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Plate 1 A galloping horse with flames rising from its mane and tail

Fire Horse

2026 is a Fire Horse year (丙午 bǐngwǔ), the first since 1966: by the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar it began on 17 February 2026 and ends on 5 February 2027. In Japan, where the year is called hinoeuma, a belief about girls born in it was followed in 1966 by a fall of about a quarter in births.

Chinese zodiac. Also called fire horse 2026, fire horse meaning, fire horse year, hinoeuma, year of the fire horse.

Meaning

In the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese calendar, each year pairs a heavenly stem with an earthly branch. The stem 丙 bǐng is yang Fire and the branch 午 wǔ is the Horse, so the pair comes round every sixty years: 1906, 1966, 2026 and next in 2086 (see the five elements for how the cycle works). In Japanese the same characters are read hinoeuma: hinoe, the “elder brother of fire”, and uma, the horse. There the year carries a belief peculiar to Japan: that women born in it are ill-fated or dangerous to their husbands. K. Kaku, who studied the 1966 birth figures in the 1970s, calls it a superstition observed only by the Japanese, and the sociologist Kikkawa Tōru writes that although the cycle came from China, the taboo on women’s marriages and births is unique to Japan. In 1966 Japan registered 1,361,000 births, against 1,824,000 the year before and 1,936,000 the year after. The Fire Horse is followed by a yin Fire year, the Fire Goat (丁未 dīngwèi), which begins on 6 February 2027.

Origin and history

Kikkawa traces the Japanese belief to the early Edo period, when stories that women born in a Fire Horse year were hot-tempered and would “eat their husbands alive” spread through puppet theatre and popular books. The best known is Yaoya Oshichi, said to have been born in the Fire Horse year 1666, who committed arson to try to meet the man she was infatuated with, and who became a favourite subject of ningyō jōruri puppet plays. Kikkawa calls the belief the fake news of its day, with nothing to support it. Women born in such years received fewer offers of marriage, and as each Fire Horse year came round, he writes, some couples avoided pregnancy or registered a daughter’s birth in the year before or after.

Yet the records for 1846 and 1906 show no clear dip in births, Kikkawa notes, though people then paid far more attention to lucky and unlucky days. What changed by 1966 was memory and the media. Women born in 1906 had found it hard to marry around 1925, when they reached twenty, and some who stayed unmarried took their own lives; because people now lived longer, many from 1906 were still alive in 1966, and older relatives warned young couples. Newspapers, magazines and television covered the coming year from 1964, some telling readers to avoid pregnancy and others to stamp out the superstition.

In Japan the year that matters is the calendar year: the Japan Times describes people refraining from having babies “for an entire calendar year”, and Japan’s Statistics Bureau puts the small number born in Shōwa 41, the calendar year 1966, down to hinoeuma. In 2014 the Bureau found that people born in Horse years were the smallest of the twelve animal groups in Japan’s population, for the same reason. By the Chinese calendar the bǐngwǔ year ran from 21 January 1966 to 8 February 1967.

Years of the Fire Horse

YearElementBeginsEnds
1906Fire25 January 190612 February 1907
1966Fire21 January 19668 February 1967
2026Fire17 February 20265 February 2027
2086Fire14 February 20862 February 2087

The dates are those of the Chinese lunar year, from the Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion tables; someone born in January or early February belongs to the year before if born before that year’s Lunar New Year. Japanese birth statistics count the calendar year instead.

How Japan’s births fell in 1966

The figures from Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS), drawn from the health ministry’s vital statistics, show 1,824,000 births in 1965, 1,361,000 in 1966 and 1,936,000 in 1967, a fall of about 25 per cent and then a rebound. The total fertility rate went from 2.14 to 1.58 and back to 2.23. How couples brought this about is disputed.

K. Kaku, writing in the Annals of Human Biology in 1975, counted about 463,000 fewer live births than the trend predicted and put it down partly to contraception and partly to abortion: the induced abortion rate reported for 1966, 43.1 per 1,000 births, was significantly higher than the 30.6 the trend predicted. In a second paper he found a rise in early neonatal deaths recorded as accidents and violence among girls born that year but not boys, and in 2011 Tim Bruckner of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues estimated 721 more female infant deaths in 1966 than expected. Our World in Data, summing up in 2024, repeats that abortions rose.

Kikkawa reads the records differently. He finds almost none of the imbalance between boys and girls seen in earlier Fire Horse years, and no evidence that abortions increased; babies were by then mostly born in hospital, recorded in a maternal and child health handbook issued months before, so births could not be moved to another year on paper. He estimates 414,000 fewer births than expected in 1966, with 87,000 more than expected in 1965 and 123,000 more in 1967, and notes that 1966 had the highest share of first children of any year on record. His conclusion is that couples who already had children used contraception to time the next one, after a nationwide campaign, run since the 1950s, for spacing births two or three years apart.

The belief reached beyond the Japanese themselves. Y. S. Kim, in the Journal of Biosocial Science in 1979, found that Koreans living in Japan also had markedly fewer births in 1966, while in Korea the birth rate showed only its steady decline.

Did births fall again in 2026?

The first figures show no repeat. Ahead of the year, the Japan Times asked in December 2025 whether the curse would “strike again”, and Kikkawa argued that it could not: young couples in Japan already use contraception routinely, so not having a baby is the normal state, and births were too low for a further large fall. Preliminary health ministry statistics reported by Nippon.com in August 2026 counted 342,068 births in January to June 2026, 0.8 per cent more than in the same months of 2025 and the first rise for that half-year in eleven years. The preliminary count includes children of foreign nationals born in Japan, and the final figure for Japanese nationals is expected to be lower.

See also

Year of the Horse, Five elements (wu xing), Year of the Goat, Year of the Ox, Year of the Tiger, Year of the Rabbit.

Sources

  1. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 1906, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T1906e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 25 January
  2. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 1907, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T1907e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 13 February (so the 1906 year ends 12 February 1907)
  3. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 1966, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T1966e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 21 January
  4. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 1967, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T1967e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 9 February (so the 1966 year ends 8 February 1967)
  5. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2026, Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables (text files T1924e.txt to T2032e.txt, consulted 3 October 2026), Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 17 February
  6. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2027, Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables (text files T1924e.txt to T2032e.txt, consulted 3 October 2026), Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 6 February (so the 2026 year ends 5 February 2027)
  7. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2086, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T2086e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 14 February
  8. Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2087, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly table T2087e, Hong Kong Observatory, title line; 3 February (so the 2086 year ends 2 February 2087)
  9. The Year of the Fire Horse: Why Did Births Plummet in Japan in 1966?, Kikkawa Tōru (sociologist), Nippon.com, 10 November 2025 (Japanese original 2 October 2025), Nippon.com (Nippon Communications Foundation), whole article
  10. Increased induced abortion rate in 1966, an aspect of a Japanese folk superstition, K. Kaku, Annals of Human Biology 2(2), 1975, pp. 111–115, doi:10.1080/03014467500000651 (PubMed abstract, PMID 1052742), PubMed (US National Library of Medicine), abstract
  11. Were girl babies sacrificed to a folk superstition in 1966 in Japan?, K. Kaku, Annals of Human Biology 2(4), 1975, pp. 391–393, doi:10.1080/03014467500001011 (PubMed abstract, PMID 1052758), PubMed (US National Library of Medicine), abstract
  12. Transient cultural influences on infant mortality: Fire-Horse daughters in Japan, T. A. Bruckner, M. Subbaraman and R. A. Catalano, American Journal of Human Biology 23(5), 2011, pp. 586–591, doi:10.1002/ajhb.21174 (PubMed abstract, PMID 21681846), PubMed (US National Library of Medicine), abstract
  13. Fertility of the Korean population in Japan influenced by a folk superstition in 1966, Y. S. Kim, Journal of Biosocial Science 11(4), 1979, pp. 457–464, doi:10.1017/s0021932000012530, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Core abstract), abstract
  14. 出生数、普通出生率、ならびに合計特殊出生率：1947～2004年 (Births, crude birth rate and total fertility rate, 1947–2004), National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS), from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Vital Statistics, 国立社会保障・人口問題研究所 (IPSS), rows for 1965, 1966 and 1967 (births in thousands; total fertility rate); table note
  15. 統計トピックスNo.76 1 午(うま)年生まれの人口は958万人 (People born in Horse years number 9.58 million), Statistics Bureau of Japan, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2014, 総務省統計局 (Statistics Bureau of Japan), section 1
  16. Japan Births Edge Up in First Half of 2026 After a Decade of Decline, Nippon.com, Japan Data, 31 August 2026, Nippon.com (Nippon Communications Foundation), article text
  17. Japan’s birth rate dropped sharply in 1966, influenced by cultural beliefs, Tuna Acisu, Our World in Data, 13 December 2024, Our World in Data (University of Oxford / Global Change Data Lab), data insight text
  18. Will Japan’s ‘fire horse’ curse strike again in 2026?, Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times, 20 December 2025, The Japan Times, headline and opening paragraphs
  19. こよみ用語解説 六十干支のよみ方 (Calendar terms: reading the sixty stem-branch pairs), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Ephemeris Computation Office, 国立天文台 (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), page text

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

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