六曜 ROKUYO – A warning

"It's bad luck to be superstitious." (Andrew Mathis)

We don't want to be seen as promoters of the idea of Rokuyo - we reject the notion that it has any mystical power at all.

Here we explain why.

六曜 ROKUYO – A warning

The concept of Rokuyo suffers the same basic problem as Astrology. Many people believe that the alignment of distant planets on their birth date can affect their lives. Maybe it can, but compared with what's happening on this planet, while we are living our lives now, must surely have infinitely more impact on our lives than astrology. And yet people change their actions according to some ancient sage's interpretation of distant planets. Very strange behaviour.

Before we delve into Astrology too deeply, let's look at some fundamental flaws:

Orientation: Astronomers of old had a geocentric belief that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, and the heavens rotated around the inside surface of a gigantic spherical ball. There is little similarity between this imagination and the observations of today's scientific astronomers. Astrologers, however, retain this geocentric concept.
Calibration: Today's zodiac was formulated some 2,500 years ago and the solstice points have moved over 30 degrees to the west since then. So if you had been born a couple of thousand years ago, your star sign would have been different from what it is today. (Just because something has been around for a long time, doesn't mean that it's true. For many thousands of years, some people believed the Earth was flat.)
Celebration: When is our birth date? That is, when do we become beings? Or souls? Why should the zodiac be based on the time we take our first breath of fresh air? Are we not a being before that? At conception perhaps? Twins share the same 'birth sign', yet often have different personalities and talents.
Rationalisation: Why should the position of distant planets on our birth day, have any effect at all on our lives? Why not the altitude, weather, air pressure, the local level of xenon gas in the air, magnetic field, or any other of the countless components of our very first environment? Why should we accept that the local environment has no significance, yet the position of stars billions of miles away dictate our future? The only force distant stars and planets have is their own gravity. This has negligible effect on Earth.

Planets were once considered gods and their brilliance and mystery gave people Astrology thousands of years ago. We have now lost touch with these gods, but some people still hang on to the ideas.

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The same arguments apply to Rokuyo.

Somebody emailed us recently, asking which Rokuyo day it was on their wedding date, twelve years ago. They're now divorcing and wondered if their marriage failed because their wedding was on the 'wrong' day. It's useful to be able to put the blame on somebody or something else when things go wrong. Similarly when things go right, it's tempting to say "That proves Rokuyo / Astrology / tea-leaf-reading works!"

But let's see how this stands up. Here are a few world famous events over the past few years:

Therefore since the world has still
Much good but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.

A E Houseman

Terrorist attack in New York on 11th September 2001. Rokuyo day: shakku. Bad luck all day (except at noon), which seems to support the Rokuyo pattern.
Tsunami disaster in Asia on 26th December 2004. Rokuyo day: sakigachi. Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon. Oh dear... The earthquake that created the tsunami occurred at 7:59 in the morning. This doesn't fit in well with Rokuyo. Let's look at another example:
Hurricane Katrina smashed into Louisiana on 29th August 2005 and claimed 1,836 lives. Rokuyo day was again, sakigachi: good luck in the morning. Well, the hurricane made landfall in the morning, so there's another misfit for Rokuyo.
Cyclone Nargis on 2nd May 2008 was much more devastating. 146,000 deaths officially recorded before the government stopped counting and thousands more people are missing presumed dead. And the Rokuyu day? Lucky taian!
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded at 21:56 on 20th April 2010. Eleven people were killed and many injured. The subsequent oil spill ¹ in the Gulf of Mexico is now considered the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. The Rokuyo calendar shows it was Sakimake, which is supposed to bring good fortune in the afternoon. It didn't.

Of course, nobody is suggesting that a terrorist attack or some other disaster is just 'bad luck'. Quite the opposite - for the shareholders of matériel suppliers, such an event is extremely 'good luck'. (Not to mention the hundreds of scam websites that always spring up within days of any disaster, to siphon donations to relief efforts.) For Cyclone Nargis it's less easy to see any good fortune from the event. The government has become more open to foreign aid since the disaster, but little else to support the notion that taian had any good luck for the nation. Many people will never recover and yet some Western companies will benefit from piecemeal reconstruction. And this brings us to the point we are trying to make:

Good fortune for one person invariably means a penalty for somebody else. Of course, everybody wants to have good luck and fortune - it's in our sorry greedy nature.

Remember Salim Sdiri of France? No? Well, I'm sure Tero Pitkämäki of Finland will.

July 13th 2007 (Friday 13th, generally bad luck but also Tomobiki - Good luck all day, except at noon) saw them at a GIAAF Golden League meet in Rome's Olimpico Stadium. Tero's sport is the javelin; Sdiri's sport is the long jump.

Tero threw his spear 80 metres, and Sdiri caught it. In his back, straight into a kidney! Talk about unlucky Friday 13th! Of course, if it struck him a few centimetres higher it would have killed him, so he was lucky there. And being out of the competition meant the other long jumpers had a better chance of winning. So lucky for them too.

And staying with sport: The opening ceremony of 2008 Olympics in Beijing was deliberately chosen to be 8 p.m. on 8th August (8/8/8/8); eight being an auspicious number. On the same day, people went onto the streets around the world to recall the 20th anniversary of a protest on 8th August 1988 (8/8/88), when millions of Burmese had marched throughout the country calling for an end to military rule. After that march, three thousand protesters were executed.

Rokuyo pages, but put no faith in the system. Don't even be tempted to dabble in it. Rokuyo, invented by some unknown philosophers hundreds of years ago, is no match for the power you can generate within yourself to change your life. Be assured that you will get much more benefit in life by putting faith in yourself, your family, your friends, and of course, your God.

(This page was updated on 6th June 2006. That's 6/6/6, supposedly the mark of the Devil. And yet nothing unusually bad happened on that day...)

"Experience and wisdom are the two best fortune tellers." (Anon)

Other 'lucky' pages:

1:	Oil companies prefer the soft word "spill" to more devastating terms such as "gush"