What an Old Man in Yanaka Taught Me About Throwing Beans at Demons

# What an Old Man in Yanaka Taught Me About Throwing Beans at Demons

February in Tokyo smells like cold concrete and roasting soybeans. The air has that particular dry sharpness that cracks your lips and makes the smoke from convenience store hand warmers hang in strange, horizontal lines. It gets dark by five, and by six the shotengai — the old covered shopping streets — are buzzing with a slightly manic energy, people clutching paper bags of roasted beans like they're carrying something important. Which, depending on how seriously you take your demons, they are.

Setsubun falls on February 3rd, or close enough, and it doesn't make many Western travel itineraries. It's not photogenic in the obvious way. There's no procession in silk robes, no perfectly timed fireworks over a castle. What it is, instead, is a festival that happens *in people's hands* — in apartments and schoolrooms and, if you know where to look, at shrines where the ritual has been performed the same way for centuries.

I stumbled into mine.

The Man with the Wooden Box

I'd been living in Tokyo for about three years when I found myself in Yanaka on a cold February afternoon, killing time between a lunch in Nezu and an interview further north. Yanaka is one of those neighborhoods that somehow avoided the firebombing of 1945 and then, somehow again, the redevelopment that ate most of the city in the decades after. The result is a place that looks like what Tokyo might have been everywhere — narrow lanes, old wooden houses, a cemetery large enough to get genuinely lost in.

I ducked into a small hardware-and-sundries shop near Yanaka Ginza shopping street, the kind that sells hinges and soy sauce dispensers and apparently, in early February, bags of *fuku mame* — the roasted soybeans used for Setsubun — for ¥320 a bag. The owner was a man somewhere between seventy and ninety, the kind of age that becomes difficult to estimate in Japan, wearing a knitted vest over a work shirt, moving slowly but with total economy of motion.

I asked him, in Japanese, if he thought people still took Setsubun seriously or whether it had become the kind of thing you do because you bought the beans and then feel obligated. He looked at me for a moment like he was deciding whether I was worth the explanation.

"The *oni* don't care whether you believe in them," he said.

Then he sold me a bag of beans and went back to reading his newspaper.

What's Actually Happening

*Oni* are demons, or something close enough to that word for it to be useful. In Setsubun's central ritual — *mamemaki*, bean throwing — you scatter roasted soybeans to drive them out of your home. You shout *oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi*: demons out, good fortune in. Then, to seal the luck in, you eat one soybean for each year of your age. If you're sixty-three, that's a lot of soybeans. The year-counting part is not optional, according to the hardware store man, though I didn't find that out until the following February when I tried skipping it.

The origins pull from a mix of Chinese cosmology, Shinto purification ritual, and something that probably predates both. Beans were considered powerful because the word *mame* is written with characters that can also be read as "destroying demons." Whether that etymology came before or after the ritual is the kind of question that scholars argue about and practitioners don't particularly care about.

What matters, experientially, is what happens when you attend mamemaki at a major shrine.

At Naritasan Shinshoji Temple in Narita — about 60 minutes from Tokyo Station on the Narita Express, around ¥3,000 each way — the ceremony draws crowds so large you feel the body heat from fifty meters away. Sumo wrestlers and kabuki actors traditionally throw beans here, and they do it with a ferocity that suggests they take the demon-expulsion mandate seriously. Bags of beans arc over the crowd. People scramble. Children are lifted onto shoulders. The whole thing happens over about forty minutes starting around 10am on February 3rd, and if you want a spot near the front, arrive by 8:30.

At Zojoji Temple in Minato ward — a 5-minute walk from Daimon Station on the Oedo Line — the scale is smaller but the backdrop is Zojoji's red-lacquered *sangedatsumon* gate with Tokyo Tower visible above the roofline, and the combination of ancient ritual and 1958 steel tower somehow captures the city's contradictions better than any postcard does.

The Eho-maki Problem

Somewhere in the last twenty years, a second Setsubun tradition went nationwide that purists like the hardware store man probably have opinions about: eating *eho-maki*, a thick sushi roll consumed in silence while facing the lucky compass direction for that year. You eat the whole roll without cutting it, without speaking, and you make a wish.

The tradition originated in Osaka, possibly in the 1980s as a promotion by sushi shops, possibly earlier — the documented history is genuinely murky. What's not murky is that convenience store chains, particularly 7-Eleven and Lawson, now sell somewhere around 200 varieties of eho-maki every February, ranging from a basic tekka-maki style roll for ¥598 to seafood-loaded monstrosities with whole shrimp hanging off the end for closer to ¥2,200.

The oni don't care whether you believe in them.

I have eaten many eho-maki from convenience stores. I have eaten them from high-end depachika counters in Isetan's basement in Shinjuku. I have eaten them in silence facing south-southeast — which was the lucky direction in the Year of the Tiger — while sitting cross-legged on my apartment floor at midnight feeling both sincere and slightly ridiculous. The good ones have the rice at room temperature, not cold, and the nori has just enough resistance before it gives. The bad ones taste like refrigerated sadness and cost ¥1,800 for the privilege.

If you're here for Setsubun, buy your eho-maki from a neighborhood sushi shop rather than a convenience store. Most will be making them fresh on February 2nd and 3rd. Point at the one in the glass case and hold up one finger — the transaction requires no Japanese whatsoever.

How to Actually See This

Most first-time visitors to Japan in early February are here for other reasons — winter clearance sales, skiing in Hokkaido, or just taking advantage of the fact that this is the least-crowded month to visit Tokyo, which it genuinely is. Setsubun offers something you can layer on top of whatever else you're doing.

If you're based in Tokyo, three options are worth your time depending on how deep you want to go. Sensoji Temple in Asakusa holds mamemaki in the late morning on February 3rd, and the combination of the Nakamise shopping street beforehand and the ceremony itself gives the whole day a coherent shape. From Asakusa Station (Ginza Line), the temple grounds are a 5-minute walk, and the ceremony is free to watch.

For something smaller and more intimate, Nezu Shrine in Bunkyo ward — a 7-minute walk from Nezu Station on the Chiyoda Line — holds its ceremony with far fewer tourists and a crowd that is mostly neighborhood families and older residents. The difference in atmosphere between Sensoji and Nezu on this particular day is the difference between a performance and a neighborhood event. Both are legitimate. They feel different in the way a jazz club feels different from a concert hall — same music, different relationship to it.

And if you happen to be in Yanaka, look for the small shrines tucked into residential lanes. On Setsubun, the ones without websites or English signage are often doing something genuinely old. Follow the smell of roasting beans and the sound of children shouting *oni wa soto* in high, uncertain voices, and you'll find it.

What the Hardware Store Man Actually Gave Me

I've thought about that exchange more than it probably warrants. The man wasn't being mystical — he was making a practical point. Rituals don't require belief to function. You do the thing, the thing does something to you, and whether there was a demon in the room beforehand is somewhat beside the point.

When I got back to my apartment that February, I opened the windows despite the cold — that's traditional, to let the demons flee — and threw the soybeans. Both at the door (outward, for the demons) and at the corners of each room (inward, for the luck). I ate thirty-four soybeans because I was thirty-four, which took longer than you'd expect. The apartment felt cleared out after, the way a room feels after you've changed the sheets: same room, slightly different version.

I have done this every February since. I buy my beans from a different small shop each year — part ritual, part excuse to wander neighborhoods I haven't mapped yet. Last year I found a shrine in Koenji, about 20 minutes from Shinjuku Station on the Chuo Line, that does the ceremony at dusk rather than midday, so the bean-throwing happens against a darkening sky with paper lanterns lit around the courtyard. That's the version I'd tell you to find, if you can.

The full Setsubun experience — beans, eho-maki, a shrine ceremony, and ideally some older Japanese person willing to explain the demon logistics — costs almost nothing. Your biggest expense is the eho-maki if you buy a good one, and your time, which on February 3rd in Japan is very well spent. If you're building your itinerary around seasonal events, this one rewards the investment without requiring you to be anywhere particular. Demons, it turns out, are everywhere. The beans just remind them to leave.

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