The Shujo Onie Festival

My Date with a Demon in Oita

Long time readers may have picked up on this by now but I really loathe covering Japanese festivals on this blog. Blasphemy right? I mean why would anyone be adverse to something so essential to the local culture? As it turns out, there’s a good reason for my madness. Put simply, by the time I’ve finished whipping up an article, the opportunity for you, the reader, to enjoy the annual celebration has long since past. Because of this, my post ends up amounting to little more than a humble brag. Sure, I can always recycle the piece the following year but there are so many other hidden gems that I could be exploring instead. As such, I often default to covering evergreen content that can be enjoyed time and again regardless of when one chooses to actually visit Japan.

Alas, every now and then there’s a festival that I come across that is simply too spectacular not to cover so I’ll be breaking protocol to take a look at one of these today. Known as the Shujo Onie, this mid-winter ritual will leave you awestruck and quivering in your boots (and not from the cold either). Should you find yourself in Oita Prefecture during the frigid month of February, you absolutely must add this event to your itinerary. Though an egregious oversimplification, the basic premise of the Shujo Onie is that the festival heralds the earthly incarnation of…