Setsubun

Light of a firefly, snow on windows
Many years of reading, we passed
We found now our years of school finished
This morning, we have to say good-bye
source

Poignant time of year this - the third graders have finished their entry exams, many now knowing which High School they'll be going to, some still aren't so sure. The past few days have seen a few haughty swaggers into the teachers room, and some shattered slouches.

But exam results aren't half of the trauma of leaving school. As I've mentioned before, the Japanese word for friend, tomodachi, has some deep implications. The Elementary and Junior High schools you go to are determined by the area you live in. This means that unless your family has moved at some point in your school life, you are going to have the same classmates for ten years, and you will do pretty much everything with them. Now people who've known each other for almost their entire life go in separate directions. Maybe I'm being soppy...perhaps teaching isn't the career for me if I'm faced with nostalgia every year.

Anyway, loosely connected, tomorrow is the first day of spring, today being the titular Setsubun. On this day when the new season begins, a ceremony called Mamemaki is performed, where toasted soy beans are tossed in and out of houses to the cry of

Fuku wa uchi
Oni wa soto

meaning "good luck in, bad luck (Oni, demons) out". Of the beans one tosses indoors (representing good luck) the number corresponding to your years must be eaten to assure good luck. The beans are toasted in order to kill any demons within. There are apparently many stories that describe the origin of this ritual, all of them ending with an Oni being chased out of a persons house by having beans thrown at them.

I was invited by some first graders observing the custom to their home-room during lunch, and provided with a little origami box of beans to fling out of the window - supremely good fun it was too, although I was concentrating so much on my pronunciation that I very nearly threw the good luck beans out & the bad ones in...oopsy...

One could write endlessly about the apparent contradictions in Japanese society, famed for their super-refined technology, yet carrying out a magical-religious ritual hundreds of years old...I suppose when you think about it, that sort of thing is common in the West (ie, Holy Communion, although Christians may dispute my use of the term "magical"). I think what differentiates the two rituals is attitude towards belief and approach towards ceremony. As their teacher said, she isn't religious, but she observes the custom because it's fun.

That's an outlook on religion I've seen many times since coming here, one I find incredibly interesting. Religion in Japan is an almost shapeless mass of tradition; no Canon, no Scriptures, no attempts to win converts or save the damned - just a recognition of continuity between all things and the need to co-exist in harmony...I'm quite excited by what I've read about Shinto, possibly the very core of what makes them so...well, Japanese...but I'm saving that for another entry...so I'll leave you with an enigmatic ellipsis...