February 3 is a fairly important day in Japan. All across the country Setsubun is celebrated, and it’s one of the odder rituals on the Shinto calendar.  It marks the day before the beginning of Spring (on the old lunar calendar).  Basically it’s a cleansing ritual to rid the house (or shrine or temple) of evil spirits and start fresh with a new year.  This is accomplished through Mamemaki – bean scattering –  ritual which actually started in China.  “Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” – “Demons out, luck in!”.

Because I’m me, I decided to celebrate Setsubun in Kyoto this year, as I’ve never done that before.  There are several well-known Setsubun celebrations in Kyoto (Yoshida Jinja is probably the most popular, with over 600 food stalls).  I chose to check out two of the other popular options, Yasaka Shrine and Heian Jingu.  These provided very different experiences.

At Yasaka the distinctive feature of the event is that the fuku mame (lucky beans) which are tossed into the crowd are thrown by geisha.  Geisha also perform on the shrine’s kagura stage.  It’s not uncommon to see women dressed as geisha around Gion, but it’s relatively rare to see actual geisha (they’re discreet) – about 98% are tourists who pay for the privilege of cosplaying geisha.  And since geisha performances are normally very expensive, the chance to see them for free was too good to pass up.

Heian Jingu’s event was much more traditional, complete with costumed oni terrorizing small children to tears (in some parts of Japan, especially up north, the oni really try to inflict serious trauma on Setsubun), onmyouji, and sacred arrow shooting.  This fellow in fact shot what sure looked like a real arrow over the crowd, and it stuck in the ground about 10 feet from me (no barriers of any kind kept onlookers away from the landing spot, either).  There’s also a demon-fighter called Housoushi leading a group of children around the grounds, chanting, and oni storming the shrine and being repelled by beans tossed by priests.

The pinnacle of the event comes with the mamemaki, when the fuku mame are tossed to the crowd.  I’ve been through a few of these and it can get pretty boisterous, but the one at Heian Jingu was especially intense.  As the massive crowd pushed towards the stage the taiko pounded, and an increasingly heavy rain began pelting down.  The rain and the drumming seemed to work the crowd of parents, salarymen and seniors into a frenzy and I won’t lie, it was pretty rough in the middle of it.

The duck, by the way, was captured at Toji, where I stopped by for the monthly antiques market. His name shall heretofore be Ahiru no Ou-sama.