What karuta is
Karuta is a general name for Japanese card games in which players match a spoken or written prompt with a card. The word is generally said to come from the Portuguese carta, “card,” reflecting the arrival of European playing cards in the sixteenth century. Over time the term came to cover many kinds of cards that are not playing cards in the Western sense. Two types are most common: proverb or picture-and-word cards for children, and poem cards for a game based on a famous anthology.
The anthology behind the game
The poem game is based on Hyakunin Isshu, “one hundred poets, one poem each.” Tradition credits the court poet and critic Fujiwara no Teika with compiling it in the early thirteenth century, and it brings together poems by a hundred poets from earlier centuries. Many of them belong to the Heian court, in which poetry was a social skill used in courtship, friendship and ceremony.
The poems are examples of waka poetry, usually the five-line tanka with a pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 sound units, which makes thirty-one in all. They return again and again to the changing seasons, to love and to longing. Because they were so widely admired, many Japanese schoolchildren have read, memorized or at least heard some of them, and the anthology became a familiar part of Japanese literature.
Using poems as a game is an older idea than the cards. At the court, shell-matching and poem-matching games were played as refined pastimes. How strongly the modern card form connects to these early games is a matter for historians, but the pleasure of matching halves of a pair is an old one.
How a round works
A standard set has two groups of one hundred cards each.
- The reading cards show a poet’s portrait and the full poem. These are held by the reader.
- The ground cards show only the last two lines of the poem (the final 7-7 section) in the kana script. These are placed on the floor or table.
The reader chants a poem aloud, usually in a traditional, drawn-out melody. Players listen and try to be first to touch the ground card with the matching ending. In a friendly game for a family or a school class, the players spread all the cards out. The winner is whoever collects the most cards. This is typically a New Year pastime, and one of the New Year customs of many households, since it needs only cards and a group of people sitting together on the floor.
Beginners usually need a few rounds to understand how it works, and children often find the game easier if the reader pauses on the first words. Adults may play together with a few simple house rules, such as handicapping a strong player.
Competitive karuta
A more serious form of the game developed for tournaments. Players memorize all one hundred poems, because speed depends on recognizing which poem is being read from the first sound or two. Many poems begin differently, but some share their opening syllables, and the point at which the poem becomes unique is the signal to move. Fifty cards are chosen and laid out, twenty-five on each player’s side, and the aim is to clear one’s own side first, with penalties for touching the wrong card.
The game is physical as well as mental. Players typically kneel on a mat and train their hearing and reflexes. Matches are fast, silent apart from the reader’s voice, and demand intense concentration. Tournaments are held across the country, and a well-known annual contest is held in the New Year season. In recent years, popular fiction has drawn more attention to the competitive game, and clubs in schools and local groups attract new members.
The charm of the cards
The pictures on the reading cards follow long-standing conventions, with poets shown in the robes of the period, and the decks sometimes carry the look of printed popular art. Those who collect antique sets note the way styles of printing and illustration changed through the Edo period, when sets were made in volume for ordinary households as well as the elite, and Edo townspeople bought them for the New Year season. Modern sets are inexpensive and widely available.
Other kinds of karuta
Some other sets are designed for younger players. Iroha karuta uses proverbs, each beginning with a different letter of the old kana ordering, and a card for each is decorated with a picture. In a game, one person reads a proverb and the others find the matching picture. They help children learn sayings, and the games are cheerful and noisy. Variants exist in different regions, and local proverbs sometimes replace the national ones.
Another type teaches reading, geography, animals or history. Since the format is flexible, teachers and parents continue to invent new sets. The common thread is that a spoken prompt must be matched with a written one, and speed and memory are rewarded.
Why poetry became play
For readers outside Japan, the idea of memorizing hundreds of old poems for fun may seem unusual. But the poems in this anthology use language that is compact and full of seasonal imagery, in the manner of seasonal words in verse, and their feelings of longing, passing time and quiet observation are close to the mood of mono no aware. Playing karuta is a way for ordinary people to take that world into their own hands. The cards put the old poems into the hands of children and give the poems a social life, so the game is both entertainment and a kind of living memory of classical Japanese poetry. It would be an exaggeration to say that every player cares about the poems, since many enjoy the game for its speed, but the poems come along with every round.