So tricky you’ll be fooled! A collection of trick riddles that both adults and kids can enjoy.

dolphin

To say that there’s no animal bigger than a whale and smaller than a killifish, we make a pun by saying “iruka” (which can mean both ‘dolphin’ and ‘is there?’/‘isn’t there?’ in a playful way). The trick is to change the intonation when responding with “Sonna no iruka!” (meaning “Does that even exist?!”). The correct answer is ‘iruka’ (dolphin).

One out of the six is a demon.

You feel like saying, “Don’t just stop after finding five—find the one more too!” but that last one is the demon, right? It was a problem where just looking at the numbers 6 and 5 made it hard to see the answer.

boundary

Many people might be tempted to answer “the city.” For an ordinary riddle, that would be a perfect correct answer, but this one’s a trick question. The correct answer is the slightly twisted “sakai” (meaning “border” or “boundary”)! Did you figure it out?

Uh

You might look at the answer and wonder what I’m talking about, but if you write each one in hiragana, you’ll see it. Compare “とうきょう” and “きょうと”: Tokyo has one more う than Kyoto.

Ugoken

When someone asks, “What kind of dog?” you naturally start thinking of dog breeds, right? But this is a riddle, so if you just think of breeds, you’ll get tricked. The answer is “Ugoken” (a pun meaning “can move”). The reason is that a dog made of copper (dō) would be stiff and unable to move—so it’s not dō-ken (copper dog), but ugo-ken (can move)!

translation

You might be tempted to think, “It’s XX o’clock, though?”, but that’s not it. In fact, it was a rather mean question asking how many characters the word ‘ima’ (meaning ‘now’) has.

Because it was daytime

We tend to imagine a power outage as “pitch black,” but in broad daylight you can read or study without any problem, right?