On That Day in History

Finally got a few minutes free to catch up on what the Japanistas of Blogoramaville have been up to lately and found out from Japan Probe that I missed another Mostly Harmless anniversary, one which I only belatedly and incompletely blogged about while in Japan. February 3 is Setsubun, a Japanese holiday I know little about except that you visit a temple, do a trivia contest, and get beans and candy thrown at you from on high. Little did I know last Setsubun that the best place to experience it is from the margins of the crowd, particularly if you have a 9-month-old in the Baby Bjorn and a 3-year-old in a carriage.

Yup, just over a year ago, I suggested to the Full Metal Archivist that it would be cool to move into the middle of the crowd before the next round of candy and bean tossing, so we could have a real Setsubun experience. How could I have known that the kindly grandmother and the nice middle-aged guy with the broken arm right next to us would join the rest of the people in the temple courtyard and turn the space into a mosh pit once the candy started flying? That I would soon be crouching over onechan and shielding imoto with one arm while regretting that the crowd noise was too loud for the FMA to hear me from a few feet away, much less make her way over to help me protect our girls from the surging crowd? That the people around us would later blame her for bringing the carriage into the courtyard, inadvertently blocking some of them from snagging some beans and tripping one or two who didn't notice it--rather than, say, apologizing for endangering a toddler and an infant?

I still don't know what to make of the experience, and I hesitate to draw any large conclusions from it. But it still strikes me as very strange that such a thing would be possible in a culture in which sensitivity and solicituousness toward others are valued and manifested in so many ways and forms. If anyone has any insight or guesses to share, I'm all ears.