Last year the calendar allowed a nine-day year-end break. This year the weekdays are less kind. The orthodox pattern is probably December 29 through January 3 — a six-day holiday. Some companies that finish work on the 25th may still take nine days from the 26th, as last year… What about you?
Palaceside Building will be closed December 31 (Thu) through January 3 (Sun) like regular holidays; the east and west entrances and the subway-escalator entrances will be shut. On December 29 and 30, shops and restaurants on the 1st and B1 floors may or may not be open — please check with each store.
2016 is hinoe-saru in the sexagenary cycle. As noted in the memo at the end, hei (丙) comes from “elder brother of fire” and means fire (also the sun in nature); shin (申) is associated with metal. In the five elements, fire and metal are in mutual overcoming — wood overcomes earth, earth overcomes water, water overcomes fire, fire overcomes metal, metal overcomes wood. Fire melting metal, perhaps? In hinoe-saru, hei overcomes shin.
One fortune site says: “Hei should be the sun that lights every corner of the world, but by overcoming shin at its feet it exhausts its energy and cannot fully show the expansive yang power of hei.” The zodiac often appears in economic and stock forecasts; along those lines you may read that “with fire overcoming metal, energy goes to the overcoming side, so it is unclear how much power remains to lift stock prices” — who knows?
Finally, what was the last hinoe-saru, sixty years ago?
The Mainichi Newspapers ran “2016’s zodiac sign, the second postwar hinoe-saru — a year of great change?” in the evening edition of December 7, special wide section (http://mainichi.jp/articles/20151207/dde/012/040/005000c). Its list of 1956 events, catchphrases and social trends includes —
Atomic Energy Commission launched, weekly-magazine boom, Minamata disease discovered, Taiyō-zoku, Elvis craze, no longer “postwar,” mass idiocy, second San’yū struggle, Antarctic observation ship sails, Sunday drama, Tetsujin 28-go, Narayama bushikō, The Human Condition, the three sacred treasures, cosmetic surgery
What kind of hinoe-saru will next year be? In any case, we can only hope for a brighter world.
Wishing you all a happy New Year.
＜Memo: sexagenary cycle＞ The kan (干) in the ten stems comes from the trunk of a tree; they are written with the characters 甲, 乙, 丙, 丁, 戊, 己, 庚, 辛, 壬, 癸. These ten stems are mapped to the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), combined in turn with e (elder brother) for yang and to (younger brother) for yin, giving: 甲 (ki-no-e), 乙 (ki-no-to), 丙 (hi-no-e), 丁 (hi-no-to), 戊 (tsuchi-no-e), 己 (tsuchi-no-to), 庚 (ka-no-e), 辛 (ka-no-to), 壬 (mizu-no-e), 癸 (mizu-no-to).
The shi (支) in the twelve branches represents branches of the trunk. In ancient China the sky was divided into twelve directions: 子, 丑, 寅, 卯, 辰, 巳, 午, 未, 申, 酉, 戌, 亥. These too are mapped to the five elements; from 子 through 亥 the sequence is water, earth, wood, wood, earth, fire, fire, earth, metal, metal, earth, water.
The combination of ten stems and twelve branches completes one cycle in 60 years (the least common multiple of 10 and 12), called the “sixty stems and branches” or simply the zodiac.