Japanese Dream Meaning: What Your First Dream of the Year Says
Search for Japanese dream meaning and one dream keeps coming up: the very first one of the new year. It’s called hatsuyume (初夢), and traditionally, whatever you saw in it was said to predict your luck for the year ahead. The best things to see? Mount Fuji first, then a hawk, then an eggplant. Yes, an eggplant.
In Japan the first dream works less like a puzzle and more like a forecast, and people have spent centuries trying to nudge it in the right direction. Below is how the custom works, where the three lucky symbols come from, and what you can do if your first dream is a bad one.
What is hatsuyume, and which night counts?
Hatsuyume just means “first dream.” Easy enough, until you try to figure out which night it is. Wikipedia explains that since lots of people stayed up on New Year’s Eve, the first dream usually happened on the night of January 1. Nippon.com says the night of January 2 into January 3 is the most common answer, and some people still go with January 1. Before Japan adopted the Western calendar, the timing was tied to Risshun on the old calendar instead.
Honestly, we like that nobody agrees. It means you get two shots at a good first dream.
Japanese dream meaning: why are Mount Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant lucky?
The ranking comes from an old saying, “ichi-Fuji, ni-taka, san-nasubi”: one, Fuji; two, a hawk; three, an eggplant. According to Wikipedia, it goes back to the early Edo period. But why these three? There are two main theories.
The first is about a place. According to nippon.com, the most accepted theory is that all three were famous in Suruga Province, today’s Shizuoka Prefecture, which was tied to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Edo period. Suruga had Japan’s highest mountain, its hawks and its early eggplants.
The second is about sound. As nippon.com explains, Fuji sounds like fushi, which means immortality. Taka, the hawk, sounds like the word for “lofty.” Nasu, the eggplant, sounds like the verb for “to achieve.” Put together, the three read like a wish for a long life, a rise in the world and getting things done, which is a pretty good list of hopes for any new year.
What comes after the eggplant?
Fewer people know that the list keeps going. Number four is a fan (yon-sen), number five is tobacco (go-tabako) and number six is a zatō, a blind acupressurist (roku-zatō). Wikipedia says nobody is quite sure where these three came from, or whether they were tacked on later or were part of the list all along. So a fan in your first dream counts. Why it counts is anyone’s guess.
What if your first dream of the year is bad?
People also had ways to protect themselves. One custom, described by nippon.com, was to put a picture of the takarabune, the treasure ship carrying the Seven Gods of Fortune, under your pillow. If the dream turned out badly, you could throw the picture into a river to cancel its effect. Nippon.com adds that in the Edo period, sellers of these pictures were known for calling out “Otakara, otakara,” and some shrines still hand them out today.
Some of these ships had the character 獏 on the sail. That is the baku, a creature from folklore said to eat nightmares. We wrote more about the baku in our post on dream practices across Asian cultures.
How can you remember your own first dream?
First dreams are slippery, so the trick is to catch yours early. If you want to try hatsuyume this year, pick a night (January 1 or 2) and log whatever you remember in EMPI DREAM the moment you wake up, even if all you’ve got is a color or one blurry image. The AI insights can help you think through what showed up, and you can turn the dream into an AI dream image to keep with the entry. Then come back to it in December and see how it lines up with how your year turned out.
A good first dream also depends on a good night’s sleep. If yours has been rough lately, our post on why sleep comes before dreams is a good place to start.
Download EMPI DREAM on the App Store.
Sources
Nippon.com: Jirō Dreams of Fuji: Japan’s “Hatsuyume” Tradition