Removing my bad luck in 2008

I’m going to tell you my third visiting a temple in 2008 last Saturday. Last 2 visiting were for praying for good luck in this year, on the other hand this one was for removing bad luck for me.

We Japanese believe that every man and woman has 3 years bad luck terms in their own life 3 times.

Women’s bad luck terms:
1^st - 18 years old to 20 years old
2^nd - 32 to 34
3^rd - 36 to 38

Men’s bad luck terms:
1^st - 24 to 26
2^nd - 41 to 43
3^rd - 60 to 62

Basically the age is usually counted from 1 year old at a shrine/temple, so the age on the list above is one more than your actual age. In addition, women can allegedly remove their own bad luck by themselves by having a baby. It’s a useful custom...

This time I went to Jindai-ji in Chofu-city, the suburban area of Tokyo. This temple is the second oldest temple around Tokyo (the oldest one is Senso-ji in Asakusa). This temple is good at removing people’s bad luck. Though it is famous, I’ve been there just twice to just get off my bad luck in these 2 years.

We generally pray from outside the main building in the temple, but to remove the bad luck we do special things – we pay for the special praying fee and enter it. Actually we can enter it whenever you pay the special fee to pray something. Here’s the main building of Jindai-ji:

There were about 50 people there, but I’m afraid I couldn’t show you any view of inside. So I’ll try to introduce what it happened then. At first 6 monks were coming into the building. One of them blew a triton, and another one started to beat a drum. After that three of them started reading Buddhist sutra and a monk lit a holy fire to purge our wooden plate for keep off bad luck.

In fact we had to keep folding our legs under ourselves during the ceremony. After a half an hour, all the ceremony was finished and the lead monk told us to stretch them and lecture. Then I had pins and needles in my legs too much to hear his story and was worried about whether I could stand after all…Finally I managed to stand by myself without any problems and got a wooden plate.

Now I’m assured a peaceful year, that’s a relief for me.

The Stereophonics

This Thursday I went to the Stereophonics concert at DUO in Shibuya , this was the first concert in 2008 for me. Basically I had to leave the office by 6pm for the concert, so I could get to the venue on time - this is earlier than usual.

I brought my wallet with me but checked all my stuff and coat to cloak so I couldn’t take a picture then…anyway the concert was very nice.

First was “My Friend”, it is really nice song even though I’ve only listened to it by Myspace. Although I didn’t know second song, the third one was “Bartender and the thief.” Every song is up beat so everybody was getting excited.

Oh I found 2 things odd there; one was Kelly’s guitar strap. It was edged with a bunch of red LED ramp and they kept twinkling. At first I thought they were silver buttons or something that reflected spotlights but it seemed different so I stared at the strap for a while. Then I found it twinkled autonomously…might it be cool?

Anyway, the other one was among the audience. There were tens of Western people there and 2 guys raised their hands with Negi – Negi is a kind of onion in Japan, which is similar to leek.

Anyway, the last song was “Dakota”, my favorite song. Good vibes.

Afterward heavy snow in Tokyo

Occasionally it snows heavily in Tokyo. It did snow yesterday, and was a bit heavier than before. People in Tokyo basically don’t get used to heavy snow, so many accidents always happen.

For example, the number of injured people was increasing over 200 and 16 of them broken their bones. And this story is always a main topic for the news of the day.

Most of all trains around Tokyo were delayed and some of them stopped until next midday (because the railway and the overhead wire are frozen by the snow).

And most horrible thing is icy street in the next morning like that…

As people in Tokyo never have snow purpose shoes, we’re usually confused which shoes are better to walk such a terrible road. Fortunately I didn’t fall to the ground this morning though slipped a little.