I’m tinkering with a web front-end for my new dictionary lookup tool, and every once in a while I stumble across something entertaining. I’m using full-text indexing (Sphinx) to create a half-assed English-to-Japanese dictionary out of the JMdict data, and one of the words I typed in was “strip”. There were 36 matching records, and one of them caught my eye: 野球拳, “strip version of rock-paper-scissors forfeit game”.

Standard rock-paper-scissors is じゃん拳. 野球 means baseball in every other compound word, but in this one case, it ain’t. I have no idea how it got that way, but this isn’t a dictionary error, as can be seen from this promotional video for the PSP game YA-Q-KEN (warning: poorly-subbed dialogue, delivered by really cute AV actresses). It appears to offer a total of 9 girls willing to work with their hands.