setsubun and sushi

so setsubun fell on feb 3rd (ish) i think... well its a japanese festival that is celebrated to symbolize a coming of the new year. Sort of follows the gust of out with the old, in with the new.
We have a single mum and her 2 kids living next door to us, and for setsubun she took on the role of "the devil". For setsubun families usually have the dad play the role of the devil figure. The devil is supposed to signify the evil and bad traces that can be found lurking in your home and daily life. So the children of a household will do a little role play of ousting the devil from their home via pelting it with beans.
So, next door, the mum dressed up as the devil and her two crazy toddlers pelted her with beans. I thought it was so cute. She really does alot to make her kids experience the fun in japanese and western holidays. For christmas time she even dressed up as santa claus.
even though her kids run back and forth on the hard wood, play tag at night and cry and throw temper tantrums, both me and shiv have a soft heart for her cause she works, plays and raises two really sweet kids. Often when me and shiv are settling down in to bed on our single man futon mattress, our heads a few inches from the wall-- we will hear a vibrant game of tag/running/screaming/singing.
The pictures that i have included in todays post are from a shinto setsubun festival at a temple in the nipponbashi/tennoji area.
Our day of setsubun began after work, we tepped out into the OCAT silver ball area and to our suprise there was a hip hop battle/concert going on. It was nuts, there were so many people there and they were all watching people dance, dancing to music, or dancing to music in their heads. it was just grand, and then there were battles for break dancing.

I think an interesting thing about japanese b-boy/girls is that they are stull super polite, they bow after one team/side does a break dance/battle . and they shake hands after. its a thing to see all these super decked out hip hoppers bowing to each other. its so japanese.

next we ( ps we is kim-mu, dom-san, shiv, and jan) took the train to umeda area (the commercial/finacial business district of osaka) to find a setsubun event. we tried following a map, asking directions and finding it ourselves but in the end we found nothing, and had a great time doing it. As with many adventures we've had, getting to the destination is 87-99% of the fun, for example -- take a hike to one of japan's thousands of slightly different temples and you'll know what im talking about.
So after exploring umeda for that setsubun thingy, we gave up and tried our luck at finding the "Burning Man" display going down at a shinto temple closer to namba area.
and boy! was that worth it. there were only a few people at the event, and it looked felt and sounded more like a cultic ritual than a holiday gathering.
There was some really creepy sounding chanting and a huge fire, that got bigger and bigger because the "priests" were throwing wooden tablets into the fire. The preists were wearing there huge white baggy shawls, and there shiny plastic hats that were really interesting. I think the whole festival had something to do with " in with the good, out with the bad". More so, a nice little lady ushered us over to the beverage counter where there was a hot, sweet ginger drink..dad you would have loved it. I loved it and you know i dont like ginger!
great photo ops, i think shiv got some great shots www.pbase.com/shivdesilva and so did dom and kim.

We were really hungry after all our walking and searching for a setsubun display, so we decided to save our hunger all day, and then go nuts, NUTS at Ryu-Gaku , and all you can eat sushi train restaurant. and go nuts we did. As you can see in the photos, we ate on average 20 plates each!!, shivs pile is the smallest, BUT, the waitress took away most of his plates before he could stop her. So shivs pile would be higher.
So in 1st place is dom, then me, then kim then shiv. (plates-wise). i dont even like raw fish, and I loved this sushi place. i like the egg, omlette ones, the shrimo ones, the surf clam and the beefy ones, there are also tuna ones and crab ones. So even if you dont like fish, you can do well at Ryu-Gaku. ps, there are also desserts on the sushi train.

These are the photos to prove the carnage