Tag: Pokemon

Pokemon and Weaknesses

My six year old son is obsessed with Pokemon. It started with the old cartoon, and has since grown to games, books, etc. As his father, I’ve tried to keep up with his hobby and that means getting familiar with the whole Pokemon battle system.

Pokemon are basically divided into “types“: water types, fire types, etc. Some Pokemon will have more than one type (usually no more than two). This gives Pokemon access to various types of attacks, but also opens them up to various types of weaknesses.

My son would frequently ask me what such-and-such type is weak too, especially under lockdown as he has more time to play Pokemon games, and I would have to look at various online charts to remember which types do more damage to which types, etc. This got tedious, and the existing online charts were too hard to memorize, so I started mapping my own chart.

The first chart turned out pretty terrible. I had assumed different types had some kind of three-type cycle (e.g. fire -> grass, grass -> water, water -> fire), but outside this basic “circle” it turns out things get complicated. Ground type is weak to both grass and water types, and Rock type is weak to ground, water and grass.

The photo above is draft two of my chart. It’s better, and somewhat readable, but needs further work.

Forget Radio Taiso, Try Pokemon Taiso!

With the lockdown underway, the family and I have been trying to stay in shape. Since my son is a big Pokemon fan, and as we’re trying to keep our kids to be bilingual, we found this great video of Pokemon Taisō:

In Japanese, taisō (体操) means calisthenics, especially morning calisthenics. It’s a cultural phenomenon that has been a part of Japan for generations, and featured every weekday morning on the national government channel, NHK, even though it was originally broadcasted on the radio since the 1920’s (which in turn was inspired by a similar program in the US). An example of one such episode of “Terebi Taisō” (テレビ体操, calisthenics for television)1 is below:

An episode of Terebi Taiso from April of 2020. Notice how there are three women, including one who does the exercises while sitting for the sake of elderly or disabled viewers in a chair.

Back to Pokemon Taiso, it’s a fun thing to do with the kids in the morning after breakfast and before we start school for the day. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, you can pick up the counting to eight very quickly:

  1. ichi
  2. ni
  3. san
  4. shi
  5. go
  6. roku
  7. shichi
  8. hachi

From there, give it a try! Good health to you and your’s. 💪🏼

1 Colloquially, people in Japan will still often call it Rajio Taisō (ラジオ体操) due to its origins as a daily radio broadcast.