karuta

So before New Year's holidays, we got to hear a lot about Japanese holiday traditions in different classes, and even got to try a few games and such. One of them was called karuta, which is a card game where there's a bunch of cards with pictures and hiragana characters on them, laid on the floor right side up. Then somebody reads off phrases from separate reading cards, and the fastest one to grab the card with the initial syllable of the phrase gets to keep it. And obviously whoever has the most cards in the end wins.

The cards we used for playing this all had easily distinguishable words on them, so that it wasn't really possible to grab the wrong one, and since all you have to do is to recognize the right hiragana, it would take your brain a few seconds, maximum, to process the sound you hear, and locate the card with the matching word. No big deal, and obviously aimed at children.

Well, this is what I thought, until after the holidays, one of our teachers introduced us the actual cards that are used in competitive karuta. Yes, you read correct, competitive karuta. Anyway... instead of simple words or phrases, these cards have what's called hyakunin isshu written on them, which are 100 tanka poems written by 100 different authors. These poems date back to... oh well, I don't even know when, but they're old as fuck.

To make it more difficult, in addition to having to grab the card with the same poem as the one being read, what you have in front of you are cards with only the lower phrase of the poem. So you actually need to have memorized all one hundred poems in order to play this game, since the reader always starts from the beginning of the poem.

Above you can see what it looks like when you're serious about the sport. Saying that they're fast is an understatement. Like, I don't even... So how come is this a traditional New Year's pastime in Japanese homes? Do everybody spend their childhood memorizing these poems in order to have fun during the holidays?

YES. Well, actually it's something they have to learn at school at some point, and I don't think there are too many grown-ups who still remember them, but still. I'm trying to think of something similar we would do in Finland, but I can come up with nothing. This is one of those "Only in Japan" things that you come across from time to time. But I think it's pretty damn cool. And I wanna play, too! It's just that, at this point, I'm reading hiragana like an elementary school student, and I'm pretty sure it would take me years and years to memorize these poems... But I'm still so fascinated by it that I just had to go and buy myself a set with CDs and all. If only as a souvenir!

But yeah, there's more to the rules but I tried to keep it as simple as possible. If you want to learn more about it, though, without actually having to study about it, I recommend an anime called Chihayafuru - I started watching it a while ago, and it seems like a pretty accurate depiction of the sport!