Page:A handbook of modern Japan (IA handbookofmodern01clem).pdf/111

Rh for taking vengeance upon a straw image of the recreant lover at the shrine of Fudō.

"After 5 many people will not put on new clothes or sandals" (Griffis). From "Superstitious Japan": "If one swallows seven grains of red beans (azuki) and one go of sake before the hour of the ox on the first day of the year, he will be free from sickness and calamity throughout the year; if he drinks toso (spiced sake) at the hour of the tiger of the same day, he will be untouched by malaria through the year. On the seventh day of the first month if a male swallows seven, and a female fourteen, red beans, they will be free from sickness all their lives; if one bathes at the hour of the dog on the tenth day [of the same month], his teeth will become hard."

There are also superstitions about ages. Some persons, for instance, "are averse to a marriage between those whose ages differ by three or nine years. A man's nativity also influences the direction in which he should remove; and his age may permit his removal one year and absolutely forbid it the next." There are also critical years in a person's life, such as the seventh, twenty-fifth, forty-second, and sixty-first years for a man, and the seventh, eighth, thirty-third, forty-second, and sixty-first years for a woman. There is a similar story to the effect that a child born (or begotten?) in the father's