February 3rd is the holiday of Setsubon, a celebration of the changing of the seasons from winter to spring. The big Setsubon ritual is the throwing of beans and the shouting of "Oni wa soto. Fuku wa uchi!" (Demons out! Luck in!) The date of this festival somewhat coincides with the Chinese New Year and folks actually bring their good luck charms from the past year to the temples in order to throw them into the fire- again, symbolic of the "out with the old, in with the new". Along with the bean throwing, there are also numerous "purification" rituals performed at local temples.
The temple pictured in the slideshow (on the right sidebar), is a 20 minute walk from school. We had a beautiful, sunny, crisp day for our field trip, which was a real treat. When we got to the temple, the fire had already been lit. It was pretty amazing. The most interesting part of the whole thing was watching the head priest and his preparation to walk across the fire. Our students are actually going back to the temple later this month to meet with him to talk about the ceremony and how he prepared, but I found it funny that he spent the past two weeks in pretty serious preparation to do what one guy did first and then a ton of people did after him. I guess his was more of a spiritual preparation, but....? not really sure?!
A few other notes about the photos:
*the priests were throwing water on the fire to aid in creating all the smoke. Apparently, it's good luck to have the smoke blow your way!
*what looked like a pile of trash.. those were the symbols from last year that people brought to be burned. They also brought new items for this year (the year of the ox) to be blessed by the priests.
* the 'head' priest is the one in purple and the one that i have a bunch of pictures of 'preparing'. I wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do, so i kept taking pictures!
* not sure why the guys had animal skins covering their bottoms? I asked my students to ask the priest when they meet with him later this month! That's the first time i have ever seen guys wearing fur!
* the group pic is my fourth grade class with our two Japanese teachers!
* the picture of the blue tarp on the ground was a 'washing area' for folks after they had walked across the fire- they were ushered to the tarp to wash/cool their feet before putting their shoes back on. I was amazed how many older (senior) folks did this.
* the whole ceremony lasted for almost two hours!
Enjoy the video and some of the sounds of the celebration! (any English you might hear is coming from my students! We were the only gaijin/foreigners present).
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