Brenton
Scissors, Paper, Rock, PAIN!!!
January 17th 2008 13:32
PON!
This is a story from Japan. Now, I really don’t know how widespread this practice is, but I’m guessing it’s probably pretty wide, looking at some other precedents that I’ll get into later.
What I can tell you for absolute certain, is this game was common practice in the boys dormitory at Meitoku Gijuku, a boarding school where I spent some time, in Kochi, Shikoku Island.
Scissors, Paper, Rock is a national treasure of the Japanese nation. There it is called ‘jan ken pon’. If you win you can call out Katta! (I Win). If you tie you call out “Ai Kodde Shou” and redraw.
The boys dormitory loved this game. They played with a variation however. You’d have about five or six players at a time. They would all play and redraw until half got one option, and half the other. I.e. 2 rocks, 3 scissors. The winners were safe at this point, and all the losers would rematch until there was only one loser left. The loser would then pull up their shirt sleeve up, tense their muscles and wait. Then, one by one their competitors would, sometimes following a room long run up, punch them in the arm as hard as they possibly could. This was not by any stretch of the imagination, soft. The solid thump of fist on flesh would almost echo. There was no real winner, but it was generally accepted that the loser was the first one who couldn’t stand up after being punched.
Some Japanese blokes walked around with their sleeves barely concealing green bruises.
The Japanese have a reputation for these kinds of games. I recounted this game to one Japanese Uni student and he just shrugged. ‘There is a game’ he told me, ‘with a helmet and hammer on the table. When one person take the hammer, you have to take helmet and put on, before he hits you on the head.’
It seems hard to imagine that in a country where the culture is as homogenized as Japan, that such madness can flourish. However, anyone who has been there will tell you that this kind of violent game is not ‘in spite of’ but rather ‘because of’ this kind of culture – tiny explosions jumping out to address the stress of maintaining respectability with a spot of well earned RAH.
IMAGE by Meme! Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
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Comment by Anonymous
Or theres the ruler game, where you take turns hitting each other on the palm of the hand with the edge of a ruler, the first to make a sound loses.