Play that follows the calendar
Many traditional Japanese games are tied to a season. Some belong to the first days of the year, some to a summer evening, and some are simply what children played in a courtyard or on a tatami floor when the weather was bad. This makes the subject easier to sort by when and where a game was played than by rules alone.
A few caveats help. “Traditional” covers a very wide span, from games with roots in the Heian court to amusements that took their present form in the Edo period or even later. Practices also differed by region, by social class and by household. What follows describes common patterns, not a single national tradition.
Games for the home
Indoor play often needed little more than paper, cloth, a board or a set of cards.
Board games. The two best-known are go and shogi, both played by adults and children and both with professional ranks today. Go is a game of surrounding territory; shogi is a chess-like game of capture. Another old board game is sugoroku, a dice race that exists in several forms, from a simple race along a track to illustrated sheets whose squares follow a journey or a story. Because the illustrated versions were printed, they were popular among Edo townspeople, who bought them in the same way they bought other inexpensive prints.
Card games. Cards of several kinds are played. Poem cards are the best known, with players matching the opening of a poem to the card bearing its ending. Proverb cards, often used with young children, pair a short saying with a picture. Hanafuda, a deck of small cards decorated with plants and flowers that stand for the months, has been used for many different games. Because each suit stands for a month, the deck itself is a small picture of the yearly calendar.
Hand play. Children have long played with beanbags (otedama), with string figures made on the fingers (ayatori), and with soft handmade balls. Paper folding is also a pastime in its own right, though it is usually treated as an art form. Some games need no equipment at all, such as the call-and-response games sung in a circle, or “rock-paper-scissors,” known as janken, used to decide who goes first.
Face-making games. At the New Year, families have traditionally played fukuwarai. A blindfolded player places paper pieces of eyes, nose and mouth onto a blank face outline, and the funny results make everyone laugh. The idea is that laughter at the start of the year is welcome.
Games of the New Year
The New Year holiday is the busiest season for traditional play, because family members are at home and school and work are paused. Typical activities include card games, kite flying, spinning tops, and hanetsuki, a game like badminton played with a wooden paddle and a feathered shuttle. The paddles are sometimes decorated on one side with raised cloth pictures. People often take part in these activities as part of the wider set of New Year customs, and many are now more common as a seasonal symbol than as an everyday pastime. Kites, tops and similar playthings have their own article, so here it is enough to say that they carry a sense of wishing the children a healthy year.
Games at festivals
Local festivals have a lively, informal side that sits alongside the ritual. Around the grounds of a shrine, temporary stalls often sell food and offer small games. Common examples include:
- scooping goldfish with a thin paper scoop that tears easily (kingyo sukui)
- fishing for water-filled balloons with a hook on a paper string
- tossing rings onto prizes
- shooting at prizes with toy corks in a shooting gallery
- picking out small shaped figures from a block of candy
None of these is a contest of great skill, and the point is generally the pleasure of trying. Many visitors dress for the occasion in cotton summer robes, and these yukata robes are part of the picture of a summer festival night. The festival atmosphere around matsuri festivals is a combination of ritual, food, music and these small games, and at the larger festivals the games are an important part of why children look forward to them. Summer evenings are also the season of fireworks and dance gatherings, which are covered in their own articles.
Games of the body
A different set of pastimes involves physical contests. Sumo began as a ritual offering and became a professional sport, but it also has an amateur and children’s side, with local tournaments at shrines. The martial ways, such as judo and kendo, began as training for warriors and developed into modern disciplines taught in schools and clubs. These are usually described as disciplines more than as games, and they appear in their own articles.
Playground games are another part of this group. Many are chasing or hiding games, like “daruma-san ga koronda,” where the player who is “it” calls out a phrase while everyone else moves, then turns around to see who is still moving. These games spread by being passed from older children to younger ones rather than being written down, so the rules often differ from one neighborhood to another.
Why these games lasted
Several things keep traditional games in use. One is that they tie play to a time of year, so a game feels linked to a particular season. This sense of seasonal timing is related to the way poets use seasonal words in verse. A second is that many games cross generations, with grandparents teaching the rules and children handing them on. A third is that they use inexpensive materials, such as paper, bamboo and wood, and so craft and play overlap. The same wooden dolls and playthings that children enjoy are often made by regional craftspeople, and the toy-making side of that is a subject of its own.
It is also fair to say that many of these games are less common in daily life than they once were. Video games, smartphones and other leisure activities now take up much of children’s free time. At the same time, schools, community centers and museums often keep older games alive through events and classes, and competitive karuta, go and shogi have active followings. What survives is usually a mix of old rules and new settings.
A note on origins
Many games came from elsewhere. Go and the ancestor of shogi both reached Japan from the Asian mainland. Playing cards were introduced by European traders in the sixteenth century and then reshaped into forms that suited local tastes. Others, such as the games of children in the street, seem to be homegrown but are hard to date. When a source gives a precise date or a single inventor for a folk game, it is wise to treat that claim cautiously.