Title:

General Information about Item:

• Genre and Sub Genre
  • Verbal Folklore: Superstition

• Language: English

• Country where Item is from: Japan

Informant Data:

Leeya is a current sophomore (’20) at Dartmouth College. She lives in Hawaii and is native Hawaiian as well as Japanese. When she was younger she spent summers in Japan attending elementary school. She speaks Japanese and English.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: The informant learned of these superstitions from older figures. This piece of folklore was collected in the McLaughlin cluster on Dartmouth’s campus.

• Cultural Context: The superstitions pertaining to dreams is largely symbolic and partly mnemonic, likely unique to Japan. Mt. Fuji is an important landmark in Japan as the country’s tallest peak and is rooted in the region’s endemic animistic religion of Shinto.

Item:

Good luck: Having a hawk, Mt. Fuji, and an eggplant appear in your first dream after the new year is a very auspicious omen for a very good year ahead.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

 

Transcript of Associated File:

Informant: “So, your first dream (I think) after new years is really important. So if you dream about a hawk, Mt. Fuji, and an eggplant then you are supposed to have a really good year.”

Collector: “Cool, is there a reason for the three things in your dream?”

Informant: “They are supposed to be symbolic, I don’t exactly know why, but they are symbolic for something.”

Informant’s Comments:

• The informant admitted post interview that she doesn’t know the exact background for the particular piece of superstition that she shared, but remains convinced it is because they are symbolic.

Collector’s Comments:

• Some follow up research revealed that some of my assumptions were correct. Mt. Fuji is a significant landmark and is a generally auspicious symbol. Other things I learned was that Japanese people regard hawks as very intelligent, possibly due to a history of falconry practice during Japan’s feudal era, and that the Japanese word for eggplant sounds similar to another Japanese phrase that connotes achieving greatness.

Collector’s Name: Natt Chan

Tags/Keywords:

• Superstition/Good Luck/Japan/Dreams