The First Juraku Olympics: One Coat, Two People, and a Bowl of Ramen

On Wednesday August 5, our weekly TEN TEN NYC meetup went Olympic.

The line on the invite was "no athletic ability required," which turned out to be the most accurate description of the evening anyone managed.

Five events. The fourth is the one people are still talking about.

1. Chopstick Bean Challenge

Move as many beans as you can from one bowl to another. Thirty seconds. Chopsticks only, no hands, one bean at a time, and anything you drop does not count.

Simple to explain, much harder once a room is watching.

2. Blind Beer Tasting Challenge

Five beers in the lineup. Each competitor gets three of them, poured blind, and writes down what they think each one is. A point per correct answer. Twenty-one and over, obviously.

The one event where knowing a lot about beer was supposed to help.

3. Shake Shake Fries Challenge

Hold a pedometer in one hand and shake a bag of fries with that same hand for sixty seconds. Most shakes wins. You may not switch hands, and if the bag bursts you are disqualified, which is the rule that made people slow down at exactly the wrong moment.

There was also an optional handicap: strap a weight to your shaking arm, and if you still finish top three you take two bonus points. Several people took that bet.

4. The Nininbaori Ramen Challenge

The one people are still talking about.

What nininbaori actually is

Nininbaori is written 二人羽織, which literally reads "two people, one haori." A haori is a traditional Japanese jacket, worn open over a kimono.

The setup: the person in front puts the haori on but does not put their arms through the sleeves. A second person crouches behind them, hidden under the same coat, and pushes their own arms through instead. From the front you see one slightly hunched person whose hands appear to belong to them and absolutely do not.

The comedy is entirely in the mismatch. The arms cannot see. The face cannot reach. Nothing lines up.

And the classic version of the bit is feeding. The person behind tries to get food or drink into the mouth of the person in front, and misses, repeatedly, in front of an audience.

You will find it at yose comedy theatres, on Japanese TV comedy, and above all at parties. It is a staple enkaigei, the sort of party trick someone volunteers for at a year-end office do. Most Japanese adults have watched one, and a fair number have been the arms.

If none of that is familiar, the closest reference point is "Helping Hands" from Whose Line Is It Anyway? Same joke, several centuries younger.

What we did to it

Teams of two, one coat, three minutes. The player in front could use no hands. The player behind was the arms. Whichever team got through the most ramen won.

It came with bigger prizes than the other events, on the straightforward grounds that it was by far the messiest.

Watching two people negotiate a bowl of ramen by shouting directions at each other is the funniest thing that has happened in this restaurant.

5. Wasabi Takoyaki Roulette

Two takoyaki. One of them is loaded with wasabi. Pick one, eat it whole, and then hold a poker face for ten seconds while a judge watches you.

Eating it was never the challenge. The scoring was all about the face:

• 8 to 10 points: completely deadpan
• 3 to 7 points: a twitch, or a sound escaped
• 0 to 2 points: visible agony, or you reached for water, which is a disqualification

You also had to declare your difficulty before eating. Normal was worth one point, Super Spicy two. Draw the plain takoyaki and you got a flat three points, so the safe outcome scored respectably and the brave one scored better only if you could keep your composure.

Nobody is as good at this as they think they are.

What They Were Playing For

Every event scored the same way: three points for first, two for second, one for third. The wasabi roulette layered its own scoring on top, and the fries had that weight bonus, so the running total was genuinely hard to follow from the sidelines.

At the end of it all there were medals, special prizes, a share of $300 in cash, and the title of first-ever Juraku Olympics Champion.

• Gold: $150, medal, Juraku prize
• Silver: $100, medal, Juraku prize
• Bronze: $50, medal, Juraku prize

You could enter everything with the all-challenge pass, which came with a welcome drink, or buy into a single event. Watching was free, and plenty of people took us up on that.

Also, It Was My Birthday

I did not plan the date around it. TEN TEN picked August 5 and I worked out the collision later.

Spending your birthday watching people try to feed each other ramen through a bathrobe is not something I would have written down in advance. It was better than anything I would have written down.

Thank You

To everyone who competed, cheered, filmed, celebrated my birthday, and helped turn a Wednesday night into a genuine New York City spectacle: thank you.

The Olympics were a one-off. The meetup they grew out of is not. TEN TEN NYC is at Juraku every Wednesday night, and it stays what it has always been: artists, regulars, friends, and people who want to be somewhere with a bit of life in it.

Not every week has medals. Come anyway.

More of the people we work with.