“After 5 P. M. many people will not put on new clothes or sandals” (Griffis). From “Superstitious Japan”: “If one swallows seven grains of red beans (_azuki_) and one _go_ of _sake_ before the hour of the ox on the first day of the year, he will be free from sickness and calamity throughout the year; if he drinks _toso_ (spiced _sake_) at the hour of the tiger of the same day, he will be untouched by malaria through the year. On the seventh day of the first month if a male swallows seven, and a female fourteen, red beans, they will be free from sickness all their lives; if one bathes at the hour of the dog on the tenth day [of the same month], his teeth will become hard.” There are also superstitions about ages. Some persons, for instance, “are averse to a marriage between those whose ages differ by three or nine years. A man’s nativity also influences the direction in which he should remove; and his age may permit his removal one year and absolutely forbid it the next.” There are also critical years in a person’s life, such as the seventh, twenty-fifth, forty-second, and sixty-first[66] years for a man, and the seventh, eighth, thirty-third, forty-second, and sixty-first[66] years for a woman. There is a similar story to the effect that a child born (or begotten?) in the father’s forty-third year is supposed to be possessed of a devil. When such a child is about one month old, it is, therefore, exposed for about three hours in some sacred place. Some member or friend of the family then goes to get it, and bringing it to the parents, says: “This is a child whom I have found and whom you had better take and bring up.” Thus having fooled the devil, the parents receive their own child back.