all right now that we've done periodization and eras it's time to move on to the sexagenery cycle and the lunar calendar and i'm going to approach those in that order until the 20th century the calendrical system used in japan in other words the calendar system used in japan and in china was different from that used in europe and the americas there were two principal differences and these are the things that i want to cover today the first concerned the method of keeping track of the passing years or the succession of years and the second was a method for dividing up the year i.e how many months there were in a year okay now we kind of looked at one method of that method of keeping track of the passing years when we looked at the rain titles when we looked at nengo because we could see that different years different numbers within an engo so nengo if you said something like bunka three or bunker five or something like that that certainly is keeping track of the years but there's another important method that we're going to cover today so i'm going to start with the cycles the chinese and the japanese and the koreans reckon the passage of time in cycles both days and years and actually even months were tracked in cycles of 60 designated by the permutations of the so-called 10 heavenly stems and the 12 earthly branches i'm going to front load a whole bunch of abstract stuff for you right here and then i'm going to give you some real concrete examples the japanese refer to this system the chinese zodiac as etho the cycle itself had a real impact on history the first day of the cycle or the first year of a cycle the quinoa day was believed to be very auspicious and therefore many events like launching a rebellion making some big important political move were timed to occur on such days so what are these cycles how do they come together the heavenly stems earthly branches how does that come together to 60 let me try and spell it all out for you we're going to start with the heavenly stems the heavenly stems are referred to in japan in terms of the five elements the traditional five elements wood fire earth metal and water each stem is either what they call the older brother or the younger brother of the elements you have five elements and you've got ten heavenly stems and i'll put these all together for you here on the next slide on a chart i should also mention though and we're going to come back to this when we do ordinal systems that an important use of the heavenly stems is not just in this exaggerated cycle but it's also as an ordinal system so here's a basic chart on the left we have the five elements with their own yummy they should be familiar to you because you know the days of the week and then on the right we have the ten heavenly stems with their own yummy okay so if you see this kanji it could be pronounced coal and indeed when it's being used as an ordinal usually you use the own yummy so you'd say ko o tsu it's like sub a sub b okay but if you were referring to that character alone and not in an ordinal system then you would refer to it as kino e and then there's kinoto so this is kino the older brother of wood the younger brother of wood so if you don't know this kanji this is older brother ani and this is younger brother ototo uh and then we have hino e the older brother of fire hinoto the younger brother of fire tsuchino the older brother of earth the younger brother of earth etc etc okay so if i were looking at this kanji and i wanted to refer to it and and pronounce it not using the onyomi but the kunyami i would refer to it as kanoe i hope that makes sense so those are the 10 heavenly stems that we see here now where do these come from what what are their origins i'm going to digress just a little bit here and show you uh the original meaning of these characters they go pretty far back in chinese history and the modern meaning in other words if you looked it up today in the dictionary what would it say about that particular character and you can see in either case either the original or the modern case um there isn't an immediate connection that at least that i see so for example a shell or a helmet how does that really connect with first it's not it's not immediately clear to me right so the heavenly stems are not easily memorized i think because of this sort of break from their actual definition but they are still very important how about the earthly branches what are they those are probably going to be familiar to you the earthly branches correspond to the 12 animals in the chinese zodiac so we have in order the rat the ox the tiger the rabbit the dragon the snake the horse the sheep the monkey the the dog and the boar and on this chart we have both the kunyami and the onyomi the onyomi is in katakana for each one of these characters and when you look at these you might think to yourself well some of those words are familiar to me and indeed here's their correspondence to those particular animals you might see a chart like this in any kind of traditional chinese reference now some of these as i said might be familiar to you but note that the kanji we see here in this row are not the kanji that you'd find if you look these up in the dictionary if i were using a kokugogi 10 for example and i looked up the word ushi this is not the first kanji i would see in the entry rather this is the first kanji that i would see in the entry and then maybe as a secondary thing they'll label this okay usually there are some exceptions but of these 12 most of them most of these kanji have the same reading as the ones that we see over here on the left hand side like ushi for example ox or torah tiger so the ones on the left are the more common kanji for those animals if you were writing outside the context of the earthly branches outside of the context of the chinese zodiac referring to these animals then these kanji on the left are the ones that you would use but in the context of the earthly branches you're going to be looking at using these particular characters and i i should i'm i'll give you a little bit of a preview of what's coming up in in other learning modules these earthly branches have lots of applications it's not just in the sexagenary cycle so they are good characters to be familiar with and you know you can find them in every aspect of japanese life i thought these were really cute they're little cookie cutters and each one represents one of the zodiac signs all right so let me explain what the sexagenery cycle is webb does a very poor job of this if you did the reading for this lesson you may have looked at that part of his chapter and thought it doesn't really make sense and he he he is explicit in saying i'm just not going to explain it to you if you want to know we you can go off and you can look elsewhere and then he continues on so my job here is to do what webb doesn't do and explain to you what the sexagenery cycle is so we're going to start here uh with on the top row here we have the earthly stems and on the bottom row we have the heavenly oh sorry the the heavenly stems and the earthly branches and these are in the correct order so in those previous slides when we were looking at at the heavenly stems it no they necessarily are presented in this order it's not random likewise this is the proper order for the earthly branches okay this far left hand uh column is just the label so this that this kanji indicates we're looking at the heavenly stems and this one indicates that we're looking at the earthly branches right so we've got 10 characters here and 12 characters at the bottom and as i wrote on the slide we end up with a series of 60 possible combinations let me be more explicit about what i mean there okay the first combination takes the first two characters of both categories and puts them together this is it right here kino uh the chinese pronounce this the jazza um the next character takes the next two symbols and puts them together and i should it's on the next character the next combination and so you can call these a combination or you can call them a cycle the next takes the next two and so on and so on i think you can start to get the feel for what's going on here each one of these combinations is considered a cycle and i'll show you a chart in a minute and puts it all together and we keep going until we get to this point but now what we have run out of heavenly stems we got 10 of those and we got 12 of the earthly branches so now what do we do the answer is that we return to the beginning of the heavenly stem row but we continue in the earthly branch row so the next combination is this so we're using this kanji and this kanji and i bet you can guess what happens next indeed we continue here on the bottom and we continue on the top and we end up with this combination and so forth and so forth each time you run out on one row you simply return to the beginning and start over again it's a fairly straightforward process and if you keep doing this eventually you'll end up right back where you started and at that point you'll have put together 60 combinations or 60 cycles so eventually we get back to the beginning there's a total of 60 and here they are with all of the different readings the readings now i should say there you you can read these with the kunyami you can read them with a um yummy it kind of depends on the context which one you would use so neither one is particularly more correct than the other so here's our chart we started here with that kino combination and then the next thing was the kinotoushi and then the hinoi torah etc cetera right and when we ran out of hempfeline stems we went back to the beginning and we have quinoa inu here etc etc all the way through and once we get to this very last combination mizuno toy then we go right back to quinoa nay and that would be in essence the 61st cycle but really it's the it's the first cycle of the next series so in china and consequently also in japan this system of keeping track of the passage of time uh is very widespread and effective so each cycle is assigned to a year and this goes all the way back into chinese history let me show you here's a partial chart certainly doesn't go back real far the earliest year here is 1804 but you can see that there is a cycle of 60 combinations and then when you get to the end of that you start over at the beginning so the year 1804 was a quinoa nay year and then when we get all the way down to 1863 we need to go to 1864 we end up back here at the beginning the sexagenery cycles were established by the chinese and then they're adopted wholesale by the japanese and the koreans what do i mean by that it well you can be looking at any year in chinese or japanese or korean history and if you're looking at the cycle assigned to that year it will be the same in japan as it is in china now of course as we already covered in the last lesson the rain titles the nengo differ because the emperor is different and the emperor has his or her or empress has hit or her own nengo but the sexagenery cycles do not similarly the lunar calendar is the same when we look at the months and the years and we'll be getting to that in the second half of today's lecture so although you may not realize it because you've only seen reference to it in romanization and this is indeed one of the evils of romanization many things in east asian history are named after the cycle in which they occurred for example the boshin war which was 1868 to 1869 in japan took place in a year whose cycle was boshin and so we refer to it as the boshin war now if you just saw that in romanization it probably wouldn't mean much to think oh maybe there was somebody named boshin or bushy must be a place where battle happened or something like that but actually the bushing war is a name that tells us quite specifically when that war happened at least within a 60-year period and here is a photograph of the soldiers in the bushing war i just had to throw that out i thought it was a lot of fun that's right at the end of the tokugawa and the beginning of the meiji period here's some more examples the teu nonikai was a group of young intellectuals and it was founded in 1897 and it has a cycle of taiyu the japan the japan korea protectorate treaty of 1905 is referred to as the ishibo yaku because it was signed in an ichi year see those first two characters there's that cycle just like this is a cycle and another example the japanese invasions of korea in 1592 through 1598 are known in korean as the imgene wyron because they began in that particular cycle year so this really covers the borders uh here's an example from china the shinghai revolution in 1911 in china was called the shanghai revolution because it happened in the shinhai year so i want to return to this chart that we looked at in the last lecture in the last lecture we looked at this in the context of learning about nengo or rain titles and now what i want to do is focus on this column here that i had decided was not important back then i said oh don't you know don't be distracted by it here it says the cycle you'll see cycle combinations and these are for each year and i really like this chart because it illustrates my point that the cycle is the same in china korea and japan it doesn't matter who's keeping track of the calendar all three places recognize that particular year 761 in the western calendar as having that cycle so while the nengo can be kind of a bother because you have to figure it out according to individual countries the cycle you don't have to worry about me give you a practical example of cycles of years and i'm not making this up a few years ago a man brought some paintings to the east asian studies department here at the university of albany and he'd gotten these paintings at a antique store i think it was in vermont and he wanted to know anything that i could possibly tell him about the paintings and in particular he wanted to know when they had been painted the inscription on the paintings provided some clues so this is what the painting looked like as he spread it out on the table and that inscription is kind of tiny so i'm going to blow it up and we can look at it a little more closer here it is in case you can't even see it on that slide there's that inscription the first thing we have to do of course is decipher the calligraphy and that may give you bad nightmares about the calligraphy unit so i'll do you a favor and i'll give it to you in really clear characters this is semi-cursive and some of those you may have been able to figure out already they're really not terrifically difficult what do we have here well this is the author or the the artist's name and this is the artist's seal okay i'm sorry this is this is the name of the painting this is the artist seal this is the artist's signature and this is the inscription and you probably know this kanji to make right and this one summer and this one month a summer month it was made in the summer month of what year here it is there's the cycle so the year is indicated here by the cycle not by a number and we're not even given an ango so we're working a little bit blind here but the whole sexagenery cycle is 60 years long and i'll tell you you might not be able to tell from the photograph that the quality of the paper and the paint in other words how much it had faded or hadn't faded told me that the painting couldn't be really old it most certainly couldn't be uh let's say more than 150 years old so in what year do you think this painting was painted here's that chart again and so what we're looking for is the first cycle the kino-ena cycle so our choices here are 1804 1864 1924 or 1984. based on the quality of the paint and the paper i eliminated 18 1984. it's certainly wasn't that new and it wasn't as old as 1804 and it seems suspicious to me that it could be really even as old as 1864. that seemed quite unlikely the paper was in pretty good condition and so all i could really tell this man was i think this painting was done in 1924 i didn't know anything about the artist i couldn't give him information there but at least i could tell him when it had been painted so that's an example of how cycles are used and i'm going to give you a couple other examples here too the cycle as i was saying can be substituted for the numeral in a date for example the year 1964 in the western calendar could be written like this showa is the nengo of 1964. the show i'm hoping you remember is a good chunk of the 20th century so we can say that there is uh a if we're referring to a year we could say it's the 39th year of showa or we could say it's this cycle year of showa and this brings me to a particular point let me bring this up so i have an illustration one of the problems with the showa period is it's inordinately long it begins in 1926 and it ends in 1989. uh and so there is more than uh there are more years in the showa period than there are cycles consequently there are some cycles where if you use them to refer to a specific year in showa it might be unclear you might be looking at the very beginning of showa or you might be looking at the very end of showa happily that only happens in japanese history once and that's with the showa period and also happily it only happened once in all of chinese history and so this is still a pretty effective way of designating a year how about this what year do you think this postcard this is a greeting postcard a new year's card and we see the date up here in the upper right hand corner these last four characters are happy new year so what do we have here well it's heisei and there is the cycle everyone got that cycle in their brain let's look at that chart again and see if we can figure out when we think that was what do you think what year was that postcard printed in let me go back one more time so you can look at the cycle and now look at the chart here's the cycle that we're looking for and we know that heisei began in 1989. therefore we know that this greeting card is for the year 2006. i got a couple other fun examples for you here's an advertisement for a brand of soy sauce it's called kinoene soy sauce like the best soy sauce i just love that one last word about the cycles or i'm really repeating what i was saying earlier they they not only pertain to years but they also pertain to months and days months you very rarely see days you'll see much more often in some of the conversion calendars that we're going to look at in a couple minutes you'll see days also i've been focusing on years because i think that's the most likely place that you'll see the cycles but don't be surprised that there are that the days are also assigned specific cycles okay so let me layer on top of the sexagenery cycle the lunar and the solar calendars and let me also say again if you were diligent and you did the reading in web he kind of mixes the solar and calendar conversation together in a way that i wasn't easy for me to to separate out so if you read the solar part and you're still a little confused about it uh wait until the next learning module because in the next learning module i'll be saying more specific things about the solar calendar that will then correspond to what webb says okay so the lunar calendar japan's first calendar came from china via korea that shouldn't be much of a surprise that happens often in the middle of the sixth century the yamato imperial court which ruled japan at the time invited a priest from a country called pekje or kudara in japanese in what is now korea to learn from him how to draw up a calendar this is what webb calls a civil calendar because it was really an important calendar for the government for the imperial family so they had to they they borrowed this idea for the calendar as well as ideas about astronomy and geography from the mainland reportedly japan organized its first calendar in the early 7th century and i also want to point out that the diet library of japan has a really interesting website on the development of calendars and it's in english and i would recommend that you take a look at that it's more detailed than we need to get into but i found it really kind of fun reading so that's a little capsule here on the slide of the origins of the calendar but if you want more more detail about it all you got to do is look at the japanese diet library website okay so i'm going to start from the beginning and talk a little bit about what a lunar calendar is you may already be familiar with the lunar calendar but i'm not going to assume that prior knowledge each lunar month begins with the new moon and continues through the lunar cycle which lasts approximately 30 days so the lunar month is tied to the lunar cycle lunar cycle is how long it takes that moon to go around the earth okay the most usual way of referring to these months in the lunar calendar was simply to number them from one to twelve the first month the second month the third month so we don't have specific names like january february march april we're just referring to them by their numbers so writers would refer to for example the fifth month of the year uh the second day of the fifth month of the year or something like that and in that traditional calendar that japan borrowed from china the months themselves had either 29 or 30 days and that was established in the same way sort of that we have um the same name the same number of days uh each year in specific months so as we have the poem 30 days has september april june and november right uh in in the same way in the lunar calendar uh specific months the third month or the seventh month or the ninth month uh are given either 29 or 30 and that doesn't vary because each month has about 30 days more or less it's you know 29 or 30. the 12 months of the lunar year yield a year of approximately 360 days but that's a little bit problematic because the seasons are governed by the earth position with respect to the sun not the moon the solar year is of vital importance for a particularly agricultural society right so really where the earth is revolving around the sun is um the thing that affects our seasons and our weather and if you're a farmer which most people were in early japan then keeping track of the seasons was really important and that that solar year is actually closer to about as we know 365 and a quarter days this is why every four years we have a leap year and we add a day to the calendar to keep things in line with uh the position of the earth around the sun and this slide shows you that in graphics the earth revolving around the sun and doing so in about 365 days so the lunar calendar again is the the civil calendar sometimes called the civic calendar it was more important for the intelligent uh the educated the intelligentsia than it was for the farmers in the next lecture we'll talk more about the solar calendar but let me keep on going with the lunar calendar so in that lunar calendar scenario with 365 days a year there's constant slippage between the lunar year and the solar year with the result that if you don't correct it the sequence of months loses touch with the seasons pretty quickly it doesn't take long when you think about it a discrepancy of five days a year is a whole lot more than a discrepancy of a quarter of a day a year so the chinese and the japanese because the japanese borrowed from the chinese corrected this problem by periodically adding extra months and these are known as inner calorie months that's a great vocabulary word isn't it these were inserted in the year and referred to with the same number as the preceding month so for example the inner calorie six month was an extra sixth month inserted after a regular sixth month and that would happen about every three or four years or so okay my students invariably at this point asked me well what if you were born in inner calorie month does that mean you only get to sell your celebrate your birthday once in a while it's kind of like being born on february 29th isn't it the fixing of a calendar was deemed so important that it was placed under the control of the imperial court and we'll see more about that when we start looking at imperial court ranks uh and then later in the edo period that responsibility was placed under the shogunate because really the shogun was running the show in the tokugawa period this was serious business uh keeping track of time we really take it for granted in our context you know we have we have clocks all over the place in our lives and we we take the western calendar the gr we call it the gregorian calendar because it was established uh under pope gregory uh we we really just take that for granted in so many ways that once in a while other time keeping sneaks into our lives most noticeably for example with religious holidays easter moves around yum kippur moves around and those are based on lunar calculations but for the most part we live under the gregorian calendar and time is time and you know who would think twice about it but if you didn't have a watch and you didn't have your computer screen looking at you with the time at the bottom or what not your cell phone then and you have no way of keeping track of time that can be a little bit disconcerting so i want to talk about calendrical conversion in east asian studies we often face the problem of converting a date in the lunar calendar to a date in the solar calendar so for example if i'm reading a text from the heyon period it might say uh this this event happened on the 17th day of the eighth month and i can't just take that as oh it's august 17th because it wasn't it simply wasn't okay so it's necessary if you're doing that sort of advanced work to know how to do that conversion luckily virtuous scholars have compiled tables and databases to make the process fairly painless these reference works enable us to easily convert the dates from lunar to solar however because the conversion will necessarily refer to the emperor's rain title the conversion calculators will differ from country to country so a chinese converter or a korean converter will end up giving you and i'll show you a demonstration of this the same lunar date of month and day but then the rain title will be different because the emperor or empress was different and the rain title from country to country was different for japanese studies the most popular choice database conversion is called ningo calc i love that nengo calc is available online here's what it looks like and you can also download it now i'm i'm going to play around with this a little bit show you uh some of its features but i also want to recommend that you take the time to download it it's available in both a a mac format and also a windows format i've never had a student have any problem with the software i've never had somebody come back to me and say oh it crashed my system or anything like that so i would strongly recommend that you download it and i'll show you why if we look at this main page what do we see well the date it gives us a database choice and i'm going to say more about what suchihashi is in a couple minutes we can sort by year here i'll do this pull down menu and you can see this goes chronologically and these are all the different nango okay or we could sort alphabetically by the nango itself so if we know the ningo name but we're not we're not sure what year that was we could do it that way okay and then we can put in a specific date you see our choices and a month this is this this number is going to be the the year number associated with the ningo and this one with the month and this one with the date okay so just gonna randomly go down here i'll pick something notice it's intuitive so it knows that in nimpei there were only four years as you could choose one i'll say the third year of nimbei and i want to know what the ninth day the fourth month was when i do that it hit repeats for me what the japanese date is that i've input here and then it tells me that that date in the western calendar was um the year 1153 and here you might think oh um that's uh april 5th but actually it's may 4th because this is done according to uh european style this negocalc was originally put together by a german man so you have to keep in mind that these are done according to um that sort of more traditional european order and then it gives us the cyclic signs so that particular day which was a monday had this cycle and that particular year is assigned that cycle okay so far so good so why am i recommending that you download it well here's the answer i'm going to bring up what it looks like what that window looks like if you download it if you download nango calc and you start running it you get a slightly different interface so database choice okay that's there same idea because you only have two to choose from oops pardon me and the input you get the year roman is the romanization and look there western date you can go in the other direction so if you're just working with nengo calc through its web page you have to you only have one choice you can only go from a lunar date to a solar date but if you download it then you can go from a solar date back to a lunar date so in this case uh the third day uh or sorry the um the third of may 701 would correspond to the 11th day i'm sorry the 21st day of the third month of the first year of tai ho kaio is the nango okay and then once again they give us the cycle signs one of the things that a lot of students have a hard time with is they in this version they forget which is which day or year but if you look at that main page you'll see the day comes first and the year comes second i want to make a note about that yourself that's the only thing only critic criticism that i have of the downloaded software and unless you think i'll never need to convert a date i'll tell you right now you're going to need to do it for your homework so keep that in mind i have actually one other criticism of nengo calc there's a small portion of the database that's erroneous i keep meaning to write to the author of it and i never get around to it um but there's i've discovered because students have diligently done their homework that sometimes they'll get the wrong answer even though they've input the right thing it's not wildly wrong but it is the cycles end up in particular uh being incorrect so in that case if you're really being a stickler you know what other options do you have there are some other options um those two databases that he refers to one of them is tsushihashi uh sushihashi is a paper um set of tables it's its title its author is a man named suchihashi uh the title is called japanese chronological tables from 601 to 1872. there's a copy of this in the ualbany library i also have a pdf of it on blackboard in case you want to take a look and see what it is the book has tables for converting dates plus appendices for computing cyclical characters cycles for the years and the days of the week it's it's nice to have admittedly in the electronic age very few people will use it uh although it was the basis for nengo calc and and so because mingle cal can sometimes have errors and things like that just briefly i'd like to go over what tsuchihashi how sushi how she is set up and if you needed to use it what that would entail so i randomly picked a page to show you what it looks like in print this is a book that is pages and pages and pages of charts that look like this and i know that on the screen here it's a little bit fuzzy so what i'm going to do is recreate it in a much clearer form on the next slide and break it down for you annotate it so what do you see in each one of those charts at the top of the chart you'll get the years in the western calendar and then in parentheses you'll get the year in the cool key system remember that system that wacky system that's on the far right hand column of the other chart that we were looking at i said you don't need to worry about so don't worry about it okay in the next row we have the years according to the nengo system so it's the gen boon it gives you in romanization and the kanji gimboon ii is the second year of gem boon and then it gives you the cyclical characters for that year a lot of information in that one line and the next line down it gives you the cyclical characters of the day the first day of the first month of the year and if you have those and you have your cycle chart and you have a calendar it would be tedious but you could figure out any cycle day for that year starting with that information on the left hand side we have a column that gives us the first day of each month of the lunar calendar so the first day of the first month in the lunar calendar was or corresponds to the 31st day of january in the western calendar likewise the first day of the second month in the lunar calendar corresponds to march 1st in the solar calendar the first day of the third month in the lunar calendar corresponds to march 31st in the solar calendar and if you have that information you could figure out the rest of the information between those days between the first day of each month again it would be tedious you'd have to sit there with your calendar and sort of count with your pencil point one two three right but you could do it okay um if the font is bold that indicates that that month has 30 days if the font is regular font then that month has 29 days and that helps you do those calculations if the month is italicized that's an inner calorie month so this particular year had an inner calorie month there wasn't there was an 11th month and then there was another 11th month in inner calorie month okay so that's how sushi hashi works and as i said that whole book is just chart after chart after chart that are like that there are other resources there's online calculators for chinese calendars and i've never looked for them but i'm assuming they're probably there for korean also those online resources will as i i'm hoping by now you would expect produce the same result for the lunar month and day and cycle because those cross the borders of china japan korea but they give you a different rain title because the emperor is different now the nice thing about the chinese calculators is they tend to have a broader range of dates and that's because chinese history is longer so a lot of the japanese resources start in the 7th century because that's when japan adopted the lunar calendar uh and when that whole ningo system begins uh but if you were working with earlier dates then um maybe you'd prefer using a chinese resource so just as a comparison here i'm showing you on the left nengo calc converting october 10th 1780. here we see that date into the lunar calendar so here's the japanese date first of all we'll see that the the lunar date is the same in the japanese result as it is in the chinese result right it's the 13th day of the ninth month the 13th day of the ninth month and the cycle is also the same but the nango is different because we're looking at a different emperor and how do you find these conversions conversion software pages basically just go to google type in calendrical conversion you'll find a bazillion resources and of course it's not just east asian calendars there's mediterranean calendar conversion all kinds of stuff like that all right there are also some other print resources besides suchihashi for example in the albany library there's a there's a handful i'm going to show you only one because usually by the time i get done doing that the students eyes are spinning into the back of their head and the one that i'm going to use is the sino-western calendar for 2000 years sadly it ends in the year 2000 so it's and now it's become obsolete uh so i'm going to use a sample data and this is from chinese history not from japanese history okay so the nengo is a chinese here's the ningo is a chinese nengo it's not a japanese nango um but the hexagonal cycle is going to be the same and the lunar date is going to be the same so let me show you how this chart works this one i really like the sino-western calendar in a way a lot better than sushi hashi suchihashi presents a lot of tedium and really converting dates it would be slow to use this one is again a book of page after page after page of charts that look like this and i'm not going to go over all the different features of this particular chart suffice it to say it it makes it possible for you to tell what day the week a day was what the cycle is for a particular day sushi hashi kind of makes that possible as i said but you'd have to be counting and counting and counting and this particular chart as you can see is much more detailed so where sushi hashi just dedicates a tiny little table to each year this chart gives us a detailed day by day breakdown of each particular year physically i'll tell you this is a lot bigger book than sushi sushi actually is this kind of little thin little thing that sits on the shelf and this particular book that we're looking at right here is a much bigger thicker almost kind of like a phone book kind of thing okay so what do we have well we're going to be looking at a specific date okay the column on the left is the month the second column on the page right there you see where that five is circled lists the lunar month in order 1 2 3 4 down to 12. so if you're converting a lunar date to solar date you find the month number that you need in the row corresponding to the year that you need so i'm i want to convert a date from this particular ningo or i could go with the cycle too because the cycle's right there and the sixth year of that ningo okay uh so here i am in the right row and but you gotta you gotta be a little careful because um if you're looking up a date near the end or near the beginning of a year you have to be sure you're looking at the correct row since the lunar years span two western years i'll point that out again in just a minute so you find the day of the month that you're looking for across the top of the page these are the days of the month of the lunar month across the top of the page okay so far so good so we've got the 13th day of the fifth month okay and then you find the intersection of the month row and the day column to find the western date so this is that column and this is that row and that brings us to the number 25. note that the western month is indicated by bold numbers uh sort of in a diagonal way here we have i know it's hard to see is bold that's bold that's bold that's bold see if i can highlight these for you okay october gets an o november gets an n december gets a d and then we're back to january and to february so that's what i meant but you got to be careful about the beginning and the end of a year okay because the beginning of the lunar year will not correspond directly to the beginning of a solar year to find the date we want we just cross reference the fifth lunar month row then with the 13th day of the month to discover the date that corresponds and in this case it is the 25th of what well let's go back to the beginning of that month oh there's a 6 the 25th of june what year well we've got two years being covered in this row and it's indicated here 747 or 748 so 747 we start here with march of 747 and end with february of 7 48 here we are in june so it's it's june 25th 7 47. and indeed if we went to shihashi and did that conversion this is what we would find there it is okay so that's calendrical conversion we've got one more learning module on the passage of time we're going to be looking at the solar calendar and at hours and minutes