Year of the Horse
午 uma · Japanese 馬 · sign 7 of 12
The Horse is 午, read uma, and it holds due south and midday — the hour of the Horse is noon, which is where the Japanese word for “afternoon”, gogo, literally “after the Horse”, comes from.
One Horse year in sixty is different. Hinoeuma — the Fire Horse, 丙午 — carries a superstition that women born in it are strong-willed to the point of being unmarriageable. In 1966 the Japanese birth rate fell by around a quarter and recovered the next year. 2026 is the next one, the first in sixty years.
Years of the Horse
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.