ABSTRACT
Ken is a game which enjoyed great popularity in Japan at least from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the 1950s, after which its popularity rapidly declined. 1 Nowadays ken is mainly preserved in the form of jan-ken(paper, scissors, stone), a game played all over the world, which is generally used in Japan as a means to arrive at decisions similar to tossing up a coin in the West as well as a children's game in combination with other games. Jan-ken belongs to the basic vocabulary of Japanese children which according to Sanseidō's Yōji no kokugo e-jiten (Ōkubo 1971:3: 16) should already be mastered at the age of two.
