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12 strange Japanese names for Western sports, from “fighting ball” to “reject ball”

Casey Baseel Sep 28, 2016
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Are you ready for some armor ball?

Nowadays, Japan is pretty accepting of foreign loanwords. For the vast majority of concepts or items that originated overseas, Japanese society is perfectly happy to just pronounce it as best as Japanese pronunciation will allow and write it using katakana, the type of script used for foreign words.

This is especially true for modern sports that were introduced to the country through contact with other nations. In Japan today, tennis is tenisu and soccer is sakkaa. Sure, the pronunciations get a little corrupted, but they’re pretty understandable even to English-speakers without any Japanese-language proficiency.

A high-profile exception, though, is baseball, which in Japan is called yakyuu, literally “field ball” and written with kanji (generally reserved for concepts originating in Japan or China) as 野球. But it turns out that Japan actually created its own words for all sorts of Western sports, some of which are far more colorful than their English counterparts. See how many you can guess from their kanji and literal translations.

1. 籠球
Pronounced: roukyuu
Meaning: “basket ball”
In English:
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…basketball, obviously. Sure, the kanji is a little tricky, but the meaning is exactly the same (incidentally there’s also a basketball anime called Ro-Kyu-Bu!).

2. 蹴球
Pronounced: shuukyuu
Meaning: “kick ball”
In English:
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…soccer. The baseball substitute known in English as “kickball” is relatively unknown in Japan, making soccer undisputedly the most kick-centric sport in the country.

3. 氷球
Pronounced: kyoukyuu
Meaning: “ice ball”
In English:
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…ice hockey, despite the fact that the sport uses a puck, not a ball.

4. 鎧球
Pronounced: gaikyuu
Meaning: “armor ball”
In English:
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…football, since it has the most noticeable and iconic protective gear out of the major sports.

5. 闘球
Pronounced: toukyuu
Meaning: “fighting ball”
In English:
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…rugby, because no other sport so resembles a running brawl.

6. 庭球
Pronounced: teikyuu
Meaning: “garden ball”
In English:
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…tennis, a sophisticated athletic endeavor befitting those cultured enough to also appreciate and maintain a garden.

7. 羽球
Pronounced: ukyuu
Meaning: “feather ball”
In English:
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…badminton. Honestly, it’s hard to think of any other way to describe a shuttlecock than as a ball with feathers attached to it.

8. 避球
Pronounced: hikyuu
Meaning: “avoid ball”
In English:
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…dodgeball, which in Japan is a team sport played on a square, hardwood court roughly the size of the one used for basketball.

9. 排球
Pronounced: haikyuu
Meaning: “reject ball”
In English:
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…volleyball (this is another one that’s a little easier to guess if you’re an anime fan). The theory is that the name comes from a team’s goal being to “reject” the ball by knocking it back to the opponent’s side of the net.

10. 杖球
Pronounced: joukyuu
Meaning: “cane ball”
In English:
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…field hockey, in fact, and not croquet, gateball, or any other geriatric-friendly sport.

11. 十柱戯
Pronounced: jucchuugo
Meaning: “ten pillar pleasantry”
In English:
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…bowling. It’s not clear why it was given a name that shuns recognition of the bowling ball, but still, it’s hard to hate a name this quaint.

12. 孔球
Pronounced: koukyuu
Meaning: “hole ball”
In English:
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…golf, which wasted a perfectly good opportunity to be called “taking a break half-way through to eat lunch and drink a couple cold ones ball.”

Now, bear in mind that while yakyuu remains by far the most common way to refer to baseball in Japanese, all the rest of these names have fallen so out of modern use as to be largely unintelligible, even to many native Japanese speakers. As such, using them on your Japanese midterm is likely to have your frustrated teacher flashing back to that one kid who couldn’t seem to remember that everyone in Japan just uses the loanword for “lion” instead of the indigenous shishi to talk about the African animal. On the other hand, if you want to show off your knowledge of esoteric athletic linguistics to your sports buddies, these will do the trick quite nicely.

Source: Goo via Otakomu
Top image: Gatag/Vector Open Stock

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he admits that he’d probably have written the kanji 鎧球 on the inside of his high school football locker, if he’d only known about them at the time.