Unlucky ages—The Japanese cycle—Celebration of ages—Respect for old age—Death—Preparations for the funeral—The wake—The coffin and bier—The funeral procession—The funeral service—Cremation—Gathering the bones—The grave—Prayers for the dead—Return presents—Memorial services—The Shinto funeral.
When the Japanese child has passed through its teens without any serious mishap, its mother is not yet altogether free from anxiety; for there are certain stages of its life at which it is threatened by misfortune. Superstition has fixed certain ages, different according to sex, which must be passed with utmost circumspection if one would escape calamities; these ages are the twenty-fifth, forty-second, and sixty-first years for men and the nineteenth, thirty-third, and thirty-seventh years for women. Here we may note a curious way of counting years commonly practised in Japan; in official reports and legal documents one’s age must be given according to the number of full years and months one has lived, but on other occasions we have a very loose way of computing our ages. Thus, when we say that a man is thirty years old, we do not mean that he is full thirty years of age or that he is in his thirtieth year, but we mean that he has seen thirty solar years of the almanac; that is, if we say in 1910 that he is thirty years old, we mean that he was born some time in 1881, and if his birthday is the New Year’s Day, he would be twenty-nine years old on the same day of 1910, but if it is the thirty-first of December, he would be only twenty-eight years and a day on the first day of 1910, still we speak of him in either case as being thirty years old. A baby born on the last day of the year would be two years old the next morning; its second year according to our mode of computation is, in short, the solar year in which it completes its first twelvemonth. When, therefore, we say, for instance, that a man’s first inauspicious age is his twenty-fifth year, we mean the solar year in which he completes his twenty-fourth year. Thus, the twenty-fourth, forty-first, and sixtieth years of a man and the eighteenth, thirty-second, and thirty-sixth years of a woman are really their climacteric years; and of these the most critical are the forty-first for a man and the thirty-second for a woman, for not only these years themselves, but the years immediately preceding and following each of them also, are considered inauspicious, so that the crisis lasts in either case for three years, during which period men and women refrain as much as possible from acts that may appear like tempting Providence.