My wife and I were talking about sukiyaki (which her mother had enjoyed in a NYC Japanese restaurant sometime in the 1930s-’40s) and I wondered how far back it went in English; the OED, in a 1986 entry, takes it back to 1920 (“Another name by which this dish [sc. nabe] is usually known outside of Tokyo, is suki-yaki. This is derived from suki, which means a spade, and yaki, to cook”), but I figured that could be easily antedated using Google Books, and sure enough I quickly found a hit from 1915 1912 [thanks, ktschwarz!] (something about a “sukiyaki room” in a new Japanese social club in NYC). The most entertaining find, though, was Takeo Oha’s NY Times piece from July 6, 1919 (which you can read without the OCR errors in the Herald of Asia reprint at Google Books); it starts:
Now that the Atlantic has been crossed in the short span of sixteen hours by airplanes, the world has become a very small place indeed. Already aviators are turning their eyes to the Pacific. Soon we may expect to see the United States of America and Japan drawn much closer together by quick aerial transportation and with the shrinking of the ocean may the mutual understanding and friendship of our two nations become the greater. But New Yorkers need not wait for quick aerial transportation to visit Japan. Japan has come to New York.
The part of LH interest comes a few paragraphs later:
There are two vernacular newspapers, one weekly and the other semi-weekly. Doubtless any subscriber to any other New York newspaper could dispense with these without serious danger of backwardness in news. In consequence their readers hover in the neighborhood of the unlucrative two thousands. The parlor game, commonly christened “ta-maya” among my compatriots, has practically become one of the standard features of Coney Island and other New York Summer resorts. From a mercenary point of view the business is good and forms the best Summer side line. Really you need not be an infallible shot in order to turn a cigarette package target into your coveted prize at 50 cents or win a 5-cent doll by rolling away dollars at the Japanese ball game. Business is business, the Japanese has learned.
This metropolis may boast of no less than a dozen Japanese restaurants. Your casual visit will introduce you to fresh sliced fish taken raw, seasoned bamboo shoots, and lotus root and pickled radish served on the same table with “sukiyaki,” palatable at least to the Japanese. “Sukiyaki,” a compound word still unauthorized in any standard English dictionary, is the Japanese “quick lunch,” eaten while being cooked on a small charcoal table stove. Beef, onions, cabbage, beancurd, and other vegetable additions, not forgetting Japanese soy, sugar, and a little sake, are ready to be prepared in a shallow pan á la japonaise on the fire. The rest devolves upon you and your company, ladies not honorably excluded! A great time saving it is for the proprietor, this having his guests prepare their own meals! Though a fairly comprehensive menu is obtainable, Geisha girl entertainment, the Japanese equivalent to New York’s cabarets, is still unobtainable. Rice cakes have risen to a conspicuous place lately and have usurped a position in the bill of fare of chop suey restaurants. Their taste is the same as in Tokyo, but their price is different, as any sen-beiya-san (Japan rice-cake man) in New York City can tell you.
Note the use of “the Japanese” for a single Japanese person, a phenomenon we’ve discussed somewhere, and the Orientalizing “honorably”; what interests us, however, is the mention of “sukiyaki” as not occurring in any standard English dictionary, which of course makes sense at that early date. But I’m also curious about the parlor game called here “ta-maya”; does anybody know what that might be referring to? Google has been of no help to me; I’ve only found 霊屋 tamaya ‘mausoleum; (temporary) resting place of a corpse.’
I assume this is obvious to hat, but if you swapped in “pachinko” for “ta-maya” the sentence wouldn’t seem obviously wrong or confusing to me, although the wording is vague enough that whatever it describes might resemble pachinko quite closely or almost not at all. Wiki says that pachinko-as-we-know-it emerged circa 1930 in Nagoya with some aimed-at-children precursors in the 1920’s, but there was apparently a thing in Europe in the 1700’s called (for whatever reason) “billard japonais” which is ancestral to our pinball machines. But if you can find a more detailed history-in-English of the pre-1930 antecedents of pachinko, ta-maya might pop up there?
There is a company called Tamaya (玉屋) in the pachinko business, apparently founded in August 1953.
I can’t pin down “not honorably excluded”. Are ladies excluded? Is their exclusion dishonorable? Or is failure to exclude them honorable?
Was “ladies honorably excluded” a common phrase of restriction, at some restaurants or some Japanese restaurants, so that a play on the phrase was scannable?
The singular/countable use of “Japanese” or “Chinese” is considered gauche in English-speaking countries but, as best I can tell, is fairly current in English in East Asia, among both expats and locals. I imagine the “… person” formulation starts to wear thin if you actually have to use it a lot.
Note FWIW that this singular “the Japanese” as used in the block quote above is not an identifiable individual but some sort of abstract/generic referent. It’s as if one were saying “The Frenchman is notable for his qualities of blah blah blah” without meaning “that particular Frenchman standing over there” rather than some abstracted typical Frenchman. What’s interesting is that in this particular context swapping in plural “the Japanese” with a plural verb (“the Japanese have learned”) would thus result in a sentence with essentially identical meaning.
I can’t pin down “not honorably excluded”. Are ladies excluded? Is their exclusion dishonorable? Or is failure to exclude them honorable?
You’re trying — honorably but futilely — to parse it on a level it doesn’t deserve. I’m afraid it’s just tossing in an all-purpose Orientalizer (“your honorable self,” etc.) more or less randomly, without regard for logic or grammar.
Sukiyaki is a food, therefore you should check Barry Popik’s site. He’s already combed Google Books and newspaper archives, finding sukiyaki in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine (1906), Chicago Daily Tribune (1911), and Fort Wayne (IN) News-Sentinel (1918). Interesting that it was mentioned in all these other cities so early.
Date correction: this appears to be in the April 1912 issue of The Oriental Review.
Thanks, and I’ve corrected the post accordingly.
@mollymooly:
There is a company called Tamaya (玉屋) in the pachinko business, apparently founded in August 1953.
The Japanese Tamaya company appears to have issued their own (undated) game tokens (here and here).
Yes; in English as in German, this phenomenon seems to have faded out soon after WWII.
In Germany at least, among some people, it lingered on much longer. I remember speaking to people (who were not part of my usual circle of acquaintances) in 1980 who still used “der Russe” unapologetically (and this was not only a turn of phrase, but it seemed to indicate a certain way of thinking about nations). And although they were older than me, this was not the generation of WWII veterans.
@ulr: Well, in the context of 1980 you would have maybe needed to decide whether you ought to be speaking stereotypically about der Russe or der Sowjet. The man himself or the disease he carried, to paraphrase someone or other.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OSKJ8Io42a8
“Wenn der Russe nicht wär…”
I doubt that Germans took more care than Yanks or Brits to maintain the Russian/Soviet distinction. (Compare the American indifference to the English/British distinction, so salient to Brits.)
@hat, and quite probably less, since they had due to geographical proximity probably had more dealings with the pre-Soviet Russians that they had not found entirely positive.
Indeed they didn’t.
The parlor game, commonly christened “tamaya” among my compatriots, has practically become one of the standard features of Coney Island and other New York Summer resorts.
I think this might be a game involving blowing a soap bubble and guiding it through a makeshift obstacle course by puffing and fanning it to reach a goal without bursting. Blowing soap bubbles was a traditional summer pastime, and the 玉屋 tamaya ‘soap-bubble seller’ was a fixture of Edo street culture. (For instance, in this piece here, in which the performer has a box saying たまや tamaya, and especially the witty transposition of a street scene to the underwater world here, where the fish is blowing bubbles.) 玉 tama refers to シャボン玉 shabon-dama ‘soap bubbles’, and 屋 ya is ‘shop, shopkeeper, seller’. The tamaya would hawk their wares for making soap bubbles by putting on amusing little shows with their bubbles for potential customers.
Well found! Another puzzle solved.
I doubt that Germans took more care than Yanks or Brits to maintain the Russian/Soviet distinction
and one of the stranger things that’s been happening over here is the eagerness that anti-putin liberals and conservatives share with enemy-of-my-enemy leftists* [sic] to ignore that distinction when it comes to the current russian regime.
.
* the “multipolarity” set typified by vijay prashad and his Tricontinental Institute
shabon-dama ‘soap bubbles’
< Portuguese sabão ‘soap’?
Portuguese is usually the best bet, but some suggest that it may be from Spanish because of the sh (cf. Ladino shavón).
Thanks. The j as in modern Spanish jabón often comes from an “sh” sound spelled x, so that makes sense.
anti-putin liberals and conservatives … ignore that distinction [Russian vs Soviet] when it comes to the current russian regime.
Putin learnt his trade under Communism, so I think you’re making a distinction without a difference.
There was a brief period (pre-Putin) when Russia tried to be non-Communist.
And I note Russia has continually complained about other Warsaw Pact countries removing statues of Communist leaders and their symbols.
Or do you mean the Oligarchs, gangster-state, defenestrations, starving the poor and widespread corruption are an innovation since Communism. Really??
You’re trying to rehabilitate Russian Communism as lilly-white?
well, i think this short video essay should clarify the distinctions here, even to the satisfaction of someone with the reading comprehension skills of an insomniac bircher.
ladies not honorably excluded
I don’t see what is the difficulty here. There are some activities from which it was considered honorable to exclude women. Like having cigars after dinner or obtaining a university appointment. This is not one of them.
You’re trying to rehabilitate Russian Communism as lilly-white?
Good lord, why do you say these things? You have no idea what you’re talking about. And as my comparison to English/British should have suggested, the distinction is one of ambit: “Russian” refers to Russia, which was only one of the many constituent parts of the Soviet Union.
“Russian” refers to Russia, which was only one of the many constituent parts of the Soviet Union.
Sure. I know that. Yours is the first post in this thread to use ‘Union’. As to the English/British distinction (I don’t expect an American to understand this), I prefer to describe myself as British even though I lived only in geographical England. Because _within_ Britain that’s just as much a cultural distinction: note the number of StGeorge’s Cross flags now flown there, and as a barely-covert racist symbol.
If it’s purely a geographic demarcation, then why does @rozele want to drag politics in to it? Are these liberals/conservatives/enemies/leftists even trying to make any point about (say) Russian historical territory/culture vs Georgian? I think the point they’re making is that current Russian politics is indistinguishable from Soviet-era Russian politics.
The original observation “der Russe or der Sowjet. The man himself or the disease he carried, …” used ‘Sowjet’, a political organisation, not ‘Sowjetunion’, a territory. To think the man is comparable to the disease/the territory is comparable to the political organisation is to make a category error.
I took ‘Soviet’/’Sowjet’ to not be trying to make a claim about a territory.
I note Prashad is careful to say ‘Soviet Union’ when he means that historical territory, in contradistinction to ‘Russia’ (under Putin); and avoids ‘Soviet’ unqualified. Indeed he denies Putin is trying to recapture all historical S.U. territories, but rather only Russian-speaking territory. (I’m not daft enough to swallow what he’s saying.)
I’ll go back to trying to flog myself to sleep. And I’d like to hear the moderator’s moderation on that personal remark. I think it’s @rozele’s comment that shows mis-comprehension.
Die Russen kommen! was a trope in Germany into the 1980s. And even after the break-up of the SU, many Germans were unaware that other Republics existed (maybe except for the Baltic ones); when I lived in Kazakhstan in the 90s, friends and neighbors of my parents used to ask them “Is your son still in Russia?”.
Re Putin: his propaganda is a brew of Soviet and Czarist nostalgia plus Russian ethnic chauvinism plus fake Orthodox piety plus what is called “family values” in the American culture wars. He’s mixing the elements as he needs and feels, and trying to isolate whether that’s “Soviet” or “Russian” is a mug’s game.
I didn’t understand what “ignore that distinction when it comes to the current russian regime” meant. I assumed that such understanding would require a greater knowledge of left-wing American political discourse than I possess.
Yours is the first post in this thread to use ‘Union’.
Irrelevant. The word “Soviet” is not equivalent, as you seem to think, to “Communist”; it refers to the Union as against the individual republics (like the RSFSR) that made it up. When we talk about Soviet losses in WWII, we do not mean commie losses, we mean the losses sustained by the Soviet Union. That entity no longer exists. Your “Putin learnt his trade under Communism, so I think you’re making a distinction without a difference” appears to show a profound ignorance about these matters; if it doesn’t, you might want to rethink and rewrite. And don’t accuse people of “trying to rehabilitate Russian Communism” when they are doing no such thing.
I was curious about Soviet population numbers. In 1970, the Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs (which I believe most people in Russia and many in those republics might have conflated as being Russian) had about 170 million people, and the remaining republics just under 50 million. I do recognize that particularly in the Russian SSR, many residents were not Russian. At the same time, there were also millions of Russians in other SSRs.
I’m not arguing one way or the other about distinguishing vs. collapsing the distinction. Just pointing out the numbers that underlay or belie the synechdoche.
Sure, there are a number of reasons for the conflation, but it still has to be resisted.
“most people in Russia and many in those”
@Ryan, I don’t think so. I do argue here sometimes that it would be convenient if “Russian” meant all of us.
But:
– I first did that in the context of a Rusyn woman who called her language “kitchen Russian”. In English.
– I also frequently call the Russian I speak “Muscovite” (when I’m not confident the form in quesion is common for all Russia) and if in English the word for Russians (in the sense “not Ukrainians”) were different (Rossijans, Muscovites, Great Russians, whatever), I’d be very comfortable with that.
– I’m interested in history of these langauges. That’s why I want to use “Russian” for all of them and something else for the langauge I speak.
Russians (from Russia) normally call Ukrainians “Ukrainians” and Belarusians “Belorussians”, and moreover, the Donbass war was motivated by emphasising the distinction between “Russian speakers” in the East, unnamed others, and certain evil forces or “Nazis”. Colloquially, of course, unnamed others are Ukrainians, but the propaganda won’t name them.
Which is a strange distinction, because Ukrainians usually speak L1-Russian.
Besides, “they are Russians, like us” would be a very, very strange argument for “let’s wage a war on them!”
“but the propaganda won’t name them” – because they do see that portraying it as an inter-ethnic conflict is a bad idea. Why they don’t see that the conflict too is a bad idea is above me.
When I wrote “might have”, the tense indicated that I was speaking of the attitudes of 1970, not today. I may still be wrong but want to make sure we’re addressing the same question. Attitudes about the war in Ukraine, in the wake of two decades of independence, half of it spent in armed conflict, don’t really contradict what I wrote without at least some contemporary evidence.
That doesn’t even follow. It is clear that, for Putin, the Soviet Union was just the Second Russian Empire, and now he wants a Third. He ignores the whole communism thing and reinterprets the Soviet monuments as imperial monuments.
Speaking of empire, rozele, you want this version.
Holland for Netherlands is a perhaps-comparable such traditional synecdoche in English, but doesn’t carry over to adjectives. Obviously if Holland-as-such was currently waging war on Limburg, Anglophones might take greater care to avoid the synecdoche.
I was FWIW alluding to the Solzhenitsyn quote that one internet source gives in English as (maybe wording varies because of the vagaries of translation?) “Russia is to the Soviet Union as a man is to the disease afflicting him.” Solzh. was of course a “Russian” (for some value of that adjective) nationalist, and was more focused, perhaps parochially, on the negative effect of the Bolshevik Yoke on Russia-as-such* than on the injustice of its occupation of Uzbekistan or Latvia. So he was not particularly interested in the synecdoche angle where the USSR had a larger territorial scope than the RSFSR (which also had the S-word in its formal name).
*Which he well may have conceptualized as incorporating certain other East-Slavic-speaking-majority current nation-state entities.
I agree with your analysis.
@Ryan, that changes nothing:
– in the Russian empire we were White, Little and Great Russians (with variation in the word for “Russian”)
– in USSR we were belorúsy “White Rus-es”, ukraintsy “Ukrainians” and rússkie “Russians”.
These were basic geogrpaphical facts learned in school (or rather before school).
Also, it is not that Russians have a good reason to have their own opinion about Belarusians and Ukrainians. Teachers say they are not Russians, but Belarusians and Ukrianians, Belarusians and Ukrianians too intorduce themselves so.
If teachers and Pomors were telling that Pomors are not Russians, but Pomors, we would repeat after them.
___
As for war, I mentioned it, because one may think that the idea of “unity” of our people is why the war is fought: because Ukrainians will object to such unity while Putin wrote somethign about it.
And while the low cultural distance (both objective and percieved) compared to Uzbeks may play some role here, I wanted to note that our propaganda conversely spoke of certain “Russian speakers” distinct from other people of Ukraine.
Perhaps by “Russian speakers” they mean “people who prefer Russian” but I’m not sure they know what they are talking about and who speaks what in Ukraine.
The 1961-63 Japanese song 上を向いて歩こう “I Look Up as I Walk” ‘Ue O Muite Aruko’ by Kyu Sakamoto was titled ‘Sukiyaki’ for its release abroad, because although an incredibly beautiful song, the promoters felt using the simple title ‘Sukiyaki’ would aid in its promotion abroad. The song became one of the world’s bestselling singles of all time, selling over 13 million copies worldwide.
The retitling of ‘Ue O Muite Aruko’ as ‘Sukiyaki’ has been described as like if ‘Moon River’ had been retitled as ‘Hot Dog’ in order to better promote it.
The retitling of ‘Ue O Muite Aruko’ as ‘Sukiyaki’ has been described as like if ‘Moon River’ had been retitled as ‘Hot Dog’ in order to better promote it.
I like that. “Oh, hot dog, longer than a mile, I’m eating you in style…”
And of course, in the best traditions of German Schlager kitsch, the German version is an inane love song where they actually rhyme “Sukiyaki” with “Nagasaki”. Bleh.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Девушка_из_Нагасаки_(песня)
I withdraw and apologise for the “lilly-white” sentence.
Ah, yer all right — I get unreasonably testy about that sort of thing. I didn’t like red-baiting in the ’50s and I don’t like it now, but I don’t actually think that’s what you were up to.
@D.O.: I don’t see what is the difficulty here. There are some activities from which it was considered honorable to exclude women. Like having cigars after dinner or obtaining a university appointment. This is not one of them.
It’s a weird way to say it. The only hits at Google Books on “honorably excluded”, are
1) the article by Takeo Oha quoted in the OP,
2) a translation of an extended sneer written during WW I by a German about the Herr Rector of the University of Berlin, who listed his memberships in foreign academics plus being “‘honorably’ excluded” from the French Academy,
3) a mention of said sneer, and
4) a snippet from 1979 in a book about Evangelical theology.
I think we’d say excluding ladies from after-dinner cigars was considered polite (or some synonym), not honorable, and you could imagine it would be polite to serve ladies their food even if gentlemen were cooking for themselves.
The retitling of ‘Ue O Muite Aruko’ as ‘Sukiyaki’ has been described as like if ‘Moon River’ had been retitled as ‘Hot Dog’ in order to better promote it.
Popcorn can sound quite lyrical, if done right.
well, i for one am having a hard time seeing what else was going on in that comment.
i said absolutely nothing about either the u.s.s.r. or the current russian federation beyond acknowledging the basic fact that they are two different states, with two different constitutions and two different ruling ideologies. (DM is quite documentably right about how putin deploys the u.s.s.r. in support of his regime’s imperial project – just as erdoğan has with the ottoman empire, which similarly does not make his türkiye into a sultanate or him into a member of the house of osman)
what i did say was that it’s interesting that the current set of people in the u.s. who insist on conflating the two are (1) ardent anti-communists of both liberal and conservative flavors (whose conflation is purely for red-baiting purposes*), and (2) nominal leftists whose analysis is limited to mechanical enemy-of-my-enemy calculations (whose conflation is to justify their support for putin’s genocidal wars**).
so given that i’m pretty sure AntC isn’t a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation [sic] or any similar outfit, given AntC’s commitment to that exact conflation, and, especially, given the specific sentiments that AntC invented to put in my mouth, the main (if not only) function of the conflation there was to red-bait. me, specifically.
which is entertaining, honestly, because it requires missing not only my fairly regular snipes at the bolshevik political lineage, but also my fairly blatant anarchism***. again, the reading comprehension is impressive, and impressively bircheresque.
.
* adding a further level of incoherence, this appears both as accusing putin fans of being communists and as accusing communists of being putin fans.
** the direct one in ukraine, and the proxy ones elsewhere.
*** or, possibly, just not grasping that not everyone on the left is a tankie. that’s a problem that i’m happy to share with c.l.r. james; the u.s. deported him because of it. unlike him (sadly), however, my response won’t include offering to collaborate with the u.s. government to go after stalinists.
@drasvi: Didn’t know that song, thanks for sharing!
@rozele stop ranting. I don’t understand how these demons got in your head. I don’t understand how you’ve put me among them.
It may be relevant that I’m not in the U.S., and don’t follow closely the opinions of any “current set of people” there.
I’m not going to joust with shadows on the cave wall.
Let’s get back to discussing Language (and hats).
I’m afraid some of them really don’t know better. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I still encounter Americans online who… somehow, the last 35 years just passed them by; they know (possibly with an exception or two) that the Soviet Union no longer exists, but they haven’t noticed that communism in those lands is over, too.
This is what you get for always assuming the worst of everyone: people will hyperanalyze what you say so they can start to make sense of your nonsense.
Stop assuming the worst of everyone, then.
Stop assuming the worst of everyone, then.
Exactly. And tone down your responses; “stop ranting. I don’t understand how these demons got in your head” is a shitty way to talk.
@DM, (and @rozele who agrees with him):
Putin is anti-Communist.
But in 00s years ago voters of his main competitor (the “Communist” Party) who he actually tried to push out totally liked him.
And in 10s almost everyone in Russia began to idealise USSR. First I began to hear какую страну развалили!* from unexpected people (not only from those who didn’t like the change in 1990), second they began praising even those Soviet things that totally sucked. Like some young man who praised Soviet… cassette players and recorders comparing them to horrible “Chinese crap” sold in 90s.
What do you do, when you hate something, and everyone likes you because everyone associates you with something?
* what a country they-made-fall-apart!
But he hates Communism. I mean, I didn’t hear that many speeches by him, but in one of those I heard he – without any conceivable reason, because the context didn’t have anything to do with those – began telling how revolutionaries were traitors. “Traitors. Do you understand me? Traitors.” (emphasis his).
And he is quite critical of USSR. But see above about his voters.
I didn’t know about that speech – when did he give it?
It was not anything important. I don’t like him and normally try not to listen to him, so it is one out of thousands speeches that I somehow happened to have heard.
But I think I will be able to find it if I want: he spoke before Putinoid youth at lake Seliger (somehow WP has Russian, English and… Hausa articles for the event:/ Did Hausas take part in it?) and I don’t think he came there every year.
Meanwhile, Dugin has jumped every available shark and revealed who really destroyed the Soviet Union and is currently undermining Russia’s national and cultural revival.
note that if by “destruction of the Soviet Union” we mean not the change of ideology or economy but the territorial split, then “nationalists” must be a part of the answer.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but “parlor game” and “ball game” are not ways anyone would describe blowing bubbles, and I would think the extraordinary set of skills involved in navigating bubbles through an obstacle course would be similar to those required to be an “infallible shot”.
I don’t have an alternate explanation (yet), and pachinko doesn’t seem to have begun in Japan until the 1920s, so I think tamaya might remain undeciphered?
edit: found this!
https://www.coneyislandhistory.org/collection/page-21-bottom-japanese-ball-game
Good find!
https://pinballnovice.blogspot.com/2021/07/tamakorogashi-japanese-roll-ball.html
Name variants: Japanese Rolling Ball, Japanese Roll Ball, Tamakorogashi, Tama Koro, たまころがし, Japanese Ping-Pong, Japanese Bowling, Japanese Rolling Balls, Japanese Rolling Board, Japanese Ball Game, Japanese hand-bowling.
Each instance of ‘Japanese’ is sometimes shorted to just ‘Jap’ in old parlance. In parts of Europe it was called “Japanese Billiards” or “Billard Japonais”.
Aha, I thought that sounded familiar: Chinese Billiards, seen here in 2015. J. W. Brewer said:
I had started off with the same thought as AG, but then reinterpreted the passage in the OP to maybe mean that “ta-maya” was being offered as a new *alternative* to the established “Japanese ball game” rather than that “Japanese ball game” was a description or synonym for the mysterious “ta-maya.”
And I can’t be held responsible for comments apparently posted under my name in 2015. People said all sorts of crazy shit back then.
People said all sorts of crazy shit back then.
I find this to be true even as recently as 2025. I should add that the name “David Eddyshaw” is an extremely common one in the UK.
I know I post all my unpopular opinions under the name David Eddyshaw. I used to try to get away with posting them as LanguageHat but they kept getting taken down.
@mollymooly, AG:
Interesting finds! Searching that pinballnovice blog post for “tamaya”, yields a photo of a shopfront from 1913, captioned: “1913-06-29 The Philadelphia Inquirer – detail of The Japanese Tamaya – Okamoto Brothers Props. Japanese Rolling Ball Games, where exquisite articles imported from Japan are given as prizes. Okamoto Bros, proprietors.”
Thus, it appears that the Okamoto brothers, at least, advertised their Japanese Rolling Ball game as “Tamaya” in 1913. Or perhaps they just called their shop of rolling ball games Tamaya, as in 玉屋 for “ball shop”.
Some related trivia:
Elsewhere in that blog post is a poem by “Japanese poet Hagiwara Sakutarō … titled Tamakorogashi”, about an old ball-rolling game. Interestingly, however, the poem appears not to be titled Tamakorogashi 玉轉がし but rather Kyuukorogashi 球轉がし, using a different kanji for “ball”.
In addition to that (undated) photo of a Japanese Rolling Board game at Coney Island,
a 1935 photo from Coney Island shows a “Roll-Down Game”, apparently called “Score Ball”, with no reference to Japan, but this one has a triangular arrangement of holes, very different from the Tamakorogashi illustrations in the blog post.
Wonderful!
Now I wonder a bit whether this is in any way related to the Katamari Damacy video game (and its many sequels). They involve rolling a ball around—although not to get it into a hole, but rather to increase its size by picking up items on its sticky surface. The series is known for its many references to Japanese culture, classical and contemporary, mostly satirical.
References to a video game in classical Japanese cultrue make me think that in medieval Japan computers of the spaceships on which the Japanese arrived to Earth were still accessible to most of the Japanese.
Trailer here.