Rock, Paper, Scissors gets Serious

I just had a student approach me in the hall with a clenched fist.  As the distance between us shrank she started shaking it at me.  I meekly held up my hand with what might be interpreted as a peace sign, but it was to no avail.  A moment later her finger was an inch from my nose, and I was looking down at my feet in defeat.  Sigh.  Rock crushes scissors yet again.

Officially, sumo wrestling is the national sport of Japan.  It is certainly the sport with the most cultural background and significance, dating back some 1500 years.  It is widely televised and tournaments are very popular.  But it is pretty rare to meet a sumo wrestler.  And people don’t get together to have pick-up sumo matches.  Kids don’t go to sumo club after school (at least as far as I know).  I’m not really sure how one would even become a sumo wrestler in the first place.  Needless to say, while watching sumo is a very popular Japanese activity, participating in it is not.

Then you have baseball, the great American pastime.  Around the turn of the 20^th century the sport was introduced to Japan and took off.  Baseball is now the most popular professional sport in Japan, and the bi-annual high school tournaments rival the professional games in TV ratings.  Students in the baseball club at my school may joke around in the classroom, but at practice or a game they are very serious.  Baseball may be relatively new to Japan (especially when you are thinking about the history of sumo), but it has been thoroughly adopted by the culture here. 

But there is another game that has a history almost as deep as sumo and is played more often than baseball.  They call it “janken.”  You probably know it as “rock, paper, scissors.”  Interestingly enough, about the same time as Americans introduced baseball to Japan, the Japanese were introducing rock, paper, scissors to the rest of the world.  The game actually originated in China, but made its way to Japan in the 1700s.  In America the game is played mainly to make arbitrary decisions from time to time, or maybe out of boredom.  But the game is much more significant in Japan. 

Let me pause a moment here and explain how to play janken in Japan.  You start by saying “saisho wa gu, janken pon,” throwing rock, paper, or scissors on the “p” of pon.  This is best translated as, “first comes rock, janken POP!” If it is a tie you try again, saying “aiko desho,” (throwing on “sho”) meaning “it’s a tie, eh?”  If you have another tie, you play again saying “sho sho sho,” (throwing on the third sho) and you keep on saying “sho sho sho” for subsequent ties until a winner is decided.  But the game doesn’t have to stop there.  There is one variant that I like where after winning, the winner points right in the loser’s face and says “acchi muite hoi” (“hey, look over there!").  When he says “hoi” he points the finger up, down, left, or right; simultaneously the loser turns his head up, down, left, or right.  If the loser turns his head in the same direction the winner is pointing, he loses for real and the game is over.  But if he looks in a different direction he is safe and the game starts over.  It’s common to see kids standing on a log or a set of stairs playing this variant of the game.  When you lose a round you take a step backwards on the log or staircase until some gets to the end and falls off. 

So when do they play janken over here?  Here are some places I’ve seen it used to solve problems:  Who gets the extra food at lunch?  Two kids correctly answered a bonus question in class, but there is only one sticker for the winner, who gets it?  Need to spice up dialogue practice?  Have students play janken to determine roles.  Need a game to occupy a group of 6^th graders for at least a half an hour?  Recently in the news a Japanese millionaire wanted to auction off his considerable art collection and couldn’t decide between two auction houses.  He had the houses play janken to make the decision.  The winning house made millions from the auction. 

As far as I know the game is not televised in Japan (not the case in America, yikes!), but it is certainly more played than sumo or baseball.  And as weird as it is to say it, janken has a sort of respectability surrounding it here.  Before coming to Japan I only thought of it as a sort of random decision generator, but here it is a game and kids play it to have fun – it’s as popular as tag or dodgeball.  I really don’t know why the game has so much cultural standing here.  But learning the answers to the “What?” questions are much more helpful than struggling to answer the “Why?” questions.  To those questions, as my buddy Dan taught me, we usually need to satisfy ourselves with a simple, “Because… Japan.”