Janken

Last night I won $200 (20,000円) playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Except that’s absurd, and there’s no way you could ever win $200 playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.

I won the money playing Janken, which on initial inspection looks like the Japanafication of Rock, Paper, Scissors. However, it differs on some fundamental level that makes it entirely feasible for someone to win money at it.

In Japan Janken is the great equalizer. The kids seem to play it from the time they learn to walk, freeing up their hands for all of the spasmodic, epic flailing about required by the game. And once they’re old enough to play it, they seem to immediately start using it to settle disputes, in much the same way that we’d flip a coin in Canada or have an arbiter choose a number between 1 and 10.

I most often see janken getting used to settle who gets the leftovers from school lunch. All the students who are interested in a given part of lunch stand up, and they all janken off furiously for it. And “furiously” is the best word for the way Japanese students go about janken. It’s a full body sport, from my first graders who flail their hands or hop up and down excitedly as they wind up, to my fifth graders who strike elaborate poses mid-janken, throwing their handsigns like punches.

These very fifth graders nearly tore down the classroom today as we had an English lesson mostly centered on janken, poorly disguised as a lesson on “how many?”. And the best way that question could have been phrased for the lesson would be “how many of your classmates did you destroy?”. The noise and action of 25 fifth graders throwing down janken in English, Canadian (Suu-Sum-See!), Chinese, Korean, and Chinese was like the wind up to Armageddon. In all the violent throwing of handsigns, energetic posturing mid-game, and ecstatic fist-pumping at victory, I’m surprised more kids didn’t get clocked or plowed through desks and chairs in all the action. The kids were out for blood, and I had to bellow over the discord to reign them in at the end of the janken portion of the lesson.

The reason the kids throw so much of themselves into the game is also one of the main reasons janken is so very different from the western Rock, Paper, Scissors:

It is indisputable.

Regardless of the outcome of a round of janken, the decisions holds and never seems to be questioned. There is no “he cheated!”; there is no “best two out of three?”. Once you have janken-ed over it, it is decided. I saw this most keenly when I stepped up to fight for leftovers with one of my elementay classes, only to win and be forbidden to share my spoils with the runner up: the teacher informing be that janken is “Japanese law.”

When you’re talking about janken, luck never enters into the discussion. When you win at janken, it is because you are strong. When you’re beaten at janken, it’s like being bested in an arm wrestle. The game holds a bearing on this society that is ridiculous, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see business men resorting to covert hand signs to overcome commercial impasses; hung juries throwing rock, paper, scissors around to sort out their differences, the judge never batting an eye when told that they came to the decision by janken.

It’s in this world that you can win $200 at Rock, Paper, Scissors; in this world that your boss will marvel at your ability for the achievement.

Why Japan Always Wins

With this being exam time for my junior high school students, the awesome school lunches that they and we teachers receive have been cancelled for the next few days. I was dutifully informed of this when I was given my schedule for this month, but as that was about two months ago, I promptly forgot and showed up with only an orange and an apple for lunch today.

Crap.

No matter, though, as apparently I wasn’t the only one, and a bunch of teachers lumped together and placed an order with the very delicious Minato Sushi in town.

When one of the proprietors showed up with our delivery, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t to have the orders bundled to serving trays with tied handkerchiefs, the food within still steaming in real, non-disposable bowls and plates from the restaurant. They delivered the food, took our cash, and left, only to return about an hour later to collect the flatware.

That they would bring the food in real dishes and leave them with us…It’s not a big thing, but it’s a nice thing. It’s a small-town-home-made thing; a fresh thing and a real thing.

It’s the kind of thing Canada just can’t compete with.

ITADAKIMASU!

In Japanese elementary and junior high schools, students receive a free prepared lunch every day, delivered to their classroom and served up by their peers. The teachers at the schools benefit from the same system, though they have to pay for their lunches. Regardless, not having to worry about packing a lunch is a fantastic experience. And, what’s more, the stuff that they serve up at the schools is often above par when compared to the cafeterias of Canadian schools. I mean, it could well be the Japanese equivalent of cafeteria crap in the eyes of native Japanese. However, if that’s the case, we thankfully set our bar far lower in Canada when it comes to deciding what’s fit to serve our young, growing, academic minds.

The culinary abominations of my own high school cafeteria have left me feeling like Japanese school lunches are meals fit for a king. They all tend to be at least “alright,” and at times they even nudge into “good” territory. The fact that I don’t have to make them myself and don’t have to pay for them up front also does wonders for the flavour. And, at the elementary school, the school lunch is further improved by the fact that I get to eat it in one of the classrooms with the actual students.

And when you sit and eat with the students, you can really catch glimpses of their growth. The younger grades at the elementary hardly ever clamour for seconds, electing instead to feed them to big fat gaijin sensei (that would be me). Up around grade 4, the students start developing an appetite, and by grade 6 they are screaming for the left over scraps and fighting furious janken¹ wars for half a tempura shrimp. By the time the kids reach junior high, their bottomless teenage stomachs have them banging down the door of the teacher’s room on days when lunch is particularly good, looking for any scraps we happen to leave behind.

There's also the whole ceremony around lunch here. When you're eating in the classrooms with the kids, one of them will be assigned to the role of class leader for the day. This person usually prompts the rest of the class for greetings (every Japanese school period starts with students greeting their teacher, and every Japanese school period ends with students saying goodbye to their teacher), and I'm pretty sure this leader can be taken to task when the rest of the class is acting up.

When it comes to lunch, this leader is responsible for beginning and ending the meal. It begins with a raucous "ITADAKIMASU!", which is thunderously echoed by the rest of the students. It roughly translates to "thank you for this meal," but it is far more symbolic than that, referencing buddhist worship and the idea that an animal dying to feed you is one of the greatest sacrifices it could make. When you hear it every day, it starts to lose its meaning and becomes a bit of a joke as students bellow it at the top of their lungs, but as soon as you make the mistake of starting to eat before it has been said, you quickly realize how important this ceremonial element is (and that realization makes you feel like a big, stupid gaijin pretty quickly!). And, once the final student is done eating, the same class leader will clap their hands and yell "gochisosamadeshita!", which loosely translates to "it was a real feast!" and serves as the formal ending to the meal.

Just like with ever other pedestrian event in Japanese society, you've always gotta have an opening and closing ceremony.

In addition to sometimes being rather tasty, the lunches provide a degree of entertainment. Take today, for example, when I was served with a riddle, battered in a crunchy mystery coating, seasoned with some tasty enigma sauce. We got a 8-10” hotdog bun, a plate full of fried noodles, some of the awesome-fire-engine-red pickled ginger, and the meagerest scrap of Japanese bacon-cut pork you’ve ever seen. That last one, as we painfully discovered one hungover Sunday morning, is a clever ninja ploy that looks just like western bacon but tastes like a really skinny piece of pork. Yeah, it doesn’t sound so bad until you put it in your mouth expecting bacon, and you find out that it’s not.

That was my lunch, and just as I was about to set into it with the provided fork, I noticed the teacher across from me cramming the piece of faux bacon, ginger, and noodles into the big hotdog bun. I suspected this might be some clever ploy to make me look like the foolish gaijin barbarian everyone suspected me of being, but I looked around and saw everyone else was doing it. Apparently the carb-tastic meal was called yaki soba pan, which directly translates to “fried noodle bun” (duh). Why you’d eat fried noodles in a bun is beyond me, but that was the way of it.

¹Janken is the Japanese version of rock-paper-scissors. But, when compared to the intensity and form of janken, rock-paper-scissors resembles a series of aimless, spasmodic flailings.