Japan’s Most Intense Rock, Paper, Scissors Competition
[GIF via Nippon Channel]
Leave it to Japan to make a friendly game of rock-paper-scissors into an event, complete with cosplay, cheering, and crying.
Since 2010, members of idol group AKB48 and its sister groups have duked it out in paper-rock-scissors competitions or “janken taikai” in Japanese.
“Janken” means paper-rock-scissors (“taikai” means “tournament”), and while I played this growing up in the U.S., I certainly never did as much as Japanese people do. Even grown-ups play janken, using it to decide trivial things among friends that people in the U.S. might decide with a coin toss.