World Rock Paper Scissors Day

In the spring of 2005, Takashi Hashiyama, president of the Japanese electronics firm Maspro Denkoh Corporation, could not decide which of the world’s two great auction houses should sell his company’s collection of Impressionist and modern paintings, a lot that included works by Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso worth an estimated $20 million. Rather than weigh proposals, he told Christie’s and Sotheby’s to settle it between themselves with a single game of rock, paper, scissors. One firm treated the request as a joke; the other treated it as a competition to be won. World Rock Paper Scissors Day, observed every 27 August, celebrates a game so old and so apparently trivial that grown institutions have staked millions of dollars on a single throw of the hand.

Where the day comes from

The World Rock Paper Scissors Association, headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, established World Rock Paper Scissors Day in 2014 to encourage people to play the game purely for fun, and to promote it as a legitimate way of settling everyday disputes rather than a children’s pastime to be outgrown. The Association, which had already been running organised championship tournaments for over a decade by the time it created the day, chose 27 August as a fixed, unaffiliated date late in the Northern Hemisphere summer, giving the observance room to spread through workplaces, schools and social media without competing with an existing holiday.

A much older game than it looks

The game’s roots reach back to Han-dynasty China, the imperial period running from 206 BC to 220 AD, where hand games using symbolic gestures to represent a hierarchy of forces were already part of everyday social life. A more precisely dated ancestor appears in the Ming-dynasty text Wuzazu, written by the scholar and official Xie Zhaozhi, which describes a game called shoushiling using hand signs to represent a slug, a snake and a frog — three creatures arranged so that each defeats one of the others and loses to the third, the same cyclical logic that rock, paper and scissors would later apply to man-made objects instead of animals.

The game reached Japan by the seventeenth century, where it evolved into a family of hand games known collectively as sansukumi-ken, or “the fist game of the three who fear one another” — a name that describes the cyclical, no-single-winner structure precisely. The specific version using rock, paper and scissors as its three symbols emerged in Japan in the late nineteenth century under the name jan-ken, and it was this Japanese form, not the older Chinese original, that eventually spread to the rest of the world. Japan gave the game its modern shape so thoroughly that janken remains, to this day, one of the most culturally embedded ways the country resolves everyday disputes — who orders first, who takes the last seat, who pays a shared bill — treated with a seriousness that looks, to outsiders, disproportionate to three simple hand shapes.

The game entered Western print comparatively recently. A French children’s magazine described it in 1927, and the New York Times laid out its rules for American readers in a 1932 article, treating rock, paper, scissors as something of a novelty import rather than a game readers were assumed to already know. That late arrival is part of why the game still carries a faint air of the exotic in English-speaking countries, even though by the early twenty-first century it had become one of the most universally recognised methods of instant, tie-free decision-making on the planet.

Why Americans call it “roshambo”

In parts of the United States, especially on the West Coast, the game is nicknamed roshambo, and popular legend attaches that name to Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, the French general who commanded troops alongside George Washington during the American Revolutionary War, with a folk story claiming the two generals once settled a military disagreement by playing the game. The story cannot be true: rock, paper, scissors did not reach the West from Japan until the early twentieth century, more than a hundred years after Rochambeau’s death in 1807. Linguists favour a duller but more plausible explanation — that “roshambo” is simply what happened when English speakers half-heard one of the chanted Japanese variants of jan-ken-pon and reshaped its sounds into something that resembled a French name they already knew. The earliest documented use of “roshambo” for the game appears in a 1936 publication, The Handbook for Recreation Leaders, printed in Oakland, California, which places the nickname’s American debut squarely in the same region where it is still most commonly heard today.

The day the art world played for millions

The Maspro Denkoh case became the game’s most famous adult demonstration precisely because the two firms prepared so differently. Kanae Ishibashi, then president of Christie’s Japan, took the challenge seriously enough to consult two children — Alice and Flora Maclean, the eleven-year-old daughters of a Christie’s employee — who told her that rock was “way too obvious” and recommended she open with scissors, since scissors beats paper and most first-time players default to rock. Ishibashi also carried lucky charm beads and sprinkled salt for good fortune before the game. Sotheby’s representatives, by contrast, treated the whole exercise as pure chance and put no strategy into their choice at all, reportedly picking paper on a whim. Because both companies represented themselves through their local presidents rather than a synchronised in-person throw, the “match” was conducted by each side submitting its choice on paper in advance. Ishibashi’s scissors beat Sotheby’s paper, and Christie’s won the consignment; the Cézanne alone went on to sell for $11.8 million as the third-largest lot of Christie’s May 2005 evening sale. The episode is now a stock case study in decision theory and game theory courses, less for what it proves about randomness than for what it revealed about two competing attitudes toward an ostensibly random game: one side did its homework and won.

How it’s celebrated

The World Rock Paper Scissors Association marks the day by promoting local tournaments, office pools and casual play, part of its long-running effort to have the game recognised as a legitimate competitive activity rather than a coin flip with extra steps. Competitive rock, paper, scissors has run its own tournament circuit since the Association organised a first World Championship in Toronto in 2002, complete with published strategy: reading an opponent’s tendencies, exploiting the well-documented human bias toward opening with rock, and varying one’s own pattern enough across a match to stay unpredictable. Workplaces have adopted the game for exactly the reason Judge Presnell did — as a fast, free, universally understood tie-breaker — and casual leagues built around the day now run in bars and community centres in several countries, treating a children’s hand game as a legitimate excuse for an evening out.

A federal judge’s order

The game’s most unusual American appearance came from the bench rather than the boardroom. In June 2006, US District Judge Gregory Presnell of the Middle District of Florida, presiding over Avista Management v. Wausau Underwriters, grew tired of opposing lawyers’ inability to agree on where to hold a routine deposition and issued a written order instructing counsel to appear at a neutral location and resolve the dispute with “one game of rock, paper, scissors,” with the winner entitled to choose the deposition site anywhere in Hillsborough County. The order was reported around the world as a novelty, though the attorneys are widely believed to have quietly settled the matter without ever playing in public, sparing the losing side the embarrassment of a courthouse defeat by hand gesture.

Fun facts

Researchers at the University of Tokyo unveiled a robotic hand in June 2012 that wins rock, paper, scissors against a human opponent with total reliability, using a high-speed camera to recognise the opponent’s hand shape as it forms and responding within a single video frame, faster than the human eye can perceive the robot has “cheated”. The Chinese game’s original three symbols were a slug, a snake and a frog. The pop group AKB48 once ran an annual, nationally televised janken tournament in which members competed for a coveted “centre” position in the group’s next single, turning a children’s hand game into a genuine career stake for professional performers. And the game’s most consequential recorded outcome to date remains a decision worth $20 million, settled by a pair of eleven-year-olds’ playground advice about which hand shape to throw first.

A closing reflection

What the Maspro Denkoh auction really exposed was not that rock, paper, scissors is random — it is, in the purest sense, provided both players choose independently and simultaneously — but that human beings almost never play it that way. People default to rock when nervous, favour whatever beat them last time, and telegraph intentions through posture and hesitation, which is exactly the gap that separated Christie’s careful preparation from Sotheby’s shrug. A game old enough to have been played with a slug, a snake and a frog before anyone thought to use a rock, endures because it is small enough to fit into any spare thirty seconds of human disagreement, and honest enough that everyone, including a company president settling an eight-figure decision, can agree to live with the result. For more on games where an instant of hand-eye timing decides everything, see World Juggling Day, and for a longer history of pastimes played purely for their own sake, National Puzzle Day.