One of the things you’ll get told in the ‘cultural’ learnings side of Japanese, is to be careful with the number 4 due to its pronunciation.
Apart from the fact that I disagree that this should be a JLPT N4 kanji (surely the numbers below 100 have to be N5?), the main point of bringing this up is to point out that the two main readings of this kanji are:
よん
し
The し reading is the Chinese reading of this kanji, and if that doesn’t make sense to you, never fear as I’ve got a two part series that goes into what this means in some depth:
The issue is, that there is another kanji that is read as し, which means death:
So thus you have an issue with putting four on things as, when spoken, it can sound like death.
I always found this to be a slightly strange attitude, considering that there are many instances that し is used in Japanese and no one seems to mind, for example April is しがつ.
But one big part where this is not put up with is for rooms and buildings.
I worked at a hotel in Japan and even in this hotel there was no floor four, nor any rooms that ended with four. This is despite the fact that fourth floor is 四階（よんかい） and doesn’t even use the pronunciation of 四/死.
I think there was another floor that was missing but can’t for the life of me remember, it was either 7 or 8. I would’ve thought it would be 9 as it can be read as く which can mean suffering via 苦, but I’m almost certain there was a floor 9:
This skipping of floors can be found almost anywhere there is kanji, as this picture from Wikipedia is from a building in Shanghai:
There is a lot of cultural underpinnings and ideas close to numerology or even the Kabbalah contained with Japanese culture and kanji, and I cover all of this in my lessons that I perform online with my students.
One experience that really brought this home was a visit to a samurai’s castle in 石川. One issue with being a samurai, is you have to be on your guard for the specialist samurai assassins, the ninjas.
While you can build a castle that tries to keep the ninja out, as prevention is better than cure, in the end you may end up losing and so the honourable thing to do is suicide. So of course, you should design a special room to do so.
This room had a doorway that only allows you to enter and not leave, and also is only four tatami mats wide. The usage of tatami mats to measure things is possible due to it being a standard of measurement under the 尺貫法, which you can find more about here.
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