Year of the Boar
亥 i · Japanese 猪 · sign 12 of 12
The twelfth sign closes the cycle, and here Japan and China differ outright. Chinese sources give the Pig; Japanese sources give 猪, the wild boar, read i. Different animal, same slot.
That changes the reading. The Japanese boar is not comfortable and domestic but headlong — chototsu moushin, “rushing straight ahead”, is the idiom, and it is exactly the trait the sign is given: courage without a reverse gear. Boar meat stew, botan-nabe, is a winter speciality in mountain regions.
Years of the Boar
Each year page gives the exact date the zodiac year began, the element that goes with it, and what it means if you were born in the weeks before that date.
The character readings above are traditional characterisations with a long history, not predictions. The arithmetic on this page — which animal, which element, which date the year turns — is exact and checkable. What the tradition makes of it is culture, and we report it as culture.