Tag Archives: hand

Hand to face prank

Something she learned as a kid, my informant remembers this piece of folklore from middle school. The way it works is someone says that if your hand is bigger than your face, you have cancer. Then, when you put your hand up to your face to check, they push your hand into your face. It’s painful and annoying and it makes my informant remember why she hated things like that when she was younger, tricks kids would make up to hurt others. Because the kid the prank is pulled on fails to realize they’re being tricked, it becomes almost acceptable to hurt them. The pain comes as a result of the person’s failure to realize it’s a trick. This is why many people accept it when they get hurt from a prank like this, versus if someone randomly just hit you in the face, in which case you might less readily let it go. My informant remembered being a kid and not differentiating between the two cases, though. When a peer did this to her, her response was to kick him in the leg. The prank is something she hasn’t forgotten because it serves as a reminder of that human desire to hurt others and be in positions of power over them, where it becomes acceptable to hurt them. My informant dislikes that quality of humanity but finds it interesting that it exists and that things children do often reflect it.

The prank also acts as a kind of initiation into the group of people who know it. Once it’s been done to you, like a college hazing ritual for example, you want to do it to the person who doesn’t know about to get revenge upon whoever did it to you. And once the prank’s been done to you once, it can’t be repeated unless you forget how it works. This makes it not seem as bad, since even if it hurts you, it also teaches you what it is so you feel like you gained some knowledge from the experience. Humans learn from pain, and this is an example of that. The prank’s existence also shows how children like to push limits to see what’s socially acceptable. Mature adults would be less likely to perform this prank because it is against social codes to malevolently trick someone like that.

Eating The People On Your Hand — Japanese Folk Belief

In Japan, students nervous for a presentation are often told to draw the Chinese character for “person,” 「人」three times on their hand. They are then supposed to pretend to eat those “people” by putting their hand in front of their mouth, in the belief that this will ease their anxiety.

My informant spent most of her life in the city of Naha in Okinawa, Japan, where her mother informed her of this folk belief when she was in middle school, preparing to give a speech in front of her whole class. Her mother drew three broad, sweeping 「人」characters on her hand and said, “now eat them.” The idea was that those three 「人」characters represented the audience in the palm of her hand, and eating them made them seem irrelevant, undeserving of her anxiety. My informant said, however, that it was less the actual gesture and more the fact that it invoked her mother’s continuous caring, that soothed her when she saw the characters on her hand while giving her presentation (and subsequent nerve-wracking situations after that). Because it is widely known and understood to be a prominent folk belief, she said, it gave her a sense of camaraderie with her audience–that she was connected to them even as she stood in front of the class, because she knew that many of her classmates had learned the same tactic from their parents as well.

This folk belief is influenced obviously by the Chinese characters in the Japanese language. Each Chinese character possesses a meaning independent of sentences or words, and can be used alone to convey messages and serve as symbols. The three 「人」characters, as mentioned earlier, illustrates a literal crowd in the palm of one’s hand, at once minimizing the audience and making the performer feel more in control–the palm of the hand is a very controllable space, after all. Pretending to eat the audience only empowers the performer further, by giving them an opportunity to at least fake power over their own anxieties and the judgments of others. My informant mentioned, furthermore, that in her time in the seventies, the 「人」characters on her hand had served as a kind of symbol for wishbones as well, supposed to give the performers good luck–so the characters served a double purpose.

By now this practice has become so widespread around Japanese society that, my informant said, nobody really knows where it originated from. She had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from her teacher, and so on.

Most importantly, however, this highly ritualistic gesture is something that is performed usually in anxiety-ridden situations. When one is under a great amount of stress, even half-hearted trust in a certain folk belief can be enough to soothe one’s mind immensely. My informant said that, depending on how nervous she was, the simple act of performing that gesture repeatedly could calm her down, if only by reminding her of the futility of worrying, and of her mother’s support.