Animal Crossing: New Leaf players will want to clear their schedules for Monday night! On 2/3/14 from 9pm – 11pm, SPLI Co-Founder Gluxbox will be hosting the Setsubun Festival in her Japanese ACNL town of Wasabi.  All participants will receive a free Ogre Mask!

DATE: Monday 2/3/14

TIME: 9pm – 11pm

WHERE: Wasabi Village, ACNL.  For details on how to participate, please visit the Event Page below.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/1461491234064525/

NOTE: To make the event run more smoothly, we are going to do a Live Stream of the event on the StreetPass Long Island Twitch TV Channel. This means that only two visitors will be able to enter at a time, since the streaming 3DS will be in Wasabi Village continuously throughout the event. Please use the chat room on the Twitch TV feed to coordinate on when to enter Wasabi Village. Please be patient, as there will be many people trying to enter at the same time and we don’t want to have disconnection and game crashing issues. Please also be considerate of others and keep your visit brief so that others can have their turn.  Thank you!

About Setsubun

From Wikipedia: Setsubun (節分^?, Bean-Throwing Festival or Bean-Throwing Ceremony) is the day before the beginning of Spring in Japan.^[1][2] The name literally means “seasonal division”, but usually the term refers to the Spring Setsubun, properly called Risshun (立春) celebrated yearly on February 3 as part of the Spring Festival (春祭haru matsuri^?). In its association with the Lunar New Year, Spring Setsubun can be and was previously thought of as a sort of New Year’s Eve, and so was accompanied by a special ritual to cleanse away all the evil of the former year and drive away disease-bringing evil spirits for the year to come. This special ritual is called mamemaki (豆撒き^?) (literally “bean throwing”). Setsubun has its origins in tsuina (追儺^?), a Chinese custom introduced to Japan in the eighth century.^[2] 

In Animal Crossing New Leaf, visitors must go to the Town Plaza to receive their free Red or Blue Ogre Mask from Isabelle. If you put the mask on your character and talk to the town residents, they might just give you a surprising reaction!