before the start of spring in the old calendar. That made it, functionally, a new year's eve — the seam between one cycle and the next.
Seams are where things get in. That is not a metaphor I am imposing; it is the explicit logic of the ritual. The boundary between two periods is a moment when the barrier is thin, so the accumulated bad luck of the departing year is at its most active and has to be driven out before the new one starts. The same reasoning shows up all over the world in solstice and new year practices, which is a decent hint that people arrive at it independently.
The mask is there because you cannot throw beans at an abstraction. Give the year's misfortune a face and a body and you can chase it out of the front door, which is exactly what happens, at volume, in a great many hallways.
Why beans, and why roasted
Soybeans specifically, and roasted specifically, and the roasting is not a culinary preference. A raw bean that lands in a corner and gets missed could sprout, and a sprouting bean means the misfortune you just threw out has taken root inside the house. Roasting it makes it inert. The ritual has a debugging step.
That detail is my favourite thing in all of this, because it tells you the belief was taken seriously by practical people. Somebody thought the process through to the failure case and patched it. This is not vague spiritual atmosphere. It is a procedure with a known bug and a documented fix.
Afterwards you eat beans — traditionally one for each year of your age, sometimes one extra for the year ahead. It is a small, physical, slightly annoying act of counting your own life out loud, and there is a point past which it stops being a snack and becomes a chore, which everybody makes the same joke about every year.
Being the demon
Someone has to wear the mask, and the job usually falls to whoever is least able to argue. The masks themselves are often flimsy cardboard things that come free with a bag of beans from a supermarket, which I find genuinely delightful — an object of enormous folkloric weight, mass-produced, given away, and thrown at.
There is something worth noticing in the role, though. The demon is played by a member of the household. The thing you are driving out is being embodied, temporarily and by agreement, by someone you love, who then takes the mask off and rejoins the family. It is a controlled, consensual, deeply humane piece of theatre about getting rid of the bad year without pretending the bad year came from outside.
I have made a proper one for this. It is heavy, it is hand-painted, and it is completely inappropriate for the purpose. The cardboard ones are better and I know it.
The bit I did not expect to like
There are variant chants. In some places, temples associated with particular figures, or families with a name that contains the character for demon, do not say 'demons out' at all — they leave that half off, or they invite the oni in instead, on the reasoning that you do not throw your own out.
That is the moment the whole thing stopped being a novelty to me. A ritual with a documented exception for people who are related to the monster is a ritual that has been alive for a long time and has been argued about by real communities with real stakes. Living traditions have edge cases. Dead ones are tidy.
It also happens to be a fairly precise description of what I do for a living, which I did not plan and am not going to pretend I planned.
So: an inherited new-year purification, executed with pantry items, with a fix for the sprouting problem, a consenting volunteer in a cardboard mask, and a documented exemption for anyone whose name means demon. It is one of the most complete pieces of folk practice still running, and most of the internet knows it as a photo of a man being pelted with beans. Both of those things are true.
Demons out, fortune in — mine is through here ✦
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