artist: AKINO from bless4 artist: angela artist: Aramary artist: binaria artist: Cocco artist: Fire Bomber artist: How-Low-Hello artist: I've Sound artist: Ikuhara Kunihiko artist: J. If you’re having trouble visualizing this, this page has photos of 4-tatami-mat rooms (not all are studio apartments), this page has a bunch of photos of layouts for 6-tatami-mat studio apartments, and this one has images (though most are not photos) of layouts for 5-tatami-mat apartments. I’m not going to go into any sizes larger than 6 tatami mats because this almost always comes up in the context of the singer talking about how tiny and crappy their apartment is. 6 tatami mats is a common size for a studio 4 and 5 are less so. In practice, tatami mats are usually made to order and aren’t of a uniform size, but as a standard of measurement, a tatami mat is about 1.65 square meters, so if the main room of your house (this measure usually doesn’t include the bathroom) is 4 tatami mats it’s about 6.6 square meters or 71 square feet if it’s 5 tatami mats it’s about 8.25 square meters or 88 square feet and if it’s 6 tatami mats it’s about 10 square meters or 107 square feet. Traditionally, the size of living spaces in Japan was measured in the number of tatami mats it would take to cover the floor, and this is still commonly used to talk about the size of rooms or studio apartments. It involves a formalized call and response, of which the commonly quoted part is “Ano ko ga hoshii” / “Ano ko ja wakaran” or “We want that kid” / “We don’t know which kid you mean.” Each team picks a player from the other team that they want the two selected players play rock-paper-scissors and the loser joins the winner’s team. Two teams, initially of equal size, stand in two lines facing each other and holding hands. Hana Ichi Monme: This one’s not as ominous, so it doesn’t come up as much, but it is still referenced on occasion. Hana Ichi Monme is like a somewhat more genteel Red Rover. Much like Ring Around the Rosy, it somehow attracts a lot of edgy theories about what the lyrics really mean there must be something about children holding hands in a circle and singing a song that brings that out, I guess. The line most often quoted in pop culture is “Ushiro no shoumen dare?” (“Who is in front of your back?” or “Whose face is that behind you?”). Other players form a circle around them while singing a song, and when the song ends the oni has to guess who is standing behind them. Kagome Kagome: Also features a blindfolded oni, but in this case a stationary one. The accompanying chant is “Oni-san kochira, te no naru hou e,” or “Oni, come here, toward the sound of clapping hands.” Like Blind Man’s Buff, it’s not actually played much anymore, possibly because of the obvious problems with letting a small child run around blindfolded. Mekakushi-Oni: Mekakushi-Oni is a tag variant where the person who’s “it” is blindfolded, similar to Marco Polo or Blind Man’s Buff. Tag (Onigokko or Oni-asobi): Works pretty much like the kind of tag you’re probably familiar with, but while chasing the others, the oni repeats, “Onigokko suru mono kono yubi tomare,” or “Everyone who’s playing tag, stop at my fingertips.” There’s more to the chant sometimes and there’s some regional variation, but “kono yubi tomare” is mostly the part that gets quoted. On a side note, comparing this to the American “Ready or not, here I come” is amusingly on-the-nose as an encapsulation of the differences between the two cultures. Hide and Seek (Kakurenbo): In the Japanese version of hide-and-seek, the person who’s “it”–referred to as the “ oni” in pretty much any game that has an “it”–calls out “Mou ii kai?” or “Are you ready?” and other players respond with either “Mada da yo” (“Not yet”) or “Mou ii yo” (“I’m ready”). These chants tend to come up in horror contexts much like English-language children’s songs and nursery rhymes do, with the added spice of demons already being involved. It will be updated as I come across more things that require frequent explanation.Ī lot of Japanese children’s games have accompanying songs/chants, many of which involve demons/monsters or are just generally vaguely creepy. There are certain things I find myself explaining over and over in footnotes, so I finally decided that it would save a lot of time if I just wrote some things up in a centralized post that I could link to when necessary.
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