JAPANESE GAMES
The children of Japan have many games, and some of these games are shared
with them by their fathers and mothers--yes, and by their grandfathers and
grandmothers too, for an old man will fly a kite as eagerly as his tiny
grandson. The girls play battledore and shuttlecock and bounce balls, and
the boys spin tops and make them fight. A top-fight is arranged thus: One
boy takes his top, made of hard wood with an iron ring round it, winds it
up with string, and throws it on the ground; while it is spinning merrily,
another boy throws his top in such a way that it spins against the first
top and knocks it over. So cleverly are the attacking tops thrown that the
first top is often knocked to a distance of several feet. Other games are
playing at war with toy weapons, hunting grasshoppers, which are kept in
tiny cages of bamboo, and hunting fireflies. The last pastime is followed
by Japanese of all ages, and the glittering flies are pursued by night, and
struck down by a light fan.
Wherever there is a stream of water, the boys set up toy water-wheels, and
these water-wheels drive little mills and machines, which the boys have
made for themselves in the cleverest fashion.
Here is a group whose heads are very close together. Let us peep over their
shoulders, and see what it is they watch so quietly and earnestly. Ah! this
is a favourite trick. A small boy is setting a team of half a dozen beetles
to draw a load of rice up a smooth, sloping board. He has made a tiny cart
of paper, and filled it with rice. The traces of the cart are made of fine
threads of silk, and he fastens the threads of silk to the backs of the
beetles with gum.
Now he has his strange team in motion, and the beetles are marching up the
board, dragging their load. The tiny faces in the ring of watchers are
filled with deep but motionless interest. Not one dreams of stretching
out a finger. There is no need to say, "Don't touch!" No one would dream
of touching--that would be very rude. Japanese children manage their own
games, without any appeal to their elders. It is not often that a dispute
arises, but, should that happen, the question is settled at once by the
word of an elder child. The decision is obeyed without a murmur, and the
game goes on.
Another game of which children are fond is that of painting sand-pictures
on the roadside. A group of children will compete in drawing a sand-picture
in the shortest time. Each has four bags of coloured sand--black, red,
yellow, and blue--and a bag of white. The white sand is first thrown down
in the form of a square; then a handful of black sand is taken, and allowed
to run through the fingers to form a quaint outline of a man, or bird, or
animal, upon the white ground. Next, the design is finished with the other
colours, and very often a most striking effect is obtained by these child
artists. "But the most extraordinary and most fascinating thing of all is
to watch the performance of a master in sand-pictures. So dexterous and
masterly is he that he will dip his hand first into a bag of blue sand
and then into one of yellow, allowing the separate streams to trickle out
unmixed, and then, with a slight tremble of the hand, these streams will
be quickly converted into one thin stream of bright green, relapsing again
into the streams of blue and yellow at a moment's notice."
There are many indoor games, and a very great favourite is the game of
alphabet cards. This is played with a number of cards, some of which
contain a proverb and some a picture illustrating each proverb. The
children sit in a ring, and the cards are dealt to them. One of the
children is the reader, and when he calls out a proverb the one who has the
picture corresponding to the proverb answers at once and gives up the card.
The first one to be rid of his cards is the winner, and the one who holds
the last card is the loser. If a boy is the loser, he has a dab of ink or
of paint smudged on his face; if it is a girl, she has a wisp of straw
put in her hair. The game is so called because each proverb begins with a
letter of the Japanese alphabet.
Japanese children have many holidays and festivals, and they enjoy
themselves very much on these joyous occasions. With their beautiful
dresses of silk shining in the sun, a crowd of them looks like a great
bed of flowers. Mr. Menpes speaks of a merry-making which he saw: "It
was a festival for girls under ten, and there were hundreds of children,
all with their kimonos tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and
looking for all the world like a mass of poppies.... Two rows or armies of
these girls were placed several yards distant from each other in this long
emerald-green field, and in the space between them stood two servants, each
holding a long bamboo pole, and suspending from its top a flat, shallow
drum, covered with tissue-paper.
"Presently two young men teachers appeared on the scene, carrying two
baskets of small many-coloured balls, which they threw down on the grass
between the children and the drums. Then a signal was given, and all the
girls started running down the field at full tilt towards one another,
pouncing on the balls as they ran, and throwing them with all their force
up at the paper drums.
"After a time, when a perfect shower of balls had passed through the tissue
drums, quite demolishing them, a shower of coloured papers, miniature
lanterns, paper umbrellas, and flags came slowly fluttering down among
the children on to their jet-black bobbing heads and into their eager
outstretched hands. Never have I seen anything more beautiful than these
gay, brightly-clad little people, packed closely together like a cluster
of flowers in the brilliant sparkling sunshine, with their pretty upturned
faces watching the softly falling rain of coloured toys."