Celebrating Setsubun in New York
February 3rd, 2009 by James
Today was Spring Setsubun, so a Japanese reporter in New York had a local sushi restaurant prepare him a traditional ehou maki (“lucky direction roll”):
As he went to Times Square and ate the roll facing East-North-East (2009’s lucky direction), people stopped to watch him. It took a total of 3 minutes to successfully eat the roll without stopping.
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GAIJIN DA!!
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I do not want you to misunderstand it first of all.
A lot of Japanese do not have such a tradition.
It is only Osaka and a Kansai region.
マスコミは嘘を撒き散らすなよ‥
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And they say Americans eat too much… XD
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I do not want you to misunderstand it first of all.
A lot of Japanese do not have such a tradition.
It is only Osaka and a Kansai region.
マスコミは嘘を撒き散らすなよ‥
^^Not exactly true. Just check the sushi-ya’s on Setsubun. If they are selling ehou-maki, that means people must be eating them. I’m in Tokyo and I ate one yesterday. My GF is from Ishikawa and she did too. But, yeah, its much more prevalent in Kansai.
マスコミは嘘を撒き散らすなよ‥ ＜－－当然です。＾＾
LF: The reaction of the guy with the knit cap in the video is ppppricelesss… roffle.
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It seems to me that supermarkets were aggressively marketing ehou-maki before the マスコミ made a big topic out of it.
I didn’t translate this survey:
http://release.center.jp/2009/01/2702.html
that shows about 70% in Kansai versus 30% in Kanto planning on eating it.
I went to Hankyu in Umeda, Osaka last night after work to pick up some salad, and the queues at every stall selling ehou maki were horrendous, worse than Xmas Eve for strawberry shortcake!
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Right. I didn’t know this custom until this year somebody gave me a futomaki at setsubun. I live in tokyo. For me Setubun is the time when people call out, “oni wa soto and fuku wa uchi”.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/恵方巻
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Yep, that’s what most people associate with it. I posted about that aspect for last year’s Setsubun ( http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=3713 ), but this year I thought I’d do a post about ehou-maki, which seems to be gaining in popularity lately.
My local Jusco actually has a direction marker on the floor beside the sales area so you can check.
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Ishikawa follows Kansai in many ways – it’s a lot closer, after all.
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