Appendix I: THE CALENDAR The traditional Japanese calendar was a great deal more complicated than anything we have known in the West. Also, because of yin-yang and related ideas, it was far more important in people’s everyday lives than even the medieval European calendar with its plethora of Saints’ Days, movable feasts, and other observances. In order to explain as clearly as possible the calendar that dominated Heian activities, ranging from the appointment of high government officials to trivia like cutting one’s toe-nails, it is best to start with the Chinese Zodiac, which was the basis of dates, time, and directions. This diagram drawn by Mrs Nanae Momiyama, gives the following information from outside to inside: (i) the compass directions, (ii) the hours of day and night (midnight at the top, noon at the bottom),
(iii) drawings of the twelve “branches”, each corresponding to one watch or two Western hours. In order to designate a date the Japanese normally used a combination of two series, which produced a cycle of sixty days or sixty years, sixty of course being the first number divisible by both ten and twelve. The first series consisted of the twelve signs of the Zodiac as shown in the diagram. These signs, known as “branches”, were as follows: (i) rat, (ii) ox, (iii)
