Our latest get-rich-quick-with-poop scheme goes head-to-head with other attempts to supernaturally game the system.

As some of you may recall/have been unable to suppress the memory of, as 2025 drew to a close, we here at SoraNews24 embarked upon a bold new financial strategy. At the end of every year, the Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji New Year’s lottery takes place in Japan. With a total of one billion yen (roughly US$7 million) up for grabs, and a jackpot of 700 million yen, this is potentially life-changing money, and our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori decided that he was going to try to change his life by leaving bits of poop on himself.

You see, in Japanese the way to say that you’ve got good luck, “Un ga tsuiteiru,” sounds almost exactly the same as how you say you’ve got poop on yourself, “Fun ga tsuiteiru.” Because of this, there’s a superstition that if you do somehow have poop on yourself, you’ve got luck on your side too…but what if it’s not just a superstition? What if, by having poop on himself when he went to buy his lottery tickets, Go could push his luck up over the line needed to ensure that those tickets would be winners?

Needing those answers, and also needing to drop a deuce, Go sequestered himself in our testing facility/office bathroom, pooped, and then made sure to do a half-assed job wiping his ass, leaving bits of fecal matter clinging to his butthole. Then he pulled up his pants, washed his hands, and headed to the nearest lottery ticket window to buy 9,000 yen’s worth of Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji tickets.

▼ Go going Number Two. For those keeping track, this is the second time we’ve tried using poop to make money, and also the second time our reporters have ended up with their own bodily waste on themselves for research purposes.

▼ The stand where Go bought his tickets

However, in the interest of proper scientific research standards, we realized that Go’s results alone wouldn’t be enough to determine whether or not having poop on him really made him luckier or not. A lack of winning tickets, for example, could just be the result of a coincidentally timed dip in luck on the cosmic level, or vengeful gods seeking new and creative ways to punish humanity as a whole. To really make this experiment work, he was going to need to bring in some outside help, and so he reached out to a number of other Japanese media organizations, all of whom would be employing their own luck-boosting strategies. KagoshimaniaX spent 9,000 yen on lottery tickets at Chance Center Tenmonkan, a famous lottery ticket shop that’s been the purchase point for a string of big winners since the late ‘90s. Nishinomiya Tsushin put their faith not in the seller, but in the buyer, having someone who’s won big in multiple lotteries buy 30,000 yen of lottery tickets for them. Finally, Tokana went all-out on the occult options, utilizing a combination of a Kokkuri-san paper (basically Japan’s version of a Ouija board), dowsing, and interpretations of the prophecies of Nostradamus to determine when and where to buy 30,000 yen in tickets.

Following the announcement of the winning Nenmatsu Jumbo Takarakuji numbers, Go and his fellow aspiring lottery winners gathered to compare their results and see which of them had come up with the best luck-boosting strategy.

Despite the complexity of Tokana’s approach, things ended very badly for them, as they were able to recover only 9,000 yen of the 30,000 they’d spent. Nishinomiya Tsushin did just slightly better, but still lost big, getting back 16,000 yen, barely over half of their 30,000-yen outlay. KagoshimaniaX was the only one of Go’s competitors to finish in the black, winning a total of 10,900 yen from their 9,000-yen investment.

So that’s a loss of 21,000 yen for Kokkuri-san/divination/Nostradamus, a loss of 14,000 yen for the supposedly lucky man, and a minuscule gain of 1,900 yen for the trouble of going to a lucky store. But now comes the moment of truth, as we tally up the winnings for Go’s dirty butthole tickets.

The 9,000 yen he spent worked out to 30 tickets, and 25 of them were worth nothing. Mixed in with his stack of losers, though, were three 300-yen winners, a 3,000-yen winner, and, to his great joy, a 10,000-yen winner!

Add it all up, and Go’s winnings came to 13,900 yen, a 3,900-yen profit! It was by far the biggest win of the bunch, not just in amount of yen won, but in terms of return on investment too!

● Return on investment
Kokkuri-kun/divination/Nostradamus: 70-percent loss
Lucky man: 46.7-percent loss
Lucky place: 21.1-percent profit
Poop on yourself: 54.4-percent profit

▼ Go gleefully grabbing his winnings

So, in conclusion, Go believes that this clearly shows that having poop on yourself will sufficiently boost your luck enough to make you a lottery winner. He cautions, though, that the results don’t seem to be proportional to the amount that you have on yourself, so he recommends against leaving lots of poop on your butt in a misinformed attempt to secure even higher rates of return.

It is at this point that our legal team would like us to remind everyone that this experiment is intended for entertainment purposes only. Individual results may vary, so always make sure to gamble responsibly and within the limits of what your personal finances can afford to lose. For readers craving actual kooky science instead of kooky pseudo-science, we now refer you to this article about why researchers in Japan have given a mouse glowing sperm.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]