Japanese Traditional Games: 10 Classics, and Which Ones Kids Still Play
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Here's the thing most guides to Japanese traditional games get wrong: they present them as museum pieces, played once a year by children in kimono. They aren't. Ask around our shop in Tokyo and the answer is straightforward — we played all of these, and most of them are still being played by kids today. What's genuinely distinctive isn't that some died out. It's that a handful of them are locked to a single week of the year, and everybody accepts that as normal.
The Ten Games at a Glance
Almost all of them share the same DNA: cheap equipment, a skill you have to practise, and no batteries. That's a large part of why they're still here.
Kendama
A wooden ball on a string, three cups and a spike. Japan's national skill toy, with graded ranks and a genuine competitive scene.
Ayatori
String figures made from a single loop. Brooms, ladders, Tokyo Tower — dozens of shapes, all from one piece of string.
Karuta
A card-grabbing game: one player reads, the others race to snatch the matching card. Played in classrooms, and seriously competitive at the top.
Koma (Spinning Tops)
Wooden tops launched with a wound string. Winding it correctly is the hard part, which is exactly why a clean spin still gets a reaction.
Menko
Slam your thick card down hard enough to flip your opponent's off the ground, and you win it. The ancestor of every playground card craze since.
Otedama
Small cloth bags filled with beans, juggled and caught in rhythm, usually to a song. Portable, quiet and much harder than it looks.
Daruma-otoshi
A stack of wooden discs with a daruma head on top. Knock the discs out one at a time with a mallet without bringing him down.
Hanetsuki
Badminton without a net, played with wooden hagoita paddles and a feathered shuttlecock. Traditionally, whoever misses gets ink on their face.
Fukuwarai
Blindfolded, you place paper eyes, nose and mouth onto a blank face. The wonkier the result, the better. Japan's answer to pin the tail on the donkey.
Takoage (Kite Flying)
New Year kite flying. Still a proper winter sight, and the backbone of some serious regional kite festivals.
The Seven You'll Find Any Day of the Year
Kendama is the most visible of them. It has a grading system, tournaments, specialist shops and a global following that boomeranged back into Japan — the toy your grandfather played with is now sold as performance equipment. If you only try one game on this list, start here.
Ayatori survives for a different reason: it is almost free. A loop of string costs nothing, fits in a pocket and works on a train, in a waiting room or under a desk. Nearly every Japanese person can still make at least one figure, and the step-by-step nature of it is what keeps kids coming back.
Karuta is the one that scales furthest. The children's version — iroha karuta, with proverbs — is a standard classroom game. But the version built on the Hyakunin Isshu, a classical anthology of a hundred poems, has a fully competitive form with tournaments, rankings and players who can identify a card from its first syllable.
Then the four that outsiders most often assume are extinct, and aren't. Koma tops are still a school-yard and community-centre staple, and their metal cousin beigoma is the direct ancestor of the battling-top toys sold today. Menko still works the way it always did — it's a physical, slightly ruthless game where you can win your friend's cards, which is precisely the appeal. Otedama and daruma-otoshi are the quiet ones: cheap, small, easy to start and hard to master. They get written off abroad as grandmother's games. In Japan they're just games.
Honourable mention to ohajiki, which narrowly missed the ten: flat glass counters flicked across a table to knock other counters out, somewhere between marbles and tiddlywinks. It belongs to exactly the same family — a handful of cheap objects, a flick of a finger, and a game that takes a minute to learn.
The Three That Only Come Out in January
Three of the ten really are seasonal, and it's worth being precise about which. Hanetsuki, fukuwarai and takoage belong to oshōgatsu asobi — New Year play. They come out at grandparents' houses, community centres and kindergartens in the first week of January, and then go back in the cupboard for another year.
Hanetsuki has almost inverted itself: fewer people play the game than own the equipment, because ornately decorated hagoita paddles are sold as New Year good-luck decorations, and Tokyo's hagoita market each December is a genuine seasonal event. Fukuwarai is the party game of the group — deliberately silly, best with an audience. Takoage is the outdoor one, and the reason a clear, cold January sky in Japan often has something in it.
Why So Much Japanese Play Belongs to a Season
This is the part we'd argue is the real story. It isn't that Japan has forgotten some of its games. It's that Japanese play is unusually tied to the calendar — a game isn't just something you do, it's something you do now, at this point in the year, and not in June.
Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Kite flying and hanetsuki at New Year. Goldfish scooping at summer festivals and essentially nowhere else. Sparklers in August. Even the food follows the same rule — Japan's snack shelves rotate with the seasons rather than sitting still. The seasonal frame isn't a limitation people work around; it's the point. A game you can only play in January is more of an occasion than a game you can play whenever.
Why these games lasted as long as they did
- The equipment is almost nothing. A loop of string, a cloth bag of beans, a piece of card. No cost barrier, no setup.
- There's a visible skill ladder. You can see yourself get better at kendama or koma, which is exactly what keeps a child practising.
- They work in small spaces. Genkan, tatami room, train seat — most need less room than a football.
- They're social without needing a team. Fun alone, better with one other person, scalable to a whole classroom.
- The seasonal ones get an annual reset. Being tied to New Year isn't decline — it's a guaranteed slot in the calendar, every single year.
We rewrote this article after checking it against our own childhood rather than the internet's. The version you'll read elsewhere — "these charming old games have all but vanished" — didn't match: we played every game on this list, and most of them are still being played now. The honest caveat runs the other way. Because three of them are locked to New Year, a visitor arriving in Japan in July will not see a single hanetsuki paddle in use, and might reasonably conclude the game is dead. It isn't. It's just not January. The same instinct behind all of it shows up in Japan's hands-on "learning by making" tradition.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Japanese traditional games called?
Collectively, dentō asobi (traditional play). The subset played at New Year — hanetsuki, fukuwarai and kite flying, along with karuta — is called oshōgatsu asobi, New Year games.
Do Japanese children still play traditional games?
Yes, more than outside guides suggest. Kendama, ayatori, karuta, koma, menko, otedama and daruma-otoshi are all still in circulation. Hanetsuki, fukuwarai and kite flying are the genuinely seasonal ones, played around New Year.
What is the most popular traditional Japanese game?
Kendama, by a distance. It's the one with a modern competitive following, a grading system and an international market on top of its everyday use.
Why are some Japanese games only played at New Year?
Japanese play is closely tied to the calendar: certain games belong to certain moments in the year, in the same way particular foods do. Being seasonal isn't a sign a game is dying out — it's a fixed annual slot.
Are these games good for children?
They're solid hands-on, screen-free play. Kendama builds balance and persistence, ayatori trains memory and fine motor control, karuta sharpens listening and reaction speed. None is a miracle learning tool, but all reward patient practice.
Where can I buy traditional Japanese games?
Kendama, karuta and ayatori string are widely available both in Japan and internationally. Menko, otedama and daruma-otoshi are easiest to find in traditional toy shops and general stores in Japan.
Traditional, but Not Games
Two things sit right next to this list without belonging on it, and they're worth naming so you don't go looking for them here. Shodō, Japanese calligraphy, and soroban, the abacus, are traditional, hands-on and taught to children — but they're disciplines rather than games. Nobody plays shodō. You practise it, usually at school, sometimes at a club, with the same patient repetition that makes a kendama trick land.
That distinction is the reason they're not in the ten above. It's also why they're the pair most likely to still be in a Japanese child's week: a game survives because children choose it, a discipline survives because it's on the timetable. Of the two, soroban has shifted the most — its after-school slot has quietly gone to English and programming.
For when these games actually get played, see what a Japanese child's summer holiday looks like.
A Taste of the Japanese Childhood
The small, hands-on pleasures of growing up in Japan — the dagashi and playful DIY treats — arrive in every PopnCandy Tokyo box: 12 to 15 authentic Japanese candies and kits, shipped straight from Tokyo.
See the Plans