Also called: Tawaramon · Rice bale lines · Straw-bale marks · Bundle marks on the fingers

Where on the hand: On the palm side of the fingers, across the middle and base phalanges (Japanese sources exclude the nail phalange), on any or all of the four fingers.

What it looks like: Clear vertical lines standing in the pad of each phalange, several to a section, so that each phalange looks bound like a straw bale of rice — from which the name comes. The lines run along the finger, not across it.

A Japanese sign of never lacking the necessities of life. Because rice bales were the traditional measure of stored wealth, the reading is of steady supply rather than sudden riches: the person is said always to have food, shelter and enough money, and to recover quickly from losses. The more phalanges that carry the pattern, the fuller the reading.

Read with care: Western palmistry reads many fine vertical lines on the phalanges as nervous depletion or exhaustion, which is close to the opposite of the Japanese reading. The two traditions genuinely disagree here.