Name: 「ペン回し」世界チャンピオンが21段階の難易度で披露 | Levels | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-01-22T10:05:19.000Z
Duration: 15 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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I've been pen spinning since 2011, and most recently, I won the stand-up theme in the 2022 Pen Spinning Olympics.

I've been challenged today to break down pen spinning into 21 levels of increasing complexity.

Pen spinning is actually a lot like juggling.

You basically use your fingers, your hands, sometimes your wrists and arms or even knees to toss, to spin, to throw the pen or pen-shaped object in any way that you'd like.

As a disclaimer, this is my interpretation of the challenge.

The charge uses conical rotation in one spot of the hand, but just spins conically in one spot.

And conical rotation means that the pen is not actually spinning end over end in a full circle.

It's just tracing out a conical motion on both sides of the hand.

Passes are very simple tricks in pen spinning, and you might not even have noticed you doing them yourself just in daily life.

They involve passing the pen from one finger slot to the next one.

And they can go either over the finger or under the finger in either direction.

The pass is slightly more complex than the charge because the pen is actually changing position in the hand.

You have to clear the outside finger that you're passing from and then duck the other finger under or over.

That involves a couple more things that you have to get used to when you're really gaining fluency in them.

And that's because the pen has to pass through the finger slot with a half rotation of spin.

Wipers to me are more complex than passes simply because they can go wrong in many more ways.

If you're not near the tip of the pen, then the parts of your hand that you're trying to pass through might get in the way and stop your wiper.

And also when you're near the tip of the pen, almost all the weight is on the other side.

So controlling that momentum and keeping the pen from slipping out of your hand can be really difficult to do on more complex wipers.

The triangle pass consists of three different finger switches.

You can hold the pen to start in all three, and then you lift one from the barrel while it passes about a third of a rotation.

And then you bring the finger back down on the other side of the pen while lifting the next finger.

So each finger switch is a third of a rotation, and you're always gripping the pen between two fingers as it rotates.

So every full triangle pass completed, that is every three finger switches, is half a rotation, 180 degrees.

Each finger switch accounts for roughly 60 degrees of that.

And every two triangle passes you complete is a full rotation or 360 degrees.

You're not fully gripping the pen at any point.

So if you're off center in one direction or the other, it makes it really easy for the pen to fall out.

The basic sonic involves charge, which is conical rotation, and two different finger switches.

So you do half a charge in one slot, and then you clear that lower finger down until the pen comes in contact with the next finger up.

And then as that charge continues, that finger that you moved down comes back into contact with the pen, completing a full 360 degree rotation.

You do a charge, and then you clear that finger up out of the way, and then it comes back down, and the middle comes into contact with it that way.

And you can combine these modifiers in a lot of ways.

You can keep the charge rotation the same, but switch the finger switches, which is what's known as moonwalk sonic.

And you can add a lot of complexity in those ways.

The thumb around is a trick you've likely seen in TV or movies or anime, and it involves the pen going around the thumb and then being caught again with the index finger.

People tend to mess up thumb around when learning it is by starting too near to the center of the pen.

So in a round tricks, the barrel of the pen has to trace over the entire circumference of the finger or thumb that it's rotating around.

So to learn a thumb around, you need to start with most of the weight on the pinky side of the hand.

And then by the time you're done, you'll be on the opposite part of the barrel.

For the rest of the levels, we're gonna be incorporating pen modifications.

Weight and length can have a big influence on the types of pen spinning tricks that you can do and how well you can do them and how difficult they are to do.

These basically have characteristics that make it easier to learn harder tricks.

They have balanced weight, a little more weight toward the tips.

Different pen spinners prefer different mods.

To me, the natural next step in complexity is the backfall.

The backfall involves four different arounds that are linked together with passes.

All four fingers are used and a back is done on the index, then the middle, then the ring, then the pinky.

And in between each completed back, the pen passes under the finger from one slot to the next.

In the early days of pen spinning, the backfall was a really important, impressive trick that if you could do it smoothly, you were one of the best.

These days, people can pick it up in their first half year of pen spinning for the most part, but to do it smoothly with a light pen and do it elegantly is still rather impressive and tough to figure out.

The index bust is basically a continuous around done on the index finger, which is just the same as a back, but with the opposite direction of rotation.

In a round tricks, the pen ends up in a different position than when it started.

So to make them continuous, you have to get back to that original position.

Most of the time, it involves a little bit of air time to move your hand to the position where the around began.

Index busts in particular are probably one of the most common finishing tricks you'll ever see in combos.

Having learned about a round of tricks, the natural next step of complexity to me is half a round tricks, which brings us to the power pass.

The power pass is a sequence of four half a rounds, which can appear similar to passes because they take up 180 degrees of rotation and the pen moves from one slot to an adjacent slot.

The main distinction between a pass and a half a round or power pass is that the power pass is what we call fingerless, meaning that there aren't two points of contact with the pen.

So you're not actually gripping the pen between two fingers, but it's sort of resting on one or another and you can put forces in the pen in different ways.

Power passes done on the backside of the hand involve four different tricks.

The normal power pass involves the fingers curling from index to pinky and the pen moving clockwise.

Then power pass reverse involves those same fingers uncurling pinky to index and the pen going counterclockwise.

The mirrored power pass involves all the fingers moving in the reverse order.

And then mirrored power pass reverse involves the reverse of that one, which means that the fingers uncurl from index to pinky and the pen moves clockwise.

You'll find that you don't actually have to flex your fingers really hard.

You'll just learn how the pen feels on your fingers so that the angle is correct so that you don't have to keep those fingers out of the way quite as much.

So as we went over with the rounds, when you begin in a round, you're in one position of the pen and when you end, you're in a completely different position.

Another way to do an around after doing the same around is to add just a half rotation of spin on the back of the hand.

You can learn back 1.5s on any implement, but it's always gonna be easier to use a pen that's nearly perfectly balanced.

The reason for that is that from one back 1.5 to the next, you're starting on the opposite sides of the pen.

So if those have different weights, it's gonna be really hard to get used to doing one after the other.

Cardioid tricks are hybrids between arounds and wipers, but they actually tend to be pretty complex and difficult to execute.

Cardioids are another way of dealing with the problem of ending in a different position than you started when sequencing arounds one after the other.

So the reason that I've put cardioids in this position is that the number of ways you can mess it up is pretty darn high and you have to be super precise with your positioning on the pen and the margin of error timing-wise is really slim.

In a dual pass, you might recognize the resemblance to a triangle pass.

Every execution of it is a full 180 degrees, but there are only two fingers instead of three and this makes it a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to execute.

You'll sort of learn how it feels to have the pen spinning on one fingertip while moving the other one and you wanna stay basically, again, right in the center of the pen because you have very little control of it so the momentum can take it off of your fingers basically at any moment.

Basic power tricks are sequences of tricks that are all fingerless, often involving a lot of air time.

I start with an extended thumb around bust release times two, meaning that the pen rotates for a full rotation and a half in the air.

And then I catch it with the index, I do a half power pass to the pinky, then do that again and then release with the pinky again in what's called a spread.

And then I'll catch it on the thumb and do a thumb around fingerlessly, spin the pen for half a rotation on these two fingers that are curled, known as a spider spin because of the sort of Spider-Man gesture it gives, release again with the thumb around, do the same thing with a palm spin and then release again and then do what's called a haitua, which is where the pen goes around the thumb, rotates half a rotation on the back of the hand and then is released off of the pinky.

You'll see that I'm using a bunch of power tricks that all use the same exact direction of rotation.

And this is the main way that people learn power tricks because since they're fingerless, they rely heavily on maintaining one direction of momentum so that when you're sequencing all these fingerless tricks together, it's really important to keep that momentum going.