The Oni and the Scattering of Beans

They come at the turning of winter.

The oni arrive on Setsubun — the last day of winter by the old lunar calendar, the night before Risshun, before the first day of spring. The word oni translates as demon, or ogre, but the translation undersells the specificity of what they are: they are the bad things that have accumulated during the dark season, given bodies and faces and iron clubs.

They are red or blue. They have horns. Their faces are distorted by something between rage and hunger. They carry iron clubs — kanabō — studded with iron spikes, because a smooth stick is not sufficient for a demon’s work. They congregate at gates and doorways because the threshold is the place where inside and outside meet, and the oni are the outside trying to become inside.

They want in.

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The weapon against them is roasted soybeans.

The logic of this is agricultural and symbolic simultaneously: the soybeans are the seeds that will be planted when spring comes. Throwing them is a ritual planting — not into the ground but into the air, at the boundary, scattering fertility where the demons stand. Each bean, when it strikes the demon, is a small act of spring arriving in the demon’s face.

The head of the household — or, in the theatrical version, someone wearing a demon mask — throws the beans at the threshold while the family shouts: Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi! — Out with demons! In with fortune!

The children run to collect the scattered beans afterward. Each person eats one bean for each year of their age, which is the portion of good fortune appropriate to their years.

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At Naritasan Shinshōji Temple near Tokyo, sumo wrestlers and celebrities throw beans to crowds of thousands. At Heian Shrine in Kyoto, the ceremony is performed with the gravity of court ritual. At farmhouses in the countryside, the father puts on an oni mask and chases the children around the house, and the children throw beans at their father and he falls down howling, and the children understand this as their father being driven back but also understand something else about the demon and its mask.

The oni is not pure evil in Japanese tradition. It is the wild principle, the disruptive force, the winter condensed. It can be converted — there are stories of oni who become Buddhist monks, oni who stop eating humans after a woman’s compassion reaches them. The Setsubun ritual is not an extermination; it is a driving-out, a sending back to the outside where the outside belongs.

The beans scatter at the gate.

The demons retreat to the edge of the property.

Spring enters through the door they vacated.

The family eats their beans. The count of years in each person’s hand is the count of all the winters they have survived by doing exactly this: standing at the threshold and throwing the seeds of the coming season at whatever is trying to prevent it from arriving.