The man had come from China centuries before he arrived in Japan.

The ritual known as 追儺 (tsuina) — the formal expulsion of demons at the turn of the year — originated in the courts of ancient China and reached the Japanese imperial palace in 706 CE. In its earliest Japanese form it was an elaborate production: officials wearing bear-skin hats and carrying peach-branch switches processed through the palace's twelve gates, striking the air, driving invisible evil outward with drums and torches and ritual shouts. Clay figurines of oxen were placed at the gates as guardians. It was a ceremony of controlled noise and symbolic violence, the year clearing its throat before starting over.

Somewhere between that 8th-century court rite and the mid-Muromachi period, someone threw a soybean.

The story most often cited is a legend set on 鞍馬山 (Kurama-yama), north of Kyoto: a monk, confronted by an 鬼 (oni), blinded the demon by hurling roasted soybeans at its eyes, since demons are said to be vulnerable at the joints and openings of the body. Whether or not this tale is the true origin, by the 1420s the Muromachi shogunate's records were already documenting Setsubun bean-throwing ceremonies with unmistakable enthusiasm — suggesting it had become popular enough to be worth preserving in official documents. The soybeans had replaced the clay oxen. The warrior courts had made the ancient rite their own.

The 室町幕府 (Muromachi Bakufu) during the mid-15th century was not a peaceful institution. The Ashikaga shoguns who presided over 節分 (Setsubun) in their Kyoto palace were men navigating an increasingly fractured polity — domains asserting independence, succession disputes spilling into violence, the balance of power between the shogun and his great vassals growing less stable with every generation. By 1467, the 応仁の乱 (Ōnin no Ran) — the Onin War — would ignite a decade of fighting that reduced Kyoto to rubble. The shogun would flee the burning capital. The city that had been the center of Japanese culture for six hundred years would be devastated.

And yet, in 1447, the beans were thrown. And in 1450, and in 1460, and in 1467, and in every year the records went dark and the armies moved through the ruined streets — even then, in some corner of a surviving household, the ritual held.

This is what makes Setsubun unusual in the history of samurai culture: it was not the ceremony of a specific house or lineage. It was not dependent on any shogun's personal favor or a particular domain's patronage. The Muromachi court had codified and elevated it, but the ritual had already sunk roots deep enough to survive the court's own collapse. By the time the Tokugawa shogunate stabilized Japan after 1603, Setsubun had moved outward from warrior households into Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, and the homes of ordinary families across the country — the 豆まき (mamemaki), the bean-scattering, had become universal.

The chant itself deserves attention. 「鬼は外！福は内！」 (Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!) — Devils out! Fortune in! — is linguistically compact to the point of bluntness. Six syllables in Japanese. No qualification, no supplication, no deference to divine will. It is a command. A warrior culture addressing supernatural forces in the same register it addressed enemies on the battlefield: direct, unambiguous, declarative. The demons are not asked to leave. They are told.

In the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate added another layer of structure. The 年男 (toshi-otoko) — the man of the household born in the zodiac year corresponding to the incoming year — was designated as the official bean-thrower, ritually linking the person driving out evil to the cosmic calendar. The ceremony acquired further formality: specific counts of beans eaten (one for each year of your age, to ensure health through the coming year), specific arrangements of roasted beans on 枡 (masu) wooden measuring boxes.

The samurai class shaped Setsubun and then disappeared. The Meiji Restoration dismantled the warrior caste, abolished domains, stripped swords from men who had defined themselves by the right to carry them. The institutions the samurai built — the shogunate, the domain system, the rigid hierarchy of warrior society — were methodically taken apart.

Setsubun remained.

On February 3 every year in Japan, roasted soybeans still fly. Children in schools, families in apartments, crowds at famous shrines — the bean-throwers are everywhere, the demon masks appear, the chant rises in six syllables the same as it always was. The words that rang through the Muromachi shogun's palace in 1447 are the words ringing today in a ten-tatami living room in Osaka, a kindergarten classroom in Sapporo, a courtyard at Narita-san temple where former sumo wrestlers fling beans into the crowd.

The warriors are gone. The ritual they codified is not.