Yakudoshi

[3] To ward off the misfortunes believed to occur during a yakudoshi, individuals may engage in prayer to Shinto or Buddhist deities, attend rituals, purchase protective charms, make pilgrimages, exchange gifts, or hold special festivities, usually at the beginning or end of the year.

[1]: 109  [2]: 197  [6] An anthropologist reported in 1955 that to send away the danger associated with a yakudoshi, individuals sometimes abandoned a personal item such as a comb or a writing brush at a crossroads,[1]: 110  and that in one region, men wore underwear in the lucky color of red during their forty-second year.

During the two-day period, people entering either a maeyaku or yakudoshi year attend the shrine to undergo a harae ritual called yakubarai (厄払い).

The ceremony involves a priest reciting a prayer whilst waving a haraegushi above the person in order to ward off the unlucky spirits.

In 1955, the anthropologist Edward Norbeck dismissed such explanations as "folk etymology," arguing that when yakudoshi practices first arose, literacy was not widespread enough for homonyms to have caused them, but in 1998, another scholar, David C. Lewis, suggested that such puns involve only simple Chinese characters for numbers and could indeed have been widely known even in early periods.