I took today off work today to come down to Tokyo to have some meetings about future J-List and JAST USA projects. As long as I was going to be in the neighborhood, I decided to visit a certain penguin named Grape-kun, who lives at the Tobu Zoo. This is the penguin that became an otaku when his keepers placed a 2D cutout of Hululu, a penguin from the surprise hit CGI anime Kemono Friends, in his enclosure. Grape-kun decided he was in love with Hululu, and now they’re the greatest love story of the year. It was great fun, hanging out with all my animal friends!
While I’m the visible face of J-List, the heart and soul of the company is our president, my wife. Friday is moving day for Mrs. J-List, when she’ll move from her external office to one we’ve built on our own land near the company. One thing about the Japanese: they can be extremely superstitious, and there are several different systems at work in daily life in Japan. These include:
- 六曜 rokuyo, a cycle of six lucky and unlucky days that determine when to get married in order to avoid divorce.
- 風水 feng shui, the Chinese belief that color and direction can affect our happiness.
- 方位学 houi -gaku, an ancient kind of astrology based on lucky direction. Tokyo is located where exactly it is because that’s a “lucky” position in relation to Kyoto, which brings prosperity to the whole country.
- 厄年 yaku-doshi, extremely unlucky years which are age 19, 33 and 37 for women and 25, 42 and 60 for males. You should avoid starting new projects during these years.
- Western astrology, which many Japanese follow.
- Shintoism, the belief that there are kami or gods in natural objects including the the ground itself, which must be appeased with ritual offerings when doing things like breaking ground on a new building.
- Buddhism, which in Japan is largely concerned with remembering your ancestors trying to do what you think they’d want you to do.
Japanese will typically consult one or more of these systems when making big life changes like getting married, starting a business, beginning construction on a house or even taking delivery of a new car, in order to maximize good luck and minimize the chance of some bad outcome. The system my wife follows is a Chinese-Japanese-Korean one called the Four Pillars of Destiny, and according to this system, Friday is the luckiest possible day for her to make her office move. So let’s hope it’s a lucky day, so there will be lots of happy times in the future for J-List!
We got great news for you: were opening preorders for the highly-anticipated moe strategy game Eiyu*Senki, which we will be publishing soon. The game is outstanding, a fabulous world that you must conquer, with the help of super cute gender-bent versions of famous characters from history, everyone from King Arthur to Napolean to Nostradamus. Preorder now!
