Setsubun

Photos above - they're the milk to the cereal that is my words.

A very brief introduction for those who aren't familiar with it: "Setsubun" or the Bean Throwing Festival is a yearly event in Japan that takes place early in February to mark the beginning of spring. It's called that because it involves people throwing beans to ward off evil "oni" (ogres/demons, noone can seem to agree on a translation) and chanting "oni ha soto, fuku ha uchi" (demons out, good fortune in). I've heard some parents even dress up like oni so their kids can pelt them with beans but I'm not sure how common that is.

We missed it last time we were here so we were determined to get to it this time around. And get to it we did, with a little bit of help from Mr Annual Leave.

Setsubun isn't actually a public holiday which makes it quite awkward, but I managed to swing an early finish so we could make it out to Nagata Shrine. Nagata is one of the 3 big temples in Sannomiya (Ikuta and Minatogawa being the other two), which I'm guessing is why it's called Sannomiya ("3 temples"). Nagata is apparently one of the few shrines in Japan where the oni are good, so I'm assuming the temple people would be awfully cross if you started pitching beans at them. Instead, the oni do a big fire dance thing with straw torches. Because of their big wooden masks, they seem to have pretty limited visibility so the temple people had to lead them around and try to keep them separated so they didn't engulf each other in flames. A couple of oni then came over to one of the gates and people lined up in front of them. For each person, the oni rubbed his face then put his hands on the person's head, which the temple man told me was for good luck. He seemed slightly amused when Lisa and I had our turns.

On the way out, we grabbed a couple of cream-filled griddle-cake looking things that I can't for the life of me remember the name of (maybe someone can help me when they look at the photos), shunning the more traditional temple fare of chocolate covered bananas, hot chips and frankfurts on sticks(!). Everyone was selling sushi rolls between the temple and the station, which is another setsubun tradition. There's a lucky direction every year which this year is west-south-west, so they helpfully included a little compass with every roll you bought. Having made sure we were facing the right way, we chomped through it and felt the good fortune fill us with warmth and cheer (or was that the booze?).

I'm going to post about this in more detail on my 'serious' blog, so check up there in a few days if you're interested.

All up it was a nice evening and I'm glad we went. We're going to try not to miss all these little things we overlooked last time, and for that reason we're heading to the Okayama Naked Man Festival in a couple of weeks. I'll leave your imagination to fill in the blanks until then.

We're also going snowboarding this week in  from Thursday so we should have plenty of nice snaps to show off soon (to warm up your eyes for the naked men). I've been promised snow monkeys and I damn well better get them. Let it never be said we didn't do things we couldn't do in Perth.