Feb. 3 is Setsubun, which means the end of winter (yay!), the chance to pelt people with roasted soybeans (yay!) and the silent consumption of a thickly stuffed sushi roll while facing a specific direction (yay?).
The holiday marking the beginning of spring and the banishment of evil spirits from the previous year dates back to classical Japanese history and China before that. But over the past 25 years or so, a new “tradition” has stealthily glommed onto the fun, causing parent-age adults across Japan to scratch their heads. Wait, since when is this a thing?
Eating ehōmaki on Setsubun requires one to sit facing the year’s auspicious direction as determined by an old Chinese calendar system — east-northeast in 2024 — and eat an entire uncut futomaki sushi roll silently in one go. As early as December last year, advertisements for ehōmaki preorders started popping up in the windows of supermarkets and convenience stores.
It sounds just whacky enough to be an old custom, but it turns out to be a fairly recent trend.
“When I was a kid, there were no ehōmaki, period,” says Akira Shimizu, global history professor at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, United States, and author of “Specialty Food, Market Culture, and Daily Life in Early Modern Japan.”
In the early years of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), merchants in Kansai would ritually face a lucky direction and eat something without interruption to bring in good business, says Shimizu. But recent efforts to spread the good luck-garnering roll can be traced way, way back to the paragon of auspiciousness known as 7-Eleven.
The convenience store chain is widely credited with exporting the lucky direction roll to the rest of Japan. Hiroshima Prefecture branches of 7-Eleven began selling ehōmaki in 1989; 7-Eleven expanded to Kansai and surrounding regions in 1995; and the chain began selling them across the country in 1998. In 2013, seeing more chances for more lucky sales, 7-Eleven even introduced limited-time ehōmaki for summer Setsubun, a day with very little existing fanfare.
Ehōmaki have since taken off with Japan’s major chains. This year, Aeon is selling ehōmaki in collaboration with Ginza’s two-Michelin-starred Sushi Yoshitake. One premium fat roll measuring 18-centimeters long and 6.5-centimeters wide and bursting with potential fortune is going for ¥1,800. Another ultra-lucky ¥5,000 roll made with saba (mackerel) was sold out by the Monday before Setsubun.
Commerce-invented customs are not isolated to Setsubun, of course. Japan has a designated day for eating eel that falls in summer and is said to help combat the heat. Its origins sound shrouded in ancient knowledge related, again, to the change in seasons and the zodiac, but was, in fact, a marketing campaign cooked up by scholar Hiraga Gennai to boost flagging sales of eel at his friend’s shop during the Edo Period (1603-1868).
It’s not remarkable that the original meaning of a holiday should be co-opted by the private sector to enforce the idea that happiness can be achieved through buying stuff — that is in itself a time-honored capitalist tradition. But ehōmaki have become something of a symbol of Japan’s persistent food waste problem, as the perishables have no shelf life beyond the holiday. In 2019, the government was compelled to issue a request to stores to show restraint in their ehōmaki stock to reduce food waste. In 2022, Kansai University professor emeritus Katsuhiro Miyamoto estimated that Sestubun-related sushi sales were worth about ¥30 billion — ¥1.2 billion of which was lost due to the disposal of unsold ehōmaki.
If anything, the rise of the lucky direction roll is a brilliant exercise in branding. It manages to seize on Japan’s robust seasonal hype machine and drive demand through a limited-time, reserve-now frenzy. Perhaps most importantly, it drags out the annual twins of fear and hope, whose presence ensures that with just a few well placed rituals, you’ll be protected against misfortune — until it’s time to stuff yourself with luck again next year.
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