Kendama

There are many traditional toys in Japan. When I went to Japan, I visited an elementary school and they showed me many types of toys. My favorite toy they showed me is called the Kendama. The Kendama is a wooden toy with a string attached to it. It is shaped similar to a hammer with a wooden stake at the top of it. At the end of the string, there’s a ball. The ball rests on top of the wooden stake or on the sides (the parts of the hammer) of the kendama. The main point of the kendama is to get the ball back where it started by letting it fall and swinging it back up. It’s a lot more difficult than it seems! Many people who are good with the Kendama can do certain tricks over and over. Tricks with the Kendama are similar to yoyo tricks in that you’re swinging an object on a string.

This is a picture of a Japanese kendama. Sometimes the kendama have lines painted along them, but this one is just plain wood. To the left is kendama in Japanese (ke-n-dama).

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A huge part of the kendama is balance and timing. I tried out the kendama again later at the high school my host sister went to, and I got the ball back on one of the sides. It made me really excited, since I’d tried a lot of times and I was very determined to succeed. I had many of my Japanese friends cheering for me, and it was really fun. There was a photographer and the vice principal filmed it too. The school has posters along the walls of all the foreign exchange students having fun with the students every year.

Just as America has a huge amount of people who love to do yoyo tricks, many people in Japan are very good with the kendama. People who like to do kendama tricks are in America too, but since the Kendama is traditionally Japanese, I have a video of a Kendama master in Japan. It’s 5 minutes, so if it’s long you don’t have to watch all of it. I highly recommend you watch some of it though, he’s very good at each trick he performs. The fact that he does each trick twice or more shows he really is a master, because each trick is very difficult. Doing the trick twice in a row makes it even more difficult.

Click here for the video!