Unlucky Numbers

As all of you know, in the West, 13 is the unluckiest number. It's a prime number and is composed of 1, the lonliest number you'll ever see, and 3, which is a crowd. Or the Holy Trinity. Neither of which is good. In Japan, 13 is a perfectly fine number for Fridays or even hotel floors, with the added benefit that if you stay on the 14th floor, you don't piss Fate off by pretending it can't count. Japan, though, has its own unlucky numbers, specifically 4 and also 9, for an obvious reason. There are even two ways to say "four" in Japanese, "yon" and "shi," because the latter is a homonym for "death." 9 is the same, being either the inocuous "kyu" or "ku" which sounds just like "suffering." Thus, you can walk into any Japanese gym and hear the kids shouting the equivalent of... "one! two! three! DEATH! five! six! seven! eight! SUFFERING! ten!"

The Japanese even extend the idea of unlucky numbers to birthdays with the idea of "yakudoshi," or unlucky years. For women, 33 is an unlucky year (3x3 is equal nine, which means agony, and remember, 3 is associated with over crowding and the Almighty) while for men it's 42, due to that unlucky 4. I think. I don't really know and have been forced to pull this information from my most reliable research source: my skinny ass.

The little I do know I got from farewell party for the leavers at my dorm about a couple of weeks ago, when we feted Umeda-san, my dorm supervisor who's turned 42 this year. In order to avoid the bad luck, certain ancient rituals had to be performed. First, he was taken to the local shrine and had some kind of traditional excorcism performed by a priest, then people got him drunk and gave him a new tie.

I didn't really get the party, but by partying with him, the rest of us also divide up his bad luck and we all share it among ourselves equally. I was not told about this beforehand, and was a little upset, as I thought the price of the party and necktie was steep enough. Though maybe as the spirit forces or whatever were divvying up the bad luck severalty style, Still, I hate sharing, especially other people's bad luck.

As it turns out, though, I have enough of it anyway. I did a bit more non-ass-based research and discovered that 25 is also a yakudoshi for men. Which means that the year of my life when I got collapsed few times from PDO (i had never been hospitalized before), stumbled across some brutal stabbing news from closed people, being single and broke, and have to sit my ass for another few months in sendai was merely a preview of the bad luck coming this year.

And I'm not even getting beer and a necktie out of it.