Slipper Ping Pong World Championship!

The 4th annual World Slipper Ping Pong Championship was held recent in Yamagata Prefecture. Here’s a video report about it:

Mainichi’s WaiWai column reported about the competition back in July 2005:

But there’s something about the table tennis games going on in the sleepy Yamagata Prefecture of Kahoku, according to Shukan Bunshun (7/7).

Instead of using regular table tennis bats, players in the tournament whack away at the ping-pong ball using everyday bedroom slippers!

Kahoku has long been the area producing more slippers than any other part of Japan.

To mark the achievement, some Kahoku folk created the game of Slipper Ping-Pong, which follows the same rules as the game it’s derived from, though uses a slightly larger ball and slippers instead of paddles.

Local games evolved into the National Slipper Ping-Pong Championship and, from last year(2004), a Slipper Ping-Pong World Championship (which, it must be added, failed to attract a single non-Japanese competitor).

This year’s competition was truly international, with 7 countries represented in total (most of the non-Japanese were foreign students, apparently). The total number of participants exceeded 120, and from the looks of the video, they really enjoyed themselves!