Name: I Tried the Hobby that Took Over Japan in 1999 (Hikaru Dorodango)
Uploaded: 2025-05-14T15:27:33.000Z
Duration: 8 min 18 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...

Did you know that you can polish mud until it has a mirror-like surface?

In Japan, they took playing in the dirt and turned it into an art.

A simple children's pastime where we turn this into this.

And in this video, I'm going to show you how it's done.

Now, they're not really sure when the first shiny mud ball was made, but it got repopularized in Japan in 1999 by a child psychology professor who observed kids making them at a preschool.

He developed his own method, and after a piece aired on TV about the phenomenon, the hobby took off.

To me, there's just something intriguing about it, so I wanted to try it for myself.

And the first step once we get home is to sift it all.

We're looking for the finest particles possible.

Now, being from Virginia, all we had around my house was red clay, so I also want to try one with that.

And if you do use clay, you're going to have to mix it about half and half with sand.

That'll prevent it from cracking when it dries out and shrinks.

Since I've never done this before, I thought it was a good idea to experiment with a small one first.

This measuring was totally unnecessary, but I started with 100 grams of soil and 35 of water.

Your soil is definitely going to be different, so don't worry about it too much.

I'll show you the consistency we're going for in a second.

Spend some time massaging the dirt so everything's nice and homogeneous.

And you should end up with a dough-like consistency.

So add a bit of dirt or water as needed and keep working it.

After that, you can compress it and shape it into a ball, and it should look something like this.

Oh, also make sure you don't use all your clay or dirt.

I'm going to leave these to dry overnight.

And while that one starts, I'm going to make the clay and sand core.

I thought of this after I made the cores, but for shaping and polishing, I think the finer the dirt, the better it's going to be.

So I grabbed a coffee grinder and left a fine dirt film on everything in my apartment.

In hindsight, I think I actually would have done this in the beginning and used this for the cores, but oh well.

For this small one, I'm going to use a glass spice jar.

And then re-wet the surface and start shaping it.

If you make sure to not stay in one spot too long, you should end up with a perfect sphere.

I'll show you what the high and low spots look like during this part when I start the clay one.

Sprinkle a layer of your fine dirt or clay, and then wet the mouth of the jar and start working it in.

Also, don't do this over your plate of dirt or you're just going to be replacing it every 5 minutes.

And then once it starts to dry out, you're going to repeat this process over and over.

So with this test one, I was just kind of trying to figure out how to get a smooth surface, and I definitely hadn't figured out the key yet.

But after a couple of hours of messing around, I think I have something that's showing some promise.

But as you can see, there's divots all over it still.

It looks cool, but not exactly what I'm going for.

So the trial and error continued into the evening, and here's what we ended up with for the test piece.

Not too bad, and honestly pretty cool that you can even do this.

But with that test done, time for the big one.

Now you can see what I mean with the low and high spots when we're shaping the core.

But after a while, we've got this perfectly spherical forbidden brownie.

So but surprise surprise, following the exact same process, I was having the exact same problem.

No matter what I did, I always ended up with some really rough spots and some kind of smooth spots.

I was watching Netflix at my desk while I did this, and I finished all of our cane before I was done.

That's 12 hours of polishing and restarting.

But I finally figured out what I was doing wrong.

When it started to dry, I would start to see some shine showing up, and so I would just keep polishing.

But it turns out it wasn't actually ready yet.

All the low spots were never going to polish away.

The technique that finally broke the cycle was to get the jar wet and work it until you get a tacky surface like this.

Then sprinkle clay on any of the divots and gently rub them in with your palm.

Then cover the whole ball in a thin clay dust.

Get the whole surface wet with the jar and work it until you get back to that giant malt ball look.

As it's drying, you're kind of spreading that thin layer of mud to fill in all the imperfections.

And as you add layer after layer, those imperfections will slowly go away, and you'll end up with a perfectly smooth surface.

Once the surface is how you like, don't wet it again and just keep polishing.

For me, a little drop of olive oil on the rim of the glass really helped it to slide.

Then a little polish with a cloth, and you're done.

Figuring out how to do this was honestly frustrating, and a lot of work.

But once I figured it out, it was kind of meditative, and I think I could do it a lot faster the next time.

I think I'll definitely do another one in the future, and I really recommend you give this one a try.

Thanks for watching, and if you liked that, go check out some of my other projects.