Things you didn’t know about balls and cups

Two years ago while I was up in Juneau, mom and dad got me, in my stocking, traditional home of small presents and cute extras, a little ball-in-cup game. I played around with it while up in Alaska and then brought it into work and left it on my desk. Well what with the flow of people into and out of the room, the ball in cup game got to be pretty popular. So we started seeing how good we could be at getting the ball in the cup. We made a table up on the whiteboard and competed to see who could get the most number of successful balls in cups in a row. The record was 46. My personal record was 12 in a row, but I held the record for the ‘mad minute’ with 18. We’d make up tricks and do all sorts of crazy stuff.

So knowing about my obsession with balls and strings and cups, Jessie got me a little stocking stuffer for christmas this year. It’s a little thing with a ball and two cups on either side, a cup on the handle, and then a spike on the end, and the ball can be tossed into either the cups, the handle or the spike. So, of course, I brought it into work and we started the BoSoC (Ball on String on Cup) Pro league. Same table and everything.

So I got a little curious, though, what was this thing called that we were using? I did a little bit of google searching and discovered that it was, in essence, a Kendama, Japanese in origin. Two cups, one extra on the handle, and a spike on the end, simple, right?

Well I did a little more searching and discovered something really weird. You know how there are Yo-yo’s? Remember how it felt when you discovered that there are people who are *really* into Yo-yo’s? Like you discovered a whole new universe that is both strange and intriguing? Well the same is true with Kendama. There are people that are really, REALLY into kendamas. How into it?



There is a Japanese Kendama Association, the JKA, that has competitions for kendama. They have a belt ranking system, just like martial arts, that can measure your progress. There is even an official specification for what an official kendama is shaped like and only a few companies are allowed to make it. The sticker at the bottom of the handle means that this is an *official* JKA kendama.

So, of course, I bought one.

After I post this I’m going to create a Google Document which will allow us to chart our collective progress through the belt ranking system as well as our various records in number of consecutive catches and whatever other tricks we can think of to name and attempt. We’re engineers, we’re crazy like that.

-N