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Can a dirty butthole make you filthy rich in Japan? We’re starting a New Year’s lottery experiment

Casey Baseel Dec 26, 2025
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It’s time, once again, to pull out every trick we can think of to try to boost our luck in Japan’s huge end of the year lottery.

As the year winds down, it’s time once again for the Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji, a giant lottery held in Japan every year with a maximum prize of one billion yen (approximately US$7 million). But our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori doesn’t need that much money. Why, he’d be plenty pleased with even just the second-highest Nenmatsu Jumbo prize tier, which would net him 700 million yen.

However, as you might recall, these end-of-the-year lottery daydreams are a pretty regular occurrence in Go’s life, but he’s yet to hit to hit a major jackpot, even when he’s tried to boost his chances by doing such things as drawing a thicker money line on his palm or visiting a famous money-washing shrine.

And so Go found himself torn between the potential life of luxury that a jackpot ticket could secure for him, and the discouraging voice of reason telling him that his chances of winning big are, statistically speaking, incredibly low. With Go’s forlorn sighs filling the SoraNews24 offices, our boss Yoshio suddenly chimed in with a suggestion:

“How about pooping yourself right before you go to buy your lottery tickets?”

This wasn’t a case of Yoshio’s sadistic tendencies slipping out. Two of the most common words for “poop” in Japanese, unko and fun, both sound very similar to un, the word for good luck. Because of that, it’s sometimes said in Japan that if you’ve got unko (poop) on you, you’ve got un (luck) with you too.

Yoshio wasn’t proposing that Go just start plopping away right there at his desk, though.

“Really, what you’re looking for here is good luck, right? You want the un to be physically attached to you, so you need some unko on you too. But if you full-force pooped yourself, that’s be pretty traumatic, so the best tactic is to have a little poop on you. Just a little bit. A moderate enough amount of poop that you can still walk to store to buy the tickets. That should do the trick.”

Go couldn’t see any fault in Yoshio’s logic, and so after our boss discretely turned back to his desk, Go got up and headed into the office bathroom and pooped.

Ordinarily Go would then turn on the toilet’s bidet function to give himself a nice warm-water washing, then wipe himself dry. On this day, though, he didn’t use the bidet at all, and gave himself only a cursory wipe, enough to dislodge any clumps that might have fallen out while walking, but leaving the other bits of “luck” clinging around his backside exit port.

After washing his hands, Go left the bathroom, tied up some quick loose ends on an in-progress project. Then he grabbed his coat and headed down to the building’s lobby and out onto the street.

As he walked, he found himself strangely aware of his posture, unconsciously putting extra effort into keeping his back straight and his strides even and uniform.

It’s a few blocks from our office to the nearest lottery ticket shop, but after a few minutes, Go, and his particulate “luck,” had arrived.

Go, of course, hadn’t told anyone on the street about his secret luck-boosting strategy, so he found it very auspicious when an employee of the shop gave him a packet of tissues. These packets, called “pocket tissues,” are a common advertising method in Japan, and some people use them as toilet paper too if they find themselves in a public restroom that’s not stocked with supplies, and the fact that the employee had given Go something he really could use right now felt like a sign of even more good things to come. Go started feeling even better when he looked at the promotional flier bundled with the tissues that said that one of last year’s one-billion-yen winning lottery tickets was bought at this very shop.

After making his way up to the counter, Go plunked down 9,000 yen for 30 Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji tickets…

…and decided to also pick up five scratcher tickets, which have a maximum possible prize of 3 million yen each.

▼ Yes, of course the scratcher tickets have cute cat pictures on them. This is Japan!

Go decided to check and see if any of his scratchers were winners right then and there…

…but he came up empty on each of them.

Honestly, though, the lack of any winning scratchers felt encouraging to Go. After all, he knew he had unko on himself, so he must have un too, and if his good luck hadn’t gotten channeled into his scratcher results, that must mean that all of his luck is headed into the Nenmatsu Takara Jumbo tickets, the ones where he stands to win some serious money!

Of course, the luck-boosting properties of poo are still an inexact science, even with our tireless work in the field, but if our theories are correct, now that Go has bought the tickets his luck has transferred into them, so he can go back to his usual post-pooping cleaning routine. As for the results of the Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji they won’t be announced until December 31, so we’ll have to wait until then to find out if Go’s dirty butthole has made him filthy rich.

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[ Read in Japanese ]