World Rhymes›Kagome Kagome
かごめかごめ
Kagome Kagome · “Basket-eye, basket-eye”
JapaneseCircle game chantPublic domain
A circle game that Japanese children have played for about two hundred years. One child sits in the middle with eyes shut while the others walk around and sing; when the song stops, the child in the middle must guess who is standing right behind them.
The rhyme
かァごめかごめ。
かーごのなかの鳥は。
いついつでやる。
夜あけのばんに。
つるつるつっぺぇつた。
なべのなべのそこぬけ。
そこぬいてーたーァもれ。
Romanization
Kaa gome kagome.
Kaa go no naka no tori wa.
Itsu itsu deyaru.
Yoake no ban ni.
Tsuru tsuru tsuppeeta.
Nabe no nabe no soko nuke.
Soko nuite tamore.
Good to know
What it means
Basket-eye, basket-eye: the bird inside the basket, when, oh when will it come out? In the evening of the dawn. Slip, slip, it slipped. A pot, a pot with its bottom knocked out: knock the bottom out and let it be. The words are playful and deliberately odd, and their wording changes a lot from region to region.
How to play
One child, the "oni", sits in the middle with eyes covered. The others hold hands and walk around in a circle while singing. When the song ends everyone stops, and the child in the middle guesses who is standing directly behind. If the guess is right, they swap places.
History
About this rhyme
Children all over Japan know this circle game. Printed traces go back to the late Edo period: a play of 1813 quotes the first words, and a collection compiled about 1820 holds the fullest early text, shown here. Many stories say that the words hide a tragedy or a secret treasure, but we found no source for any of them, so we tell only what we can show: a game chant with playful nonsense words. The crane and turtle lines of the modern ending are not documented before the late Meiji period.
Sources & rights
- The chant is anonymous and traditional. The text shown is the one printed in the Chikudo zuihitsu (compiled about 1820), as given in the Japanese Wikipedia article; we have not seen the original pages ourselves.
- The meaning, the game instructions and the background text are written by us in our own words. The Japanese text still needs a native-speaker check.
- There is no recording or tune on this page: we do not claim any.
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