Choosing days from historical sources
Byodoji Almanac
Choose a date to see it in the Japanese lunisolar calendar, along with the favorable and unfavorable notes for activities such as weddings, building, travel, and Shinto rites, and what each note means. The explanations draw on calendar sources from China and Japan, from early times to the modern era.
Selected date
Loading the lunisolar date and calendar notes.
How to read the Byodoji Almanac
A guide to reading the calendar notes that overlap on a day, activity by activity: weddings, building, travel, Shinto rites, and more.
The sources that record lucky and unlucky days come from many periods and traditions: East Asian date selection, the Chinese translation of the Sukuyō scripture, Japanese annotated calendars and the theories of calendar experts, medieval date-selection manuals, early modern regional calendars and popular almanacs, the practice of craftsmen and local communities, and modern fortune calendars. Each source assigns notes to days in its own way and for its own purposes.
The Byodoji Almanac calculates the notes for the selected date from tables collated from the various editions of the Hoki. Each note is explained with reference not only to these tables but also to calendar books and research from different periods. The explanations keep apart what the sources state directly, the background shared by related notes, and what has not been confirmed.
A single day can carry both favorable and unfavorable notes. This is because notes for different activities, such as weddings, house building, travel, going into the mountains, and Shinto rites, have been layered onto the same days. Rather than judging the day by which kind has more entries, select the entries that concern what you plan to do, and check what they apply to, their exceptions, and variant views.