A New Warehouse for J-List, and Bad Luck?

J-List is breaking ground on a new warehouse tomorrow, which will allow us to stock a lot more cool Japanese toys, bento boxes and other fun products and help us serve our wonderful customers better than ever. We've been in quite a hurry to start the construction, of course so we can have the space to use for the busy Christmas season, but there's another reason, too. I recently turned 40, and because of a commonly held Japanese belief that some years are unlucky (called yakudoshi, meaning "unlucky year"), we've got to finish the warehouse construction this year. For a man, his 42nd year is thought to be extremely unlucky, and the years before and after are also considered dangerous; during these years it's a bad idea to begin any new project, such as building a house or starting a business. While I'm generally not the superstitious type, and in fact married my wife on Butsumetsu, the Japanese unlucky day that commemorates the death of Buddha (we figured my foreign-ness would cause the bad luck to work in reverse, and it has so far), my wife refused to budge when it came to the yakudoshi issue. The supposed unlucky ages are, for males, 25, 41 ("pre-unlucky"), 42 ("big unlucky"), 43 ("post-unlucky"), and 61; for women the ages are 19, 32 (pre), 33 (big), 34 (post), 37 and 61. If you do have an unlucky year coming up, don't worry: you can visit a Shinto shrine that specializes in yakuyoke, or removal of bad luck, like the famous Sano Yakuyoke Taishi shrine near Tokyo, where the Shinto priests will pray for the removal of your personal bad luck for a fee of 3000, 5000 or 10,000 yen.