Yakyūken is a Japanese game based on rock–paper–scissors. Three players compete. The host cries out "Play ball". The contestants dance to music played on the shamisen and taiko. The host chants "Runner ni nattara essassa.". The crowd cries out "Out! Safe! Yoyonoyoi", as the three contestants show a fist, and then "Jankenpon" as they reveal the gesture they chose. Once the winner is clear, the crowd cries out "Hebo noke Hebo noke. Okawari koi". If there is a tie that needs breaking, the players shout "Aiko de bon!". By the late 1950s, it became common for the loser to have to remove an item of clothing. Yakyūkengets its name from a Shikoku chant which is still a local performance arttoday. It is quite common to see yakyūken on Japanese televisionvariety shows especially at New Years.
Origin
The term initially originated from a Shikoku baseball game in October 1924, between the local teams of Ehime and Kagawa. The Ehime team lost the game 6–0, and its manager, senryū poet Goken Maeda, improvized a cheerleading dance from the tune of classical kabukiBotan ni Chōougi no irodori to boost the morale of his humiliated team. This dance later became an iconic feature of the Ehime team. In 1954, singers like Ichiro Wakahara and Terukiku from King, Yukie Satoshi and Kubo Takakura from Nippon Columbia, and Harumi Aoki from Victor Japan each adapted the dance and its lyrics into record singles named "Yakyuken", and the term quickly became known nationwide. In 1966, the city ofMatsuyama, where the cheerleading dance originated, introduced it as a representative taiko dance for Matsuyama in Shikoku's annual August banquet. In 1970, the banquet dance was transformed into the more popular sansukumi-kenparlour game that continued to today, which the Matsuyama people regarded as honkeyakyūken. Strip sansukumi-ken, however, had been a popular activity in the Japanese red-light district since late Edo period. In 1969, Nippon TV introduced a skit as part of its hugely popular owarai variety show Conte #55's Counterprogram Strikes! by comedians Kinichi Hagimoto and Jirō Sakagami, where beautiful female guests were invited to play sansukumi-ken on stage, and the loser would undress and auction off her clothes to the studio audience for charity. This skit was successful enough in terms of ratings, that later in the year it became its own separate show called Conte #55's Yakyuken!!, named such as Hagimoto was a keen baseball fan. Yakyūken came to associated with strip games. Because of this, Hagimoto himself personally visited Matsuyama in 2005 and apologized to Tsuyoshitoshi Sawada, the fourth-generation iemoto of honke yakyūken, for unintentionally distorting yakyūken. Yakyūken as a stripping game was further propagated by the prolific Japanese pornographic industry, which often used the yakyūken chant in adult videos. Yakyūkeneroge are also popular in Japan and many East Asian countries, with the first yakyūkenvideo game being created by Hudson Soft for the Sharp MZ-80K in 1981.
