Today, I want to do a little thought experiment, one that is based on a televised gameshow. Wheel of Fortune is perhaps one of the most iconic televised gameshows in America, and perhaps, the world, with over 7000 episodes aired in its ~40 years of history. Currently hosted by Pat Sajak and Vanna White, Wheel of Fortune features a roulette wheel with a hangman-style gameplay.

Essentially, in normal gameplay rounds (not toss-up, final spin, nor final round), contestants call out a letter on their spin, and if the letter is present, it will light up on the gameboard, and the contestant is awarded the corresponding amount on their spin multiplied by the number of times the letter appears on the board. Otherwise, their turn ends, and the next contestant spins. Players could also buy vowels for $250. While there are other mechanics involved, like toss-ups, prize rounds, and final rounds, this pretty much sums up the core gameplay of the show.

On a more statistical or linguistics note, my eyes naturally draw towards the final round, where the winning contestant would be presented a puzzle of a given theme, and letters “R, S, T, L, N, E” are shown. They would also be prompted to choose three consonants and a vowel, plus a bonus consonant if they picked up a wild card in the earlier rounds.

These letters aren’t randomly chosen, however. One source suggested that the most-often called letters are “C, M, D, A”, representing some of the most common letters used in the English alphabet.

Now, comes the thought experiment bit. How would these mechanics work on languages that do not use alphabetical systems? Could we actually manage to feasibly do Wheel of Fortune, but entirely in Japanese?

Firstly, the Japanese writing systems alone present somewhat a challenge – it uses three, the hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Of course these can be romanised to rōmaji, essentially “alphabetising” the systems. But what if we do not want to use rōmaji at all?

Having played many games of the retro era in Japanese, kanji are hardly used since it could be quite expensive to encode. Thus, we would most often see hiragana and katakana predominantly used. These two systems could be interchangeably used when letters are called in gameplay rounds, or only using hiragana, which sounds reasonable. However, the number of letters per system is around double that in the English alphabet. This leaves me to wonder if rounds would be more drawn out, or if contestants would be more likely to find the letter they called to not be on the board.

Next, how would players buy vowels? After all, the Japanese hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, where one consonant is paired with one vowel, except the letters ん and ン (n). The letters あいうえお / アイウエオ (a, i, u, e, o) technically are syllables with a zero onset.

Perhaps a workaround would be having the 46 base characters of the hiragana available to call individually, with the contestants being able to buy diacritics and other syllable modifiers like the sokuon っ, dakuten ゛, handakuten ゜, and the 3 yōon ゃ, ゅ, and ょ. While gameplay could end up longer than the English language one due to the larger syllabary used, it should make for a more balanced gameplay compared to playing by calling consonant rows and buying the individual vowels.

As Japanese is typically not written using spaces, there would be debate over whether spaces would be used for puzzles entirely presented in hiragana. Going back to the retro era Japanese games, text was typically presented with spaces, like the example below, from Mega Man V:

So it should be reasonable to argue that using spaces for puzzles entirely in hiragana is preferable, as it separates entire sentences into word blocks for the contestants to figure out. Additionally, successful guesses are also more readable, and organised compared to an entire unspaced chunk of hiragana text.

To give an example, if a song title was the theme for the puzzle, like, 六兆年と一夜物語 (ろくちょうねん と いちや ものがたり), the puzzle would show ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ ▯ ▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯▯, where two of the ▯ represent the characters contestants can choose to buy. And one could figure out how spins, calls, and diacritic or syllable modifier purchases would work.

Are there actually winning strategies for calling letters? In certain themes like “What are you doing”, patterns in verbal conjugation could help gameplay, such as calling “N, G, and buying I”. Similarly, in the Japanese version, the conjugation that expresses what the doer is doing at that time would be “~ている”, meaning that the letters “て, い, る” could theoretically be called. Infinitive verbs would also be more predictable, as any letter ending in “-u” could be called, and prioritised based on which consonant appears more often in the infinitives of Japanese verbs like ”る”.

Another strategy is to look out for characters or syllables that appear together quite often. Examples include the -(C)ai, and –(C)ou syllables, such as いたい (痛い) and もうそう (妄想) respectively. This is similar to understanding the pattern of consonant clusters in English, like how “ck” and “ch” occurs often at the end of a syllable or word. Particles would be just as predictable in Japanese as in English, as Japanese particles are usually single characters, like へ、も、の、and が (although this would be represented as two characters, one for か and one for ゛).

Of course, there could be other strategies that I have not mentioned that could help narrow down guesses for the contestant. And if you could think of any, feel free to add to the discussion in the comments!

Lastly, we come to the final round, the one where the letters “R”, “S”, “T”, “L”, “N”, and “E” are shown, and contestants are asked to give 3 consonants (plus one if they have a wild card), and a vowel. What we observe is that the most common consonants and the most common vowel are given. Now, how might this mechanic translate to Japanese?

Finding a corpus for Japanese syllable frequency is difficult. The one I could find used the Japanese TED Talk transcripts as a corpus, and gave the 10 most frequent basic syllables to be, in descending order, 「い」, 「し」, 「う」, 「ん」, 「の」, 「か」, 「た」, 「と」, 「す」, and 「て」. If we account for the fact that the Japanese hiragana is almost twice as large as the English alphabet, we could scale the given characters to be the 9 most frequent basic syllables, and the most frequent modifier, which I am led to believe is the dakuten ゛. Applying this scale, the finalist could be prompted to give 6 or 7 basic syllables (plus 1 for the wild card) and 1 modifier. This way, it should still pose a challenging gameplay, but not to the point where figuring the puzzle out is borderline undoable.

So this has been my thoughts about a Wheel of Fortune gameshow entirely in Japanese. After seeing that Japan does not seem to have a parallel gameshow to this, I have been inspired to figure out parallel mechanics of Wheel of Fortune for the Japanese language by thinking beyond the alphabet, and diving into the concept of using the base syllable as a basic unit. Opinions on this would undoubtedly differ, and so I would be interested to hear what you, the reader, would think about this.

(And to be rather cheeky here, yes, I would welcome my idea to be used in a Japanese-language gameshow.)