{"id":16656,"date":"2011-02-07T00:52:49","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T04:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=16656"},"modified":"2011-02-07T00:52:49","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T04:52:49","slug":"foxhound87-setsubun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/07\/foxhound87-setsubun\/","title":{"rendered":"Foxhound87: Setsubun!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Joshua Small <\/em><\/strong><em>is a First Year JET currently living in Ikaruga-cho, Nara-ken and has been chronicling his experience on his blog <a href=\"http:\/\/snorlax87.blogspot.com\/\"><strong>Snorlax87<\/strong><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Setsubun is a bizarre festival in Japan. I know that calling a Japanese  festival bizarre is redundant, but bear with me. Setsubun is the day  before the beginning of Spring in Japan. It literally means, &#8220;seasonal  division.&#8221; Roasted soybeans are thrown at an Oni (demon or ogre), while  the people say &#8220;Demons out! Luck in!&#8221; (\u9b3c\u306f\u5916! \u798f\u306f\u5185!, Oni wa soto! Fuku wa  uchi!?). Although this is not common practice in households anymore,  most people attend a shrine or temple&#8217;s spring festival where this is  done. I recently went to Setsubun.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to go to Setsubun  with Center of the Universe (Tenri) JETs.  We hopped the bus from Tenri  Station and walked about 10 minutes to Oyamato Shrine.  We walked  through the large gate and wandered onto the shrine&#8217;s grounds.  There  was a large bonfire, so we gathered there for a moment to warm up.  As I  was warming my hands, I noticed an older woman walk up to the fire and  throw a department store shopping bag into the fire. My first thought  was, &#8220;Are people burning their garbage on sacred ground?&#8221; Turns out,  there was stuff inside the bag. Though no explanation was given to me, I  assume people burn things that bring bad luck or memories. Again, this  is a guess.<\/p>\n<p>The priests had set up a stand selling bags of  soybeans.  Each bag had a number in it that corresponded with a prize. I  won a bag of potato chips. Yay.  Another JET won an apple. Um&#8230;yay?  When the ceremony started, we moved to the action. 2 priests were  sitting on stage next to large drums.  They said something in Japanese,  hit the drum, and reacted as if horrified. The &#8220;demons&#8221; had arrived.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/snorlax87.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_self\"><strong>CLICK HERE<\/strong><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/snorlax87.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_self\"> <\/a>to read the rest of the post.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/snorlax87.blogspot.com\/\">http:\/\/snorlax87.blogspot.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joshua Small is a First Year JET currently living in Ikaruga-cho, Nara-ken and has been chronicling his experience on his blog Snorlax87. Setsubun is a bizarre festival in Japan. I know that calling a Japanese festival bizarre is redundant, but bear with me. Setsubun is the day before the beginning of Spring in Japan. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-4kE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16657,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16656\/revisions\/16657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}