Who Invented Kick the Can? A Street Game With No Known Starting Point

1. Kick the Can Mixes Tag and Hide-and-Seek, and No One Knows Who Combined Them

Here is the usual version. A can is set in an open space. One player is “it” and covers their eyes and counts while everyone else hides. Then “it” hunts for the hiders. A hider who is found and tagged goes to a “jail” near the can. But a hider who sneaks back and kicks the can without being caught frees all the prisoners, and the hunt starts over [1]. The names vary a lot: Wikipedia lists “kick the block,” “tip the can,” “can can” and “tin can copper,” among others [1].

A reference book on play in modern society, the Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, describes kick the can as a game that combines parts of other children’s games such as tag and hide-and-seek, and suggests it may have been born by borrowing rules from games children already knew [2]. That is a sensible guess, but it is a guess. Wikipedia states plainly that the origin is unknown [1]. So where does the paper trail begin?

2. The Oldest Written Traces Are From the Early 1900s, and They Use Other Names for the Can

The Oxford English Dictionary defines kick-the-can (or kick-the-tin) as a children’s game in which a tin can is kicked, and it points readers to the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie’s book Children’s Games (1969) for a full description. The entries it quotes include a 1909 note about children’s games in Orkney, in Scotland, that lists “Kick the tinnie,” and a 1959 study of New Zealand children that calls it “Kick the Tin” and says it was the most widespread of the games in which players help one another against the chaser [3].

Two things follow. First, the game was already known to English-speaking children in places as far apart as Scotland and New Zealand by the middle of the twentieth century, under names like “tinnie” and “tin.” Second, a dictionary only quotes what happened to get printed. A game played in alleys by children who never wrote about it can be much older than its first quotation. The 1909 note shows a game called “Kick the tinnie” existed by then, though a quotation alone cannot confirm it was played exactly like today’s version; and it does not show when it started.

3. Why a Can? It Needed No Field and No Equipment, and the Depression Years Made It Popular

Wikipedia says that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many families had little money, the game was a popular pastime because it needed no playing field and no equipment except a discarded can or another kickable object [1]. Notice the careful wording: it became popular then. It does not say the Depression invented it, and the 1909 note above shows it existed earlier. This explanation of its popularity rests on that one reference page, so treat it as a reasonable account rather than a proven one.

It does explain something real about the game’s design, though. All it takes is an empty can, an open space and a few friends. Because the can is the only prop, the same idea could plausibly start in different towns, so the game may have appeared in many places without one inventor. That is my guess; no source I found shows it.

4. Japan Has a Nearly Identical Game, and Its Origin Is Also Unknown

In Japan the game is called kankeri, which literally means “can kick.” Japan’s Sport Association, in a guide for people who lead children’s activities, describes it this way: draw a circle and put an empty can in it; one child is the oni (the chaser, whose name means a horned ogre in folktales); the others kick the can away and hide; the oni returns the can, then searches, and when it finds someone it calls out the name and steps on the can, so that child is caught and waits in the circle; if a free child rushes in and kicks the can, the caught children can run again [4]. That looks very close to the English-language game, with a different word for the chaser, though I did not compare the two in detail.

Where did it come from? A cultural website about Japan says nothing in the records shows who started it or when. It lists three popular ideas, that it came from America, that it arose by itself in many places, or that it goes back to ancient Greece, and it adds that none has records behind it [5]. The “from America” idea is the easiest to imagine, since kick the can is well known in English-speaking countries, but the source says there is no record for it. Having a twin overseas is not proof of copying. When a game needs only an empty can, children in two countries could easily arrive at the same idea separately. That is my reading, not something a source has demonstrated. What a researcher would need is an old Japanese written record, and I could not find one.

5. In Japan the Can Itself Is Not Very Old, Which Hints at What Early Players Kicked

A can is a modern thing. In Japan, canning food began as a business on October 10, 1877, when salmon was canned at a government cannery in Ishikari, Hokkaido; that date was later named “Canned Food Day” in 1987 [6]. Canned drinks came much later: the first canned juice in Japan went on sale in 1954, and early cans were opened with a can opener, with the pull-tab arriving in 1965 [7].

So any Japanese game that started before the 1950s cannot have used a soda can, and the cans kids kicked must have been the empty containers that were around at the time. Which ones, and when the game first used them, no source I found says. What the dates do show is that the can in the game kept changing while the game itself carried on.

6. Many Children Had Not Played It by 2010, and That Puts the Memories at Risk

An old street game with no inventor survives only if children keep playing it. According to a search summary of the encyclopedia entry, which I could not read in full, kick the can is becoming less known as outdoor, unstructured play dwindles [2]. A Japanese survey from 2010 points the same way: a company asked 100 elementary school children online, and about three quarters said they had never played kankeri, and more than one in ten said they did not know it at all [8]. That is only 100 children, so it cannot tell us about all of Japan, but it shows how quickly a game can slip out of view.

That makes spoken memories valuable, because the written record is so thin. You can ask a parent, a grandparent or an older neighbor what they called the game, what they used for the can, how many players were “it,” and how a caught player got rescued. The answers will probably differ from town to town, and that is exactly the kind of detail books rarely keep. If you play, choose a wide space away from roads, and watch where the kicked can flies so it does not hit people or buildings [4]. When there are many players, the Japanese guide suggests using two or three chasers [4]. And if you find a very old record of the game, you may have found something no one else has.

Sources

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