Lucky Calendar Days

In planning my son’s bar mitzvah (coming of age in the Jewish tradition – more on this later) here in Tokyo, I have come up against another tradition in the Japanese calendar.

Most of the country goes along with the Western Gregorian calendar since the war.  However, there are still holidays that follow Buddhist and Shinto holidays, such as the celebration of seasonal equinoxes. There are a number of “Lucky” days according to the traditions of “Rokuyo”.

It turns out that the day on which I am looking to have the bar mitzvah is a Taian day – the very luckiest day to hold celebrations and ceremonies of any kind.  Any person who is getting married in Japan checks the calendar carefully for the series of days that are Taian and tries to hold the wedding that day.  Of course that means that everyone plans very far ahead as well.  I am having a challenge planning the party following the bar mitzvah ceremony because so many place are already booked for October!

However, all that means to me is that I have to look harder because of course I want to hedge my bets – a bar mitzvah on a Taian day can only mean double the luck!  We’ll take all the luck we can get.

This is a chart of the days from a website called Seiyaku, which is a site of random publications about religious symbolism.