Daikon Team

There's a game I play, well there's lots of games I play, but it's kind of a game within each game I play, more of a joke really rather than a game so let's call it a joke not a game and I don't suppose it would be very funny for anyone except a group of 30 or so Japanese elementary school kids so maybe not even a joke but just something I do, or have done, an awful lot at elementary school.

I've done it so much that I decided to spice it up a little last Friday to make it more interesting for me rather than anything else but I ended up making a terrible, terrible mistake in front of 30 or so elementary school kids.

It's really very simple. I divide the kids into teams for lots of games. Each time I do, I name the teams...see where we're going with this? I give every team a normal name, except one team which I give a funny name. The funny bit is, it's always the same funny name, and it's always the last team I name that gets the funny name- Daikon Team. Daikon are 2ft long white radishes that sell for tuppence in season and crop up everywhere in Japanese cuisine. Like their distant cousin, the turnip (I should imagine), they are an ugly vegetable. Hence the joke.

It gets better. I draw a strawberry on the blackboard for Strawberry Team, or an orange for Orange Team or whatever and then at the end, I draw a giant white blob with the slightest tuft of green for the greens at the tip. It's really rather funny, or at least, the kids would have you believe so.

Well anyway. Last Friday I did the same, but on the spur of the moment I thought 'F&*k it!' (I was at elementary school after all), I'm going to draw a big bum-shaped daikon and see if anyone notices. A big bum with two big fat bum cheeks. I started drawing my Bum-Daikon and drew two big fat bum cheeks at the bottom and heard kids laughing and shrieking BUM!! BUM! i BUM!n Japanese and I thought great they picked up on it, but then the terrible thing happened.

I drew the bum cheeks, but then the tail of the vegetable kind of ran away from me and tapered into a fat wriggle at an angle from the bum cheeks so as to suggest it was neither Bum nor Daikon nor Bum-Daikon, but in fact, something much, much worse. It was only when I stepped back from the blackboard that I could see the big picture, I'd drawn it that big. I'd drawn a Penis-Daikon.