Stress, anger, frustration
Most of us experience it and we all deal with it in our own special way
For example, in Britain everyone knows the best way to deal with stress is to make hand puppets and listen to Shout! by Tears for Fears
I should probably get out more
It turns out that in Japan there's a well known way of expressing your anger or stress
and there's even a really cool arcade game that deals with it as well
Chabudai Gaeshi is a phrase that literally means "to flip one's table"
Chabudai is not too dissimilar from this table, a short four-legged table
Japanese families sit around and eat dinner on it or put leaflets on it like I do
Typically it's seen as an act done by the father of the household
when he comes home from work, feeling a bit stressed
The kids are being loud and annoying, the wife is going blablabla
And so he has a bit of a violent outburst
and just flips the table
But fortunately this concept has been made into an exciting game!
Hope they've got insurance!
Chou Chabudai Gaeshi, which literally translates to
Ultra Table Flipping Game
So the game starts out with you sitting at the dinner table
The wife's preparing dinner, and the kids are being quite annoying, on their phones, making noises
And so you start banging the table
each time they do something annoying
I didn't understand this at first I thought you were supposed to keep banging the table continuously
Which is wrong don't do that
And then at the last 10 seconds
It's about a minute long
You flip the table as hard as you can
The wife gets the brunt of it
coz she's making her way to the table when the husband/father flips it
and you get to see the table make its way through your wife's face
in slow motion, again and again
The kids don't know what's going on
The crockery, ruined
Dinner, uh, forget about dinner
And what better way to get rid of your stress
...and your family?
I have to say its a lot of fun, I don't have a wife and kids but if I did
I can't imagine a better way to relieve my stress by flipping a table through them
But the table flipping fun doesn't stop there coz there are other scenarios as well
Such as: an angry teacher flipping his desk
a woman working at a burger restaurant
and even a funeral where you flip the corpse over across all the guests at the funeral
Probably the most disturbing one of the lot
You can even play against other people in a stadium style flipping table competition
and the points you get are depending on
how far you flip the table and how much damage you cause
I have to say I haven't seen an angry Japanese person in the last 6 months I have been here
so I find the concept of someone flipping a table in anger very hard to believe
So the reason I love this game so much
is it does relieve stress, it's quite fun flipping that table
Especially when you see the slow motion replay
Let's face it, whilst some people might say "Oh gosh, how violent and barbaric"
Compared to, say "shooting up a Russian airport" in Call of Duty
or running over a whole city, in Grand Theft Auto
I don't think this is that bad at all really
So yeah it's a fun game
a practical way of relieving stress
Probably something I can't imagine seeing in real life
Particularly when...
I think I just broke my table
Oh my god