Fruits Basket

It’s best to be “normal” over here. Of course, if you told an American he or she was “normal” it would sound more akin to slamming them with the word “mediocre” than it would be praise. But on this island, the benefits of being a member of a group are encouraged at an early age through a variety of activities and carried on to adulthood, thus over here being normal is quite a good thing.

I’ve always been really curious about the pervasive “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” manner and attitude which leaves me virtually untouched as a foreigner, but nevertheless affects me in small ways on a daily basis. An interesting observation about this cultural stay happened to me on Friday.

“Fruits Basket” is a game commonly played in elementary school, somewhat akin to “tag” or “musical chairs” in western cultures but not quite the same. The game play consists of a large circle with one less chair than persons. Each person is assigned a fruit name. The person in the middle, oni or It, calls a fruit name and the people assigned that fruit must stand up and run to claim a new seat, trying not to be the one left without a chair. If they are the last one standing, they must stand in the center and call another fruit name or call “fruits basket” in which everyone gets up and changes seats. It just continues like this into eternity or until the teacher says stop. It’s actually quite fun and I must say I am quite good at it, being at least 3 feet taller than the students I play it with.

Last Friday, I played this game for the first time with first graders, who are aged around 6 years. Some of them clearly didn’t get the object of the game. At the end of most turns, after a fruit had been called, there were often 2 students left in the middle, both who wanted to call a fruit, or who didn’t understand that they should want to sit down. Rather they wanted to stand in the middle to look silly and grab the attention of the other students. This made the game pretty boring. As the japanese teacher with whom I taught and I were lamenting this fact after the class had finished, she said to me “they don’t understand that standing out is bad.”

Of course she meant “bad for the game”, but it hit me in all sorts of directions and suddenly this timeless game which has no real object other than to “not stand out” became to me a nucleus of Japanese culture, a perpetuator of that strange “desire to be normal” phenomenon. Who would want to stand out when you end up surrounded on all sides by people staring at you because you were the slowest? Even more interesting is that “It” in Japanese is oni [demon]. It can hardly be said that this game is some kind of tool to teach this idea, they do that in all sorts of other ways, but it is definitely an activity fairly telling of this unique cultural attitude.

My boyfriend claims he never played this game as a kid, he is from Osaka where people are considerably friendlier and more gregariously quirky than people from the east side of Japan, but the game is well-known in most of Japan. There is also a very popular manga/anime series called Fruits Basket which contains references to childhood alienation and this game.