Dave’s Football Blog

You’ve seen them in the park. You’ve seen them on college campuses. You might have even seen them at the mall or on an otherwise unoccupied street corner…

Dirty hippies. Standing in a circle. Playing with their hacky sack.

And while you just barely resisted the urge to walk past them and shout, “Get a job!”, little did you know that those dirty hippies were actually playing the Japanese sport of kings. We’re talking about the old, old game of Kemari.

The origins of Kemari stretch back to about 600 A.D. or so, when a Chinese Cuju team on a goodwill tour visited the land of the rising sun and demonstrated their sport to the emperor. Much to their surprise, though, the emperor didn’t give a crap about the actual contest. What got his attention was the skills the players used to keep the ball in the air.

So the emperor — much like Walter Camp 12 centuries later — decided to change the rules. He got rid of the goal-scoring and all, and he decreed that the object of the game is simply to keep the ball in the air with your feet. Kemari balls were made of deerskin and stuffed with barley grains to make them round. Unlike your average footbag, though, the grains were removed once the deerskin had its shape.

Kemari became grand performance in the royal court. Mariashis — yep, that’s what they called the players — would get all dressed up like the Mikado and show off their kicking skills to the royal audience. There was no defense, no tackling, no attempt to knock a player off his game. Everyone shared the ball and cooperated to keep it off the ground. Yet nobody thought of mariashis as dirty hippies — probably because they all cleaned up for the audience. And because sometimes the emperor played with them. Clearly, it was a different time.

It was grand ceremony, too, screaming “Ariyaaaaaa!” as they kicked the ball back and forth, trying hard to keep it in the air as long as possible with as much awesomeness as possible. An awesome mariashi made the emperor smile, and you know what a smiling emperor means, kid — smokin’ hot concubines for everyone.

Some things never change.

We might make snide jokes about this guy now, but if he had lived in Japan 10 centuries ago, he would have gotten more tail than a shrimp boat…

As with all football games of the time, Kemari spread from the royal courts to the masses, and the game was immensely popular between the 10th and 16th centuries, inspiring poets and storytellers, and spreading legends of the great mariashis that kept the ball in the air for 1,000 kicks. In some cases, the emperor coated a ball in silver and gave it a high court rank to commemorate a great game. We have a building in Canton, Ohio, for that now. Those footballs must feel so cheated.

The great Kemari craze died down about four centuries ago, but if you go to Japan today, you’ll still see demonstrations of the game by Kemari preservation societies, who attract tourists just as much the original mariashis attracted the hotties. Everyone else just goes to J-League and X-League games. (Do they go to X-League games? Anyone in Japan want to let me know about that?)

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