Zoomadanke — stylized in Japanese as ず～まだんけ — is a kendama performance duo formed in 2010 that treats the classic cup-and-ball toy less like a schoolyard drill and more like a stage language. Partners Kodaman and Easy (イージー) build shows around synchronized tricks, two-hand “twin” kendama, oversized props, kendama fused with dance, and deliberately absurd experiments that ask a simple question: how far can two people play with this object before the audience forgets it was ever “plain”?
Shibuya Channel ran a close-coverage interview with the pair while following them through practice, performance, and the odd corners of Tokyo street culture where kendama still stops pedestrians cold.
Who was in the room
Kodaman — born 1980, certified toy consultant. Met partner and teacher Easy in spring 2010 and started kendama at thirty, unusually late for a performer who would soon headline children’s halls and morning television. He prioritizes visual impact over raw difficulty, favors large kendama for stage visibility, and describes himself as still in daily “kendama training.” Off stage he also works as a “Germany Game Master,” promoting German board games — a second career treated as part of his approachable public personality.
Easy — born 1990, also a toy consultant. He began kendama in third grade when it briefly dominated his after-school program, progressed to mime-dancing while juggling by fifth grade, and kept sporadic contact with the toy through adolescence. He is also a dancer; combining lock dance with kendama became one of the duo’s defining lanes. In the partnership he functions as Kodaman’s partner and technical mentor.
Together they represent one of the few two-person kendama performance units the interview could name — rarity itself became part of their pitch.
Meeting through the toy-consultant course
Both origin stories converge on spring 2010 and a toy-consultant training program.
Kodaman had always liked toys and enrolled out of curiosity about the qualification. During a break he noticed Easy practicing kendama. Kodaman had played casually as a child but still carried a “dull” image of the toy — until Easy’s tricks rewired that assumption. “Kendama is actually interesting,” he recalled thinking for the first time, and asked Easy to teach him.
Easy’s path ran backward through the same classroom door. A kendama boom hit his after-school club in elementary school; classmates competed to do something else while kendama-ing — dancing My Fair Lady choreography with a ball in play, for example. By fifth grade he could pull off varied combinations. Middle school reduced frequency, but he still handled kendama more often than most peers. In university year two, bored and browsing toy culture online, he discovered the consultant certification, liked the premise, and joined the course.
An instructor’s rule stuck: a toy consultant keeps toys in the bag at all times. Easy carried kendama everywhere. That habit is how Kodaman first saw him — and how a qualification meant for play professionals accidentally seeded a stage duo.
What “toy consultant” actually means
Asked to explain the credential, Kodaman described consulting work such as inventing ten play patterns from one toy — structured creativity rather than retail sales. The course runs roughly nine months with about twelve lectures, plus museum practicums. Trainees skew toward childcare professionals like nursery teachers, but Easy noted wide age spread, including company presidents in their fifties.
Both said the human network outlasted the certificate. A five- or six-person drinking circle from the same cohort still met regularly; those friendships sometimes fed later work. For Zoomadanke, the qualification mattered less as résumé line than as the social machine that put two complementary obsessives in the same room.
From forum booth to first kendama show
Performance began at the Toy Forum, an annual event Kodaman compared to a toy-culture festival hosted by a toy museum. Consultants exhibit projects; the pair could not decide what to mount until Easy said plainly: “Let’s do a kendama show.”
Practicing together had already multiplied possibilities. Easy observed that duo kendama performers were scarce; two people might unlock visuals solo artists could not. Kodaman admitted panic — he had only just started, and hiding weak tricks consumed him. Their first workaround was practical: bigger kendama make clumsy moments less fatal and read better from the back row.
Rehearsal shifted the creative axis toward “how do we make this look explosive?” That mindset produced signature ideas early — cutting the string for stringless routines, catch-ball sequences using the ball itself, and Easy layering rock/lock dance onto standard tricks. They drilled roughly one to two months before debut, inventing moves mid-run as failures turned into gags.
The first public show included plenty of mistakes, Kodaman said, yet children and adults responded loudly. Applause became proof the concept could travel outside toy-insider circles.
Why kendama still hooks them
Kodaman named the rush of landing a newly invented trick after repetition — proof that practice visibly pays off — plus the thrill of doing something the audience has never seen. Duo format widens that design space; every show became something to anticipate.
Easy emphasized immediate feedback loops rare in adult life: effort shows up on the string within days. He also praised the social layer — kendama with a partner is “really fun,” and having someone to consult or impress beats solo grinding.
Those answers explain the duo’s tone: competitive with themselves, allergic to dusty tradition, but warmly audience-facing.
Signature moves and what to watch
Easy highlighted kendama dance — merging dance training with cup-and-ball control after he started formal dance study.
Kodaman countered with twin kendama: both hands operating two full setups because he “cannot dance like Easy.” Full-body manipulation makes the trick visually heavy even when technical difficulty is masked by comedy.
Easy asked viewers to watch synchronized stringless kendama — routines where cut-string props force pure toss-and-catch timing. Their opening sync pass, he said, lands in aun no kokyuu (“shared breath”) alignment from the first beat; identical angles side-by-side are the joke and the skill at once.
The interview photos reinforced three branded phrases the piece kept repeating: kendama dance, twin kendama, and sync kendama.
Show craft — size, sound, and audience switching
Stage kendama are deliberately oversized for visibility. Kodaman also amplifies sound on purpose — clicks like flint striking, he said, add impact in noisy rooms.
Easy framed the ideal children’s show as instantly reproducible: when a kid shouts “I want to try!” the trick should be something they can attempt immediately. He recommended kendama as a parent-child communication tool, not only spectacle.
Kodaman described tailoring sets:
- Kids: more play, more games; finishing a trick with a “beard dance” (ヒゲダンス) reliably wins laughs.
- Adults: lean into nostalgia, then subvert it — unusual tricks, unseen combinations, or difficult moves presented with comic timing so the room feels in on the joke.
That split keeps the same apparatus flexible across birthday parties, corporate hanami side stages, and club nights.
How tricks get invented
Kodaman said kendama already contains hundreds of established patterns; their process rarely starts in a spreadsheet. Instead, practice devolves into “wouldn’t this be stupid-funny?” improvisation — what he called aho waza (“idiot tricks”) — until something sticks. The search keyword is “how do we make this ridiculous?”
Examples from the interview sound like a variety show writers’ room:
- Substituting cabbage or a balance ball for the ball
- Eating a cream bun mid-trick
- On rainy days, balancing an umbrella on the kendama or playing umbrella catch
Easy treats kendama like a guitar for air-guitar routines; most ideas are same-day sparks. He estimated more than a hundred self-invented moves, constantly adding “common-sense-breaking” stunts.
For polish he relies on mental rehearsal — thinking through physics before throwing — because kendama is “surprisingly cerebral.” He also commits to touching kendama at least once every day.
Practice, in other words, is both lab and playground — which Kodaman said might be the most fun part of the job.
Shows, media, and booking
By interview time Zoomadanke played children’s centers, malls, company launch parties, and seasonal corporate hanami gigs. They uploaded YouTube videos; that channel led to television bookings, including a live kendama segment on NTV’s Sukkiri — tight enough that host Terry Ito reportedly gave strong approval on air.
Easy felt word-of-mouth among people hunting “new and interesting” acts gradually widened their calendar. The original piece openly solicited bookings for kendama shows and kendama classes via [email protected].
Offline photos documented children’s-hall performances and playful backstage moments — the duo clearly comfortable letting kids inspect props mid-interview.
Memorable stages — model rooms, wrestling rings, Germany
Kodaman recalled unusual venues as a specialty:
- Model-room doubleheaders — two shows per day in a showroom apartment
- A three-show marathon starting near Narita, traveling, and ending at a Shibuya club event
- January 2012 opening support for a charity pro-wrestling match in Yokohama, performing on a real wrestling ring (video archived on YouTube at the time)
Easy’s peak memory was busking in Germany: five or six street sets per day at first drew thin crowds. He learned to shout, deploy the beard dance at full commitment, and thicken his performer skin. As confidence grew through tourist spots, tips started appearing; on the final day the audience surrounded them 360 degrees — a capstone he credited with sharpening stagecraft.
Those stories matter because Zoomadanke’s brand is portability: if a toy show works on a wrestling canvas or a Berlin sidewalk, it can probably survive your company picnic.
Shibuya — Miyashita Park as open rehearsal
Both partners tied Shibuya to everyday practice more than one-off gigs.
Kodaman said they often rehearse at Miyashita Park. Heavy foot traffic means frequent approach — “Can we take a photo?” — and he linked Shibuya’s appetite for novelty, rarity, and freshness to why kendama fits the ward.
Easy liked Shibuya’s constant human flow and noted foreign tourists especially latch onto practice sessions.
The original interviewer joked that Miyashita Park might be the place to “run into” Zoomadanke; the feature confirmed the duo actually demonstrated tricks there during coverage.
For the street layer of the same district today, the Shibuya Crossing live camera catches the crowd density Easy described — then this archive piece adds the smaller spectacle of two toy consultants turning a park bench into a rehearsal studio.
Readers connecting Artist File history to today’s street feeds can start with how to watch Japan live.
Where they wanted to go next
Kodaman wanted more shows in nursing homes, festivals, live houses, and deliberately “impossible” locations — anywhere a kendama act feels out of place. After Germany he hoped street performance culture would grow more mainstream in Japan. Through all of it he pledged to keep developing funny kendama with Easy.
Easy’s horizon was cultural: make kendama trendy, flip the image from dull to “cool!”, and give children dreams through performances that look achievable yet surprising.
Closing copy praised both as approachable craftsmen — Kodaman the game evangelist, Easy the young veteran who spent half his life with a kendama in reach — and urged readers to catch them live.
Links and contact from the feature
- Official blog: ameblo.jp/zoomadanke/
- Facebook: Zoomadanke page
- Twitter: @ZOOMADANKE
- Booking / inquiries: [email protected]
- TV reference: Sukkiri live performance (Facebook video linked in 2013 coverage)
- Video reference: Yokohama pro-wrestling charity kendama show on YouTube (
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Zoomadanke sits in the overlap between toy culture, busker energy, and park-level practice — a reminder that not every ward memory runs through live-house doors.
