British, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese Superstitions

Every country has it's superstitions. I think that superstitions are one of the most intresting things about a country and you can sometimes tell a lot by what type of ones there are. (Just because you have never heard of these doesn't mean they don't exist. When I actually asked my Mum and Nan about British ones, they told me ones that I had no idea even existed.) Here are a few British, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese superstitions.

BRITISH SUPERSTITIONS

•        Lucky to meet a black cat. Black Cats are featured on many good luck greetings cards and birthday cards in England.

Black cats are luck but apparently they are also unlucky if they JUMP out in front of you.

•        Lucky to touch wood

I don't think it's just lucky to touch wood randomly but I remember my mum 
teaching me this thing I can't remember if this is it fully or not but if someone tries to do something to do with bad luck (?) then you say "Touch wood and whistle." I was sure something came before that though...

•        Lucky to find a clover plant with four leaves.

Yeah, everyone knows this one...in England, I mean.

•        A horseshoe over the door brings good luck. But the horse shoe needs to be the right way up. The luck runs out of the horse shoe if it is upside down.

Thus one is weird to me, to be honest.

•        Catch falling leaves in Autumn and you're have good luck. Every leaf means a lucky month next year.

Linh is now obsessed with trying to catch a leaf.

Going into back luck ones now...

•        Unlucky to walk underneath a ladder.

I guess that someone had a bad day and something dropped on their head after walking under a ladder. My nan and someone was walking down a road and a ladder was leading against the building. My nan went under the ladder and the other person avoided it and nothing happened to my nan but the woman had something drop on her like paint or something.

•        Seven years bad luck to break a mirror.

This is also popular in America so it's more of a Western superstition. I'm aware that mirrors are special in some cultures but I'm not sure of the origins of this one.

•        Unlucky to spill salt. If you do, you must throw it over your shoulder to counteract the bad luck.

Another popular one in America also. I have no clue where this came from but I know that paranoia makes me stick to this. It's like a habit for me.

•        Unlucky to open an umbrella in doors.

Some people do this anyways. Nothing happens, I think...but I don't follow them home to know if anything bad happens to them.

•        The number thirteen is unlucky. Friday the thirteenth is a very unlucky day. Friday is considered to be an unlucky day because Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

I now understand the "Friday the 13th" date now and I also get why in the days of the week poem it says "Friday's child is loving and giving." It was a kind of religious poem in a way. Also, according to the poem I am "Bonny and blithe and good and gay." I am not gay. I like hotdogs, not tacos.

•        Unlucky to put new shoes on the table.

Um...yeah...not sure. Maybe someone got their shoes stolen when they put it on a table. Like they bought new shoes and went to the pub or bar to gloat or get a drink and some person stole them. I don't know. 

Here are some food superstitions.

•        When finished eating a boiled egg, push the spoon through the bottom of the empty shell to let the devil out.

...I'm not even going to try...

•        In Yorkshire, housewives used to believe that bread would not rise if there was a corpse (dead body) in the vicinity, and to cut off both ends of the loaf would make the Devil fly over the house! 

I wonder if the police force ever got women to bake bread near crime scenes to check for dead bodies. I don't know why but I want to make bread now.

We have some animal superstitions.

•        Animals feature a lot in our superstitions as they do in superstitions around the world.

•        One ancient British superstition holds that if a child rides on a bear's back it will be protected from whooping-cough. (Bears used to roam Britain but now they are not seen on our shores)

•        In some parts of the UK meeting two or three Ravens together is considered really bad. One very English superstition concerns the tame Ravens at the Tower of London. It is believed if they leave then the crown of England will be lost. 

•        It is said to be badluck if you see bats flying and hear their cries. In the middle ages it was believed that witches were closely associated with bats.

•        In some areas black Rabbits are thought to host the souls of human beings. White Rabbits are said to be really witches and some believe that saying 'White Rabbit' on the first day of each month brings luck.

A common lucky charm is a Rabbit's foot, but not for the Rabbit.

KOREAN SUPERSTITIONS

•        Writing names in red ink is believed to kill whoever's name it is. Tradition-wise, red is the colour used to write the names of the dead in Korea and this then leads to the belief that if you write the names of the living in red ink then it is incredibly unlucky.

When I hear this I think of Death Note. "Death" and "writing" always do.

•        For Westerners, the number "13" is the unlucky number and in Korea it's the number "4" Four, in Korean, has the same pronunciation as the word for death (both are pronounced as “sa”). You can see why people wouldn’t want to live on “death” floor, which is why Korean elevators often list the 4th floors as “F”, or just skip the number altogether.

I heard that it's the Chinese character of the number four that sounds like the word "death" so I have to ask..."Why do Koreans care?" Well, in Korean, they use Chinese characters but it still seems more of a Chinese superstition than a Korean one.

•        If you take a shower within 24 hours of getting a vaccination, you will die. All of them are considered life-threatening when combined with a shower, it doesn't matter what kind of vaccine it is.

Well...I'm kind of screwed then. I had 3 to prevent cancer (like the others girls in my school year) and I had ones when I was a baby.Miracles do exist. I'm a walking one, yo.

•        Fan death is the belief that if you leave an electric fan running overnight in a room, pointing directly at you with the window closed, you will die.

Theories for why include:

1.     The fan chops up the air molecules in the room, making them un-breathable.

2.     The fan causes hypothermia.

3.     The fan creates a vacuum which sucks the air out of the room, leading to suffocation.

When I first heard this, I was like "WTF??" then I heard that there is actually science behind this when you think of it in more of the second point of view and the third one just confuses me. This is most likely the most famous Korean superstition.

JAPANESE SUPERSTITIONS

•        Don’t whistle at night, or a snake or a ghost will attack you.

Whistling is a big thing in some countries. I remember watching a show where the investigators went to go hunt down an urban legend to see if there was scientific proof of it. The native people of the small village they went to said that whistling attracts the monster. The point of this? I don't know, I wanted to share some useless information.

•        If a wife wears pants in your household, you’ll have a baby boy. If a husband wears pants in your household, you’ll have a baby girl.

What typical man is going to wear a skirt? I don't judge on any type of interest a person may have, but men don't usually dress up in skirts...or they keep it really well hidden.

•        If you lie down right after finishing a meal, you’ll turn into a cow.

I...I don't know...I can't even begin to explain this or even make a theory for it.

•        If three people take a photo together, the person in the middle dies first.

I've watched Asian horror movies and played some video games where this was used in the plot somehow. It's quite interesting to me, actually.

•        Don’t press the hair whorl, or you’ll have diarrhea.

A hair whorl is the centre of the head where the hair seems to whirl around it...? I see this mostly on Asian males. Not that I stare at people's heads. Just Google "Hair Whorl"

•        If green tea’s stalk floats vertically in a cup, it brings good luck.

I've heard of this. Things like fortune-telling interests me and of course I came across the tea-reading.

•        If a pregnant woman cleans a bathroom, she’ll have a good-looking child.

This was probably in that "submissive wife" period in time.

•        Wives who are born in the Chinese zodiac year of Hinoe Uma丙午, in 1906 and 1966, are believed to be much more dominant than the husbands; so much so that they may actually end up killing their husbands.

Those women are cray cray...I feel sorry for men who find this out about their wives.

•        When catfish starts to become unsettling, earthquake will break out soon.

This seems really traditional to me. I don't know why. Animal superstitions in ever culture always make me feel that it's an older superstition.

So, yeah, I came across some weird superstitions in my research (two minutes of Google searches). There are probably many more weirder ones out there somewhere.