Japanese Slang (45 page)

But throughout the country the dice rolled on. Desperate gamblers went further underground, formed tighter cliques, were reduced to carving their own dice, and invented new top-secret words. There was a flood of new dice games. Some cliques played
me sh
me
(big-eye small-eye), where those shouting
me
(big eye) had to get numbers four to six in order to win, and those shouting
sh
me
(small eye), numbers one to three. Others played the simple
pin korogashi
(number 1 rolls): pop the die into the
tsubo
(container),
shake it, and let it roll, and if number one comes up, you win. Every clique specialized in different games.
Tensai
(heavenly bones) was played with five dice,
kitsune
(fox) with three,
itten jiroku
(one-heaven six-earth) with two,
chobo ichi
(one cube) with one.

The most striking feature of the secret slangs that developed in the dark, illegal parlors of fin-de-siècle Japan were the different counters with which gamblers tallied the dice dots. Southern dice slang, for instance, invented:

1— pin	6— rotsu
2— nizo	7— un
3— san	8— ch
4— ya	9— kabu
5— goke	10— buta

Northern dice throwers developed their own variation:

1— pin	6— p
2— o	7— ya
3— zun	8— hai
4— ya	9— kabu
5— goke	10— buta

In the more elaborate three-dice games, the dice throwers fabricated more sophisticated names that were adopted into parlor slang as private puns and witticisms. When the dice fell into a 2-1-2 combination, the gamblers would shout
otomo
(attendant), and when they fell into 2-5-2,
nikk
(sunlight). A 5-5-5 score was dubbed
kami no ashi
(wolf's foot), and 1-1-1,
mikkab
zu
(three-day priest). But some of the
counters were given gaucher names. Whenever, for instance, the dice came up as 4-5-4, the crowd would break into peals of laughter and shout:

•   
Dankon no ten mado!
The penis's heavenly window!

As the defiant gamblers played on, risking their lives with every throw of the dice, they updated the dashing image of the medieval
bakuto
gambler. If the men of old were swank, glamorous criminals who roamed the countryside, the new urban gamblers would be dashing but somewhat rougher and a good deal more streetwise. When asked their profession, they would answer
tengo
(trickster),
tego
(“prankster” in Mie dialect), or
tetengo
(hand trickster), all words for gamblers that are still used in today's underworld. Another popular gambling cognomen that has survived the centuries is
tekka uchi
(iron-fire bangers).

Tekka uchi
appears as early as 1711 in a publication called
Konk
Kensh
,
which reports that it was used in the Shiga dialect in the south to mean “gambler,” while
Hamogi-Sendai,
published in 1800, reports that
tekka uchi
was used in the Sendai region in the north to mean “rogue.”