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Junishi · 十二支

Same Twelve Animals.
A Different Calendar.

The Japanese zodiac gives every year one of twelve animals — the junishi, the Twelve Branches — and the year you were born names yours. Where the Western zodiac reads the month of your birth, this one reads the year. They are the same twelve animals the Chinese tradition carries, running on a different calendar and sometimes giving a different answer. Knowing yours is a small act of self-knowledge: one more way of asking what you arrived here carrying.

2026 — Hinoe-Uma, the Fire Horse
Yang Fire riding the Horse — once every sixty years, and 2026 is its return. In 1966, the last one, superstition about women born that year cut Japan's birth rate by roughly a quarter: one of the sharpest marks a belief has ever left on a country's demographics. What the Fire Horse means →

Same animals · different calendar

Since the Meiji calendar reform of 1873, Japan turns the zodiac year on January 1 — not at the lunar new year. So a calendar year maps to exactly one animal here, and if you were born in January or early February your Japanese animal can differ from your Chinese one, where the year traditionally begins weeks later. Neither is wrong. They are two calendars keeping the same twelve-fold time — and the difference between them is a quiet lesson in how much of any identity is a choice of frame.

Find your animal

Your year stays in your browser — computed here, sent nowhere, stored nowhere.

The Twelve Branches — the animals

Tap any animal to open its full sign.

Eto · the sixty-year cycle

Behind the twelve animals runs a second wheel: ten heavenly stems — five elements, each in a yang and a yin voice. Stem and animal advance together, and the pairs repeat only every sixty years. That machinery is why some years carry a weight the animal alone does not explain — and it is exactly why 2026 is Hinoe-Uma, the Fire Horse: yang Fire riding the Horse, once in sixty years. The Fire Horse has its own page — this is the system it gallops out of.

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