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setsubun (Page 2)

Japanese department store wishes you a good year ahead with 150 types of delicious ehomaki

Welcome in spring with these limited-edition, mouthwatering sushi rolls.

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Japanese miko shrine maidens turn into off-road racing queens in new commercial 【Video】

These girls literally drive away ogres during Japan’s annual Setsubun bean-throwing festival.

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Sushiro celebrates a traditional Japanese holiday with this…sushi thing

As odd as it looks, it actually makes a lot of sense for Setsubun.

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$89 “Phantasmal Sushi Roll” fancies up life with Matsusaka beef and truffle salt 【Taste Test】

If you can afford this luxury lucky sushi roll, how much luck do you really need?

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Behold a 10,000-yen sushi roll covered in gold! 【Taste Test】

We try out an exquisite gilded sushi roll, inexplicably packaged in cheap plastic.

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How to deal with sushi harassment in the workplace

The following story is an important example of how one person’s holiday cheer can be another’s form of abuse in the workplace.

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Japanese cats channel their inner demon during the chilly month of February

February is a hard month to face, so why not put on a mask and greet it looking like something else?

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Red Oni and Blue Oni penguins at Tohoku Safari Park bring good luck and cuteness to guests

Who knew that demons could be this adorable?

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Japan has a custom of shouting “Out with the demons!” in early February, but all we can say is “Awwwwwww!”

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These convenience stores really, really want you to buy their ehomaki Setsubun rolls

Ehomaki “lucky sushi rolls” are a big part of Setsubun—the changing of the seasons festival. So big, in fact, that some convenience stores appear to be losing their minds in an effort to sell more rolls than the competition.

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Demon pants and dog butts coming soon to Japanese mouths

If Sunkus’ Red-Oni-Pants-Lookin’ Bread and Pom Pom Purin’s Purin Purin! Butt Cakes are any indication, 2016 is shaping up to be a great year for baked goods. 

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  • Jan 16, 2016

Celebrate the coming of spring by feasting on an enormous, $200 luxury Ehomaki roll!

Let’s see what tempting (and pricey) Ehomaki rolls are on offer at Tobu Ikebukuro Department Store this year to celebrate the coming of spring on Setsubun day.

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From San-X to Attack on Titan, yummy cake rolls take over Bean-Throwing Festival’s sushi custom

Before you start obsessing over Valentine’s Day plans, let’s turn for a moment to another February whoop-de-do: the Japanese Bean-Throwing Festival or Setsubun. Celebrated on February 3 this year, it’s an intriguing blend of evil ogres and spirits, roasted soybeans, and chomping on a whole baton of thickly rolled sushi while facing in the proper direction. These somewhat disparate ingredients commingle on this day to assure good fortune and health for the year to come.

In recent years, western Japan’s custom of eating a special type of sushi called ehō-maki (恵方巻き, literally “blessed direction roll”) for Setsubun has spread across the nation due to marketing campaigns by grocery and convenience stores; what’s more, the sushi rolls have been evolving into scrumptious cream-filled Swiss rolls! Iconoclastic? Maybe. Delicious? Yes!

So let’s jump on the bandwagon and look into this holiday a bit before drooling over this collection of sushi and their sweet doppelgängers. And Yowapeda fans, I think I spy a Makishima-maki!

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Despite being centuries-old, the core traditions of Setsubun can seem as silly as its common English rendering, The Bean-Throwing Festival. Once a year in early February, households across Japan toss roasted soybeans outside their doors, with folklore saying the practice will ensure prosperity for the next 12 months by driving off the ogre-like creatures called oni.

Perhaps the oddest thing is the way the oni are depicted in illustrations and popular culture. Generally obese and clumsy, they seem to present little if any threat, and the fact that they can be undone by a scattering of legumes doesn’t do anything to help them win street cred, either.

But what if the oni improved their eating habits and started hitting the gym? Would that make them terrifying once again? Maybe, but it also just might make them dead sexy, as shown in this stylish Japanese ad.

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Want more fish in your sushi roll? Japanese restaurant will give you a Whole Sardine Roll

Even if you don’t speak Japanese, if you’re a sushi lover, you’ve probably heard some of the language’s fish-based vocabulary. Maguro is pretty readily understood as “tuna” among foodies with a palate for Japanese cuisine, and many people who can’t put together a complete sentence in Japanese still know that uni is sea urchin, for example.

Not as many non-Japanese speaking diners are as familiar with the word iwashi, or sardine, though. Although sardine sushi isn’t unheard of, it definitely trails in popularity behind less fishy-tasting fare, and its relatively low price and humble image mean it doesn’t have the same level of pizazz as a seaweed-wrapped pile of ikura (salmon roe) or a glistening cut of otoro (extra fatty tuna belly).

Visual impact isn’t a problem, though, for one Japanese restaurant chain’s latest creation: the Whole Sardine Sushi Roll.

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Robocop called in to exorcise demons at this year’s Setsubun festival in Tokyo

As we learned a few days ago, 3 February is the traditional holiday of Setsubun in Japan. Although its customs vary from region to region, most people who celebrate the occasion enjoy the practice of throwing beans to expel evil from their homes. The Shibamata Taishakuten temple in Katsuhika, Tokyo must have had some industrial strength evil in their area this year because they brought in OCP’s future of oni-fighting, Robocop, to toss some beans.

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Demons, beans, and giant sushi rolls – It could only be Setsubun!

When you really think about them, even the traditions and practices that we each grew up with and seem perfectly normal are kind of odd. Easter, once solely the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, now sees us telling children that a benevolent rabbit came in the night to leave them chocolate eggs. Christmas takes us even further into the world of fantasy as kids grow up thinking that a magical man who lives in the North Pole works a team of elves all year round to make presents for them, delivering said gifts across the world in a single night via flying woodland beasts, despite the man himself likely having respiratory problems owing to his XXL frame.

Although Japan doesn’t really do Christmas, it does have a plenty of its own traditions and yearly celebrations, and it just so happens that today is one of them. Setsubun, or the spring bean-throwing festival, sees children yelling at and peppering fictional demons with handfuls of roasted beans, and families sitting down to eat enormous pieces of maki, or roll, sushi, often adhering to peculiar local traditions as they do.

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