[For Seniors] Recommended for Brain Training! Ultra-Difficult Quizzes and Riddles

Gunma Prefecture, Kumamoto Prefecture, Tottori Prefecture, Kagoshima Prefecture

There are 47 prefectures in Japan, but only four of them have animal-related kanji in their names. Each prefecture has its own name origin, so you can look them up together and turn it into a trivia quiz for fun. Some older adults might even be very knowledgeable about the origins of these names.

fortune-telling

It’s a riddle-like tricky question. If an elderly person is overthinking the answer, it might help to add, “This is a riddle.” The idea is to change “won’t sell it to me” (utte kurenai) to another phrasing, “won’t sell” (uranai). Then change “won’t sell” (uranai) to “fortune-telling” (uranai), and you’ll arrive at the answer.

Because the stopper came off.

When you open a bottle of wine, you pull out the cork—a ‘stopper,’ right? Here’s a wordplay puzzle that links the stopper (栓, sen) with the ‘sen’ (千) in ten million yen. If you take sen (1000) out of 10,000,000 yen, you’re left with 10,000 yen. By the way, the famed Romanée-Conti, considered a top-tier wine worldwide, can cost as much as 10 million yen for a single glass, depending on the bottle.

lower back; waist; hips

Some people hurt their lower back when lifting something heavy or bending their upper body forward. In Japan, we call this a “gikkuri-goshi,” but in Germany and other countries it’s known as a “witch’s shot.” Perhaps people thought it was the work of a witch because someone who was fine a moment ago can suddenly be in such agony that they can’t even walk. By the way, “gikkuri-goshi” isn’t the official term. The proper medical name is “acute low back pain.”

Because it is a staircase

The “Staircase National Route 399” is the only national highway in Japan that cars can’t use. There are various reasons why a pedestrian path became a national highway. The plan was to upgrade it as a national highway, including the staircases that existed from the start, but it was never improved even after it was designated, and that remains the case today. It’s said that the roughly 70-meter elevation difference and the densely packed settlement made road development impossible. It has now become a tourist spot, so some older people may have visited it as well.

Yayoi period

Onigiri, which you can easily eat by molding rice into a ball, is a familiar food for many older people, isn’t it? Its history is very old—apparently it dates back to the Yayoi period. At an archaeological site in Ishikawa Prefecture, a fossil resembling chimaki was discovered: steamed glutinous rice that had been pressed together and grilled. It may be an everyday food, but it seems to have a long history.

black dog

It’s a riddle-style, super difficult quiz. For elderly people who are good with kanji, it might be easy to solve. If you focus on the dog’s color, you can split it into the characters for “dog” and “black.” Combine those two and you get the kanji “黙” (silent). From “to be silent,” you can infer that a quiet dog would be a “black dog.”