Japanese Wedding Dates: Rokuyo, Taian and the Lucky Days.
Rokuyo is the simplest system in this list, six labels cycling through the lunar calendar, and it still governs a majority of Japanese wedding bookings.
The calendar
Rokuyo attaches to the traditional lunisolar calendar and resets at the start of each lunar month, which is why the sequence appears to jump. It arrived from China and became widespread in the Edo period.
The rules
- Taian (大安)
- The most auspicious. The default choice for weddings and for registering a marriage.
- Butsumetsu (仏滅)
- The least auspicious, and widely avoided for weddings, though it is also where the discounts are.
- Tomobiki (友引)
- Fine for weddings — "pulling friends" is welcome at a celebration. Avoided for funerals, for the same reason.
- Senshō, Sakimake, Shakkō
- Time-of-day systems: mornings favourable on one, afternoons on another, and only around noon on the third.
- Other lucky days
- Couples increasingly stack Ichiryu Manbai Bi (一粒万倍日) and Tenshabi (天赦日) on top of Rokuyo, and treat days where they coincide as especially good.
What can be worked out, and what cannot
A calendar can determine
- Rokuyo for any date, exactly
- Ichiryu Manbai Bi, Tenshabi and the other lucky-day cycles
- Where they overlap, which is the query people actually search
Only nobody, really can decide
This is the rare system with no interpretive layer. The only genuine complication is what to do when one lucky day coincides with an unlucky one — Fujō Ju Bi (不成就日) against Taian, for instance — and that is a matter of family preference rather than doctrine.
A common claim, corrected
Rokuyo is ancient Japanese religious tradition.
It is neither especially ancient in Japan nor religious. Rokuyo came from China and only became widely used in the Edo period; it has no basis in Shinto or Buddhist doctrine, and several Buddhist organisations have criticised it as superstition. It persists because the wedding and funeral industries organise their calendars around it.
Note the lead times if you are planning: Japanese wedding-date searches run about a year further ahead than marriage-registration searches, because the ceremony is booked long before the paperwork.