ちゃぶ台返し

Chabudai-Gaeshi.

Chabudai-Gaeshi literally means… turn over the chabudai. The Chabudai is the small round Japanese table that people sit at… or used to sit at… in the traditional Japanese home.

Traditional…. Japanese…. Chabudai!

Since you sit down on the floor at the chabudai, it is easy to get your hands under it, and stand up forcefully flipping the entire thing over.

A situation in which Cyabudai-gaeshi is commonly used is the following…

Salary man comes home from a hard day at work. He sits down at the chabudai and utters “gohan”. His wife scuttles in and gives him his rice/miso/fish combo dinner.

The salary man then takes one sip of the miso….

「ちゃぶ台返し！」 (うん、口に出して言うんだ。）

Bam! Food flying everywhere! Table UPSIDE-DOWN. Chaos.

I heard that the phrase ちゃぶ台返し was made famous through the cartoon, Chibi-maruko.

I haven’t tried this out myself yet… but here is a Cyabudai Gaeshi Game where you can practice flipping over the chabudai.

The text on the page says…

Original: “ちゃぶ台をひっくり返します。ただそれだけです。ただそれだけですが、現実にはなかなかできないことです。”

Harvey訳: “Flip over the chabudai. That’s it. That’s it, but this is something you can’t do in reality often…”

Someone give this a shot and tell me how it is.

-Harvey