The Same Name Covers Three Very Different Games

Most people who recognize the name Daruma-san know it as だるまさんがころんだ, a children's playground game — Japan's version of Red Light, Green Light. One player faces away and recites the phrase, and everyone else has to freeze the instant they turn around. It's the kind of thing that shows up at every school in the country. What most people don't know is that the same name also attaches to something considerably darker: a solo ritual known as the Bath Game, where the thing catching you for moving isn't a classmate, but supposedly a real one-eyed ghost. Between these two, it's the same core rule — stay still or something catches you — stretched into a very different shape.

The Ritual Nobody Plays Casually

The Bath Game asks a lot more of a player than the classroom version ever did. Every light in the house has to go off first. Then, alone, you undress, fill the bathtub, and sit down facing the faucet with your eyes closed. While washing your hair, you repeat the phrase daruma-san ga koronda — "the daruma doll fell over" — without opening your eyes, no matter what. If the ritual is done correctly, an image is supposed to surface unbidden: a Japanese woman slipping beside the bathtub, her face striking the rusted faucet, one eye destroyed in the fall. At that point you're meant to ask out loud, "why did you fall into the bathtub?" — then leave the bathroom and wait. The actual game, according to the legend, doesn't start until the next morning, when the ghost begins the version of hide-and-seek she never got to finish.

A Doll That Makes Your Head Explode

Daruma-san's most famous modern appearance skips the bathtub entirely and lands squarely in legends adapted for the screen. The 2014 Japanese film As the Gods Will, directed by Takashi Miike, opens with a giant Daruma doll forcing a classroom to play the freeze-when-it-turns version — except getting caught moving means your head explodes into a spray of red candy. It's a straight escalation of the same childhood game into something built to kill. Fans of Netflix's Squid Game have widely pointed out how closely its Red Light, Green Light sequence — complete with a giant doll that turns around and eliminates anyone still moving — echoes this exact scene, down to the framing of the shot. There's no confirmed statement tying the two productions together, but the resemblance is close enough that it's become a standard reference point in Squid Game discussions online.

The Same Fear, Built Into a Completely Different Monster

The mechanic underneath all three versions — you're safe as long as nobody's looking, and caught the instant something notices you moving — isn't unique to Japanese horror either. SCP Foundation lore includes SCP-173, a concrete statue that only moves when it's out of a viewer's direct line of sight, and can't be looked away from without risk. It's the same core fear as the Daruma doll and the Bath Game's silent ghost, arrived at completely independently, decades and continents apart. Whatever it is about being frozen under watch that unsettles people, it keeps getting reinvented from scratch — a schoolyard game, a bathroom ritual, a killer statue, a death game on primetime television — because apparently nobody needs to borrow the idea to land on it.