Today is Children's Day in Japan so this story is kind of fitting.
Last week, at the Shibuya Zatsugidan I asked a friend what he was doing for the weekend. He replied with, "Well it is kind of hard to describe in English." That answer always sends my curiosity soaring. After a very funny conversation invloving me doing a lot of probing and questioning to get the answer I was looking for it was established that my friend was going to play a game of Dorokei (sometimes known as Keidoro) in Shinjuku.
Dorokei is a word made up of two Japanese words. Doro comes from the word dorobou which means robber and kei comes from the word keistsu which means police. Due to my obvious excitement and intrigue I was invited along and of course accepted!
Adults playing a kids game through the streets of Tokyo, this I was not going to miss.
The only directions I was given was to meet at the Shinjuku Station East exit at 11pm on Sunday night. The rest was up to my imagination and did it go into overdrive.
I quickly contacted a good friend of mine, Steph, who was equally as excited. We discussed the idea of going in full costume, hand cuffs and all but thought it may be a little much on our first time, so opted for comfort over impersonation.
While waiting for the train we practiced our most stealth like robber moves.
We arrived promptly at 11pm meeting our Japanese friends who took us to a basement level izakaya about 10 mintues walk from Shinjuku station, heading towards Shinjuku Ni Chome.
When we arrived we were greeted with the usual shouts of "いらしゃいませ" (welcome!) and shown to our seats. There were a few others hanging out in the Japanese style restaurant but none looked like the cops and robbers we were expecting. We were glad to have decided against the costumes. Being the only foreigners was stand out enough.
We were given a map and a long list of rules, which our friends helped to translate. A very long list of rules.
It took a few explainations, a whole lot of questioning and plenty of laughter but soon we were well on our way to being ready to roam the streets chasing each other.
There were two teams, the blue and the red team. Each team had spies, treasure and a leader. These roles were all decided by picking names out of a hat. A quick game of jyan ken (scissors, paper, rock) to decide who were the cops and who were the robbers and then we were ready to play. More people had piled in by now making the teams bigger, about 15 on each side.
Marked with colored taped and armed with maps were were sent out into the now fairly quiet streets of Shinjuku. It was almost 1am, time for the first 50 mintue game to start. Steph and I were on opposite teams. She was a cop first and I was a robber. My team had some pretty intense startegies, having played the game many times. My strategy was to run and hide.
After about five minutes my strategy didn't seem so exciting.
So I decided to switch into fugitive mode and hit the streets.
The game playing area that had been mapped out was in the quiet, residential part of Shinjuku. Lots of funky little alley ways, the sounds of chatting and Japanese TV coming from the closely built houses. The streets themselves were pretty much empty, the beauty of living in a safe city (you can roam the streets alone playing cops and robbers at 2am)
The object of the game as a robber was to stay in the game for the whole 50 minutes and not get caught, winning points for your team. I lasted about 20 minutes, before being sent to jail (which was the izkaya that we started at). After the first game the teams swapped and roles were reversed. Being a cop is harder than I thought, those robbers are clever.
Once the two games were over, around 3am, we all headed back to the izakaya, tallied up the points and decided the winning team. The winners got champaign the losers had to drink what was supposed to be disgusting, mystery juice. I actually quite enjoyed it, cabbage, carrot, cucumber and wasabi juice.
The real games began when we celebrated our wins and joked about our loses with steaming hot pots of food and plenty of bad quality izakaya drinks. The rest is a blur...
