2018: Year of the Earth Dog
戊戌
tsuchinoe-inu
DoganimalEarthelementYangpolarity16 February 2018year begins8age in 2026
What a Earth Dog year is read as
Tsuchinoe-inu, 戊戌, is Earth on an Earth branch and a guarding animal besides, which the tradition reads as the most fixed of the Dog pairings. Loyalty stops being a stance and becomes a location. Nothing in the combination moves the sign off a position once taken, for better in the readings that praise its steadiness and for worse in those that describe watchfulness with nowhere left to go.
The animal repeats every twelve years, the element every ten, so this exact pairing comes round once in sixty. For the animal on its own, see the Dog.
If you were born in January or February
The Chinese zodiac year of the Dog began on 16 February 2018. Anyone born in 2018 before that date belongs to the previous animal, the Rooster, in Chinese reckoning.
Japanese eto works differently. Japan moved to the Gregorian calendar in 1873, and the Japanese zodiac year turns on 1 January. So a person born in early 2018 is a Dog in Japan and a Rooster by the Chinese calendar. Both answers are correct in their own system, and this is the single most common mistake in online zodiac calculators.
Who the Dog is paired with
Three traditional groupings decide this, and all three are fixed by position in the cycle rather than by anyone’s judgement. The san he 三合 triangle joins every fourth branch: the Dog with the Tiger and the Horse. The liu he 六合 pairing, sometimes called the secret friend, gives it the Rabbit. Directly opposite, six places away, sits the liu chong 六冲 clash: the Dragon.
These are relationships between signs, not predictions about people. A clash in the old system means the two branches sit at opposite points of the circle — it is geometry that later acquired a meaning, and Japanese practice leans on it far less than Chinese practice does.
The same year returns every sixty
Ten stems and twelve branches take sixty years to line up again, so 戊戌 is not just a Dog year but this particular one. The others in living memory and in reach: 1958, 2078. A sixtieth birthday returns a person to the stem and branch they were born under, which is why it is marked in Japan as kanreki 還暦 — literally the return of the calendar.
Where 戌 sits in the old system
Before the branches were animals they were coordinates. 戌 marks west-northwest on the compass, the double hour of 19:00-21:00, the 9th month of the old lunisolar calendar, and autumn. Its own fixed element is Earth, the same as the Earth stem of 2018, which the tradition reads as a doubling rather than a mixture.
This is why the old Japanese name for midnight was the hour of the Rat, and why a gate facing north-east is the kimon 鬼門, the demon gate — the directions come from this circle, not from the animals.
2018 in the Japanese calendar
The zodiac is only one of the two year counts a Japanese calendar carries. The other is the era name: what 2018 is in the Japanese calendar, and how to write it on a form.