Kemari: Traditional Japanese Hacky-Sack with Fun Costumes
By: Bob | May 17th, 2007
If you think those cool kids playing hacky sack down on your street corner or the amazing Mr. Woo invented the game of keepy-uppy, think again. The ancient sport of Kemari arrived in Japan around 600 AD and is derived from the Chinese sport of Cuju (not to be confused with a Stephen King book about a killer dog). It is one of the oldest forms of football.
The object of the game is one that we all know very well. Use your feet to keep the ball up in the air or risk having your head chopped off by a Samurai sword. Ok, the punishment isn’t that severe but you know how shameful it is when you are playing keepy-uppy in a circle and you screw up. Played with 2 to 12 players, Kemari gave the ancient aristocratic Japanese a reason to wear fun costumes and to shout.
When a player received the ball and was controlling it, he would shout “ariyaaa” everytime he touched the ball. When the ball was finally kicked to another player the last shout would be “ari!”. Hence, you would hear a player shout “ariyaa, ariyaa, ariyaa, ari!” until he got the ball back.
Kemari reached its height of popularity between the 10th and 16th centuries. In other words, before video games and karaoke. Some historians believe that Marco Polo was exposed to the sport and helped to introduce it to Europe as a forerunner to modern football.
Kemari has been revived in Japan in recent years and it is even featured in an animated movie, Samurai Warriors: Xtreme Legends. The video below shows the game being played. It is hardly Xtreme, but it is fun to think that humans have been entertaining themselves the same way for centuries.
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