Edit: after publishing this article, a kind reader “Kiri”, pointed out that an English-language option exists, so I re-wrote much of this post to focus on that. Thanks Kiri!
If you are interested in learning how to playkaruta, and especially if you live outside of Japan, it can be hard to find ways to practice, and learn the basics of karuta. The good news is that there is a great smartphone app for this. The Kyōgi Karuta Online (homepage), is available for both IOS and Google Android, and is a well-developed that lets you either play against a computer (great for training) or against opponents online (usually in Japanese time zones).
If you want to switch to English from Japanese, you can just follow this sequence of options (among other possible methods):
Battling
Battling of course is the point of the game, and there are two options available. The computer (CPU) option allows you to play anytime, anywhere without finding an opponent. I also find it very useful for training purposes.
Playing online of course is a more realistic experience, but requires finding opponents, and sometimes the skill levels do not always match.
Let’s look at each…
Computer Play
The computer play offers five modes, from left to right:
0 – short for tutorial
1 – single, this is basically a “goldfish” opponent, an opponent who is entirely passive allowing you to play at your own pace.
2 – easy
3 – normal
4 – hard
Even if you are somewhat familiar with the game of karuta, the tutorial is great and provides helpful tips and explanations of the rules of the game, plus you still get to play a match at the end.
I found, at first, that playing oneself (i.e the “goldfish” option) is a great, safe way to play and get the feel for the game before moving into easy mode.
Playing Online
At some point you will want to try online.
The vast majority of karuta players are in Japan and so Japanese daylight hours, especially weekends, are the best time to find an opponent. On the upper-right corner of the screenshot above you can change your gamer tag from “guest” to whatever you want. As of writing, my tag is SpockHere (not shown above), so maybe you might find me online.
My first match online with a Japanese player was a complete disaster:
(I’ve been playing in Japanese partly to help with my reading, partly because I didn’t know the English-language option even existed until recently 🤦🏽♂️)
I took 0 cards and had 22.2% penalties because I was panicking. My opponent was so fast and aggressive that I failed miserably.
My second opponent was less experienced, but I still did poorly:
Here I did get 1 card, but still got 14.3% penalties.
That said, experience is the best teacher, so if you’re willing to take a few lumps early on, you can gain valuable experience that will help in the competitive scene. Eventually, the more you play, the better prepared you will be.
Mini Games
Note: special thanks to “Kiri” and “Lore” for pointing me to this feature. I totally overlooked it.
In the battle section, the game also includes some mini games which you can find here:
These games are a handy method for building basic skills.
The “FlashCards” game (fudanagashi, 札流し in Japanese) will take you through all 100 torifuda cards and you guess the kimari-ji :
Sometimes the cards appear upside-down, just like in a real game.
The other game, Branching Cards (kikiwake, 聞き分け), helps you distinguish cards with similar sounding kimari-ji. This is important in avoiding painful penalties.
One of these cards has a kimari-ji of きみがためは and the other has きみがためお. You have to listen carefully and take the correct one.
Conclusion
Karuta Online is a great app for easing into playing karuta without having to make a big commitment upfront, but also a way for experienced players to hone their skills too. Non-Japanese players, who are otherwise scattered around the globe, use it to organize tournaments too.
I have been making small tweaks to blog appearance, including lighter colors, and a little blog logo. I hope you like the new look!
I finally added a new page : How To Play Karuta. It’s the first page I’ve added in many years (some were made in 2011! 😮), but since I’ve been talking about karuta so much that I figured it was time to make a new page.
My progress on memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu has shifted in memorizing the kimariji so that I can play. I think I am about 75% complete in that regard.
In the book Hyakunin Isshu Daijiten, which I mentioned here, it explains that the fourth verse, karakurenai (唐紅), is in fact a traditional color word in Japanese. The Chinese characters read something like “Chinese (lit. Tang Dynasty China) scarlet or vermillion”. There is no one-to-one equivalent in English.1
You can see an example of what karakurenai looks like on this amazing website, among other tradition colors. You can also see a list of colors on Wikipedia as well. Both sites also include the HTML codes (a # sign, followed by 6 alpha-numeric characters) if you want to reproduce yourself. For example using the HTML hex code #C91F37 I get:
karakurenai
In truth, many of these colors would be obscure to modern audiences, except in some literary circles, but some, such as yamabuki-iro (山吹色, “golden yellow”) are still used in common vernacular. Further, as is common with other Asian languages, colors green and blue are often conflated (e.g. 信号は青, shingō wa ao, “the traffic light is blue/green”).
In any case, try it out the website above, and see what other colors you might find!
Update: I decided to update the blog appearance and apply a new background color based on the HTML codes above. For the blog background color, I am using Haizakura (灰桜, code #d7c4bb).
1 Similarly, I bet some English tradition colors would have no translation in Japanese. Such is the way with language and cultures.
A blog reader recently left a comment about this, and I realized that this would make a good topic for discussion, especially if are you are trying to memorize the Hyakunin Isshu, or learnkaruta. If you know even a little modern Japanese, you may soon start to notice that the hiragana spellings for some words aren’t always what you expect. For example, the fourth verse of poem 2 reads:
ころもほすてふ
But it reads as:
koromo hosu chou (not te-fu)
Another verse that threw me off recently was poem 44:
逢うことの
In modern Japanese, this would read as au koto no, but in the Hyakunin Isshu it is read as ou koto no.
Then there are other examples throughout, too many to list. The issue is that Japanese language, like any language, changes over time. People don’t speak or pronounce things the same as they did 1,000+ years ago.1 English language, for example, has undergone some dramatic sound-changes in the last 500 years, and yet the spelling was never updated. Hence, English spelling is confusing now.
Japanese underwent a similar change. Hiragana script at the time when it was first adopted was probably phonetic and intuitive to native speakers. However, fast-forward 1,000 years and it has long since diverged from the way people pronounce it.
This was finally fixed after World War II when the modern Hiragana spelling system was used, but old literature such as the Hyakunin Isshu remained as is. Hence, spelling of words in the Hyakunin Isshu differs from the modern Japanese equivalents.
For this reason, Japanese students of the Hyakunin Isshu often rely on furigana pronunciation guides when reading about the Hyakunin Isshu. For example, this excerpt from a Chihayafuru manga my daughter has shows examples of furigana usage:
From the manga ちはやと覚える百人一首 (“Remember the Hyakunin Isshu with Chihaya”)
Further, some hiragana themselves are pronounced differently:
ひ (modern “hi”) is pronounced like い (“i”), see poem 12.
The aforementioned てふ (modern “te-fu”) is pronounced like ちょう (“cho-u”), see poem 2.
Similarly, けふ (modern “ke-fu”) is pronounced like きょう (“kyo-u”), see poem 54 and poem 61.
ぢ is pronounced the same as じ (“ji”), see poem 12.
おもふ (modern “o-mo-fu”) is pronounced as おもう (“o-mo-u”), see poem 85.
Archaic hiragana ゑ (“weh”) and ゐ (“wi”) are pronounced as え (“eh”) and い (“i”), see poem 5 or poem 14.
を (“wo”) is pronounced the same as お (“o”), see poem 12.
む (modern “mu”) is often pronounced as ん (“n”), but only if it’s at the end of a word, see poem 3.
And so on. If unsure, just listen to audio readings of the Hyakunin Isshu and you’ll often get a feel for how it’s pronounced anyway. Or, note the furigana text above the letter, as this provides a visual cue for native Japanese speakers. Whatever the furigana says is correct. Just be aware that the spellings differ from modern, standard Japanese, and that this is a common feature of pre-modern Japanese literature. There are patterns to this, and once you get used to it, you don’t even think about it anymore.
P.S. if you think the history of hiragana script is confusing, the history of romaji (Roman alphabet for Japanese) is even nuttier.
1 I always find it mildly amusing (or annoying) when time-travel movies have everyone speaking perfect English, often British-accented English. I get that it’s hard to work in another language, especially finding actors who can pronounce it reliably, but still….
Karuta is a game of memory and speed. You’re trying to take a specific poem card before your opponent does, and you can’t know which card it is until the reader starts reading the selected poem. So, players have to use clues called kimari-ji (決まり字), or “deciding letter (or character)” to determine which poem is being read as quickly as possible.
I had heard of the concept before, but in my quest to learn all 100 poems of the Hyakunin Isshu, I didn’t pay attention to kimari-ji, and thus during my first competition I struggled a lot. Learning an entire poem, and learning its kimari-ji are two separate skills. Over the long run, a person can do both, but if you want to play karuta you should invest in memorizing the kimari-ji for as many poems as you can.
A torifuda card (取り札) containing only the last two verses. The last two verses are also known as shimo no ku (下の句) or “lower verses”. This particular poem is poem 58.
What are kimari-ji though? These are the first letters (or characters, I’ll explain shortly) of poetic verse, that tell you which poem is being read. Since the cards on the floor, the torifuda cards, only contain the last two out of five verses of a poem, it’s not immediately obvious which is which. The reader has the full poem using the corresponding yomifuda card.
Anyhow, both the torifuda and yomifuda cards are written using Japanese hiragana script. Hiragana is not an alphabet. It’s a syllabary. Each letter/character is a self-contained syllable or ji (字) in Japanese. Like many languages, English uses an alphabet so it takes 2 letters to spell the syllable “go”, but in Japanese this would require a single character: ご.1
If you’d like to learn more about hiragana script, check out my other blog here and here. Learning hiragana is worthwhile not only because it will unlock the Japanese language, it will help you play karuta a lot more effectively. It takes effort to learn upfront, but the good news is that it’s a learn-once-use-often skill.
When first learning to play karuta, and memorizing the poems, you soon realize that cards often fall into common patterns just based on the first few hiragana syllables. Others stand out from the others and are thus easier to recognize during play.
Let’s look at an easy example, poem 77 (my wife’s favorite).
This poem begins with the first verse:
せをはやみ
se wo hayami
The “se” (せ) in “se wo hayami” is unique among the Hyakunin Isshu anthology in that there are no other poems that start with “se”. So, as soon as the reader says “se”, highlighted below in blue, a seasoned player knows the poem being read is number 77, and that its fourth verse starts with われても, shown in red below.
This is an example of a one-character (一字, ichiji) kimari-ji poem, also called a ichiji-kimari (一字決まり). Poems that can be recognized by the first two characters are niji-kimari (二字決まり), three-character poems are sanji-kimari (三字決まり), four are yojikimari (四字決まり), and so on.
At other extreme end are six-characterkimari-ji poems, also commonly called ōyama-fuda (大山札, “big mountain cards”). Here’s an example below.
The yomifuda cards above are poem 64 (left) and poem 31 (right). Both start with the same 5-character verse, shown in green: asaboraké. It’s not until the sixth character (blue) that they differ. In this case, the sixth for poem 64 is “u” (う), and the sixth character for poem 31 is “ah” (あ). So, if you are listening to the poem, you have to wait all the way until the start of the sixth character to know which poem is being read. If you jump the gun and pick the wrong one, you get a foul (otetsuki, お手つき). Speaking from experience, I have done this. 🤦🏻♂️ It sucks.
In any case, vast majority of poems out there usually fall between these two extremes. The more you practice playing karuta, or memorizing them, the more you internalize them. This is important as kimari-ji work like a trigger: if you’ve memorize the “board state” (i.e. where everything is on the board), as soon as you hear the right syllables, BOOM, you take the card before your opponent does.
If you’ve been training for a while, this motion is almost unconscious. It’s a great feeling when it happens.
Shifting Kimari-ji and Late Game
As the game progresses, or depending on which cards are on the board, even a “six-kimariji” card can become a one-kimariji card. How? This is called kimariji-henka (決まり字変化, “shifting kimariji”).
“Rachel” from the Seattle Karuta Club kindly provided the following chart for the blog:
This chart shows a breakdown of all 100 poems with their kimari-ji, sorted by the initial hiragana character on downward. This is important because if the cards start with naniwa-e (poem 88) and naniwa-ga (poem 19) are both on the board, you have to wait until the fourth syllable (e vs. ga) to determine which card to take. Because of their initial similarity, they are grouped together as tomofuda (友札, “friend cards”).
However, if one of the poems above has already been read, and another card with the kimari-jinanishi (poem 25) has not, then you only need to determine which one to take based on naniwa vs. nanishi. You don’t have to wait until the fourth character. If there is only one card on the entire board that starts with “na” (usually very late in the game), you can just trigger off that.
As the cards on the board reduce in number, this comes up more and more. This is a slightly more advanced topic, but as you gain more experience, you’ll start to notice this too.
So…. How do you memorize them all?
There are many approaches to learning the kimari-ji, so you should find a method that works for you, and not be afraid to adjust that method if it’s not really working. I have created a chart to help listed out the kimari-ji and also group them by tomofuda for easier memorization.
Since my last karuta competition, I’ve shifted methods a few times. But there are some popular methods worth mentioning.
First of all, the 1-character kimari-ji can be remembered using this simple rhyme:
む す め ふ さ ほ せ
mu su me fu sa ho se
Which actually spells a mnemonic sentence in Japanese:
娘房干せ
“Daughter, dry the bunches [of flowers, grapes, whatever]
However, for learning all 100 poems, the Seattle Karuta Club pointed me to some helpful resources online:
This site divides the kimari-ji by initial letters, and has good visuals.
There are mobile apps too, though many have advertisement banners and such. You can search for “hyakunin isshu” in your favorite app store.
There are a lot of helpfulcharts and explanations in various Japanese sources (this is a great example), since it’s a popular pastime, but if you’re still learning hiragana and not familiar with Japanese language, you may need to stick with English-sources for now.
For my part, I started trying out some things at home. Since I don’t have a goza mat yet, I just grabbed one of my battle-map playmats I use for Dungeons and Dragons, and used that as a play area:
I started practicing with batches of 5-10 karuta cards at a time, starting with the 1-character and 7-character kimari-ji, since they are both fewest in number.
But then I started sprinkling poems in that I just happened to like. Since I spent so much effort memorizing poems previously, I picked out another 10-15 that I liked, and mixed them in anyway.
Then, I started making my own flash cards using Anki SRS using a format similar to this site:
As you can imagine, there’s many ways to learn the kimari-ji. The sky’s the limit as they say. Find something that works for, or keep experimenting until you master all 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ poems! Once you’ve done that, the game really starts to open up.
Anyhow, my goal is to try to learn at least half of the cards reliably before the next meeting of the Karuta Club in September. It won’t win me any matches, but it will build a foundation for (hopefully) future wins.
Good luck, and happy Karuta play!
1 There are a few exceptions to this in the Japanese, mostly in the revised modern spelling, but not worth calling out here.
While watching competitivekaruta online, and in person, I noticed that there is a certain poem that is read at the outset of a match, but what’s interesting is that this is a poem that is not actually part of the Hyakunin Isshu.
This poem is called the joka (序歌), or preliminary poem, and reads:
What’s interesting from a historical standpoint is that this poem was composed by a 3rd century immigrant to Japan named Wani (王仁), who came from the Korean kingdom of Baekje1 and is credited with introducing the Analects of Confucius and the Thousand-Character Classic to Japan at a time when it was actively trying to import knowledge and culture from the mainland. I’ve talked about Japan and Baekje here as well.
The poem by Wani was so highly-praised it was felt in antiquity that if you were going to know any Waka poem, you had to at least know this one. Hence over time it became the opening poem for karuta competitions. Like many poems of the Hyakunin Isshu, it was originally preserved in the official Imperial anthology, the Kokinshū.
In karuta matches, the poem is always read before the match begins. My guess is that reciting this poem helps to calibrate or warm-up the players before the match actually begins. Apparently, the last two verses, the shimo no ku (下の句) in karuta, are repeated twice. Once it’s read twice, the match begins.
It’s fascinating to note that this poem has been in existence for 1,700 years, and is still going strong!
1 A time when the Korean peninsula was divided into three warring kingdoms. Baekje probably had the closest relationship with the early Yamato Court of Japan due to proximity and mutually beneficial relations.
I’ve been running this blog since 2011, but until very recently I had no idea other non-Japanese people around me even knew about the Hyakunin Isshu, let alone play the competitive version. I honestly thought I was the only one around.
Enter the local karuta club called the Seattle Karuta Club (homepage).
I stumbled upon their website last month, and being intrigued, came to a recent session. The people at Seattle Karuta Club were super nice and helped me get acquainted with my first game. My first opponent was Lore, one of the founding members. Above, you can see a view of my side of the board as we were setting up. I call this arrangement the “chaos strategy” because I had noooo idea what I was doing. 😅
Another view of me overlooking my cards and trying to make sense of them.
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the torifuda (取り札), that is the cards you take, have no marks to distinguish hiragana て versus で, or ち versus ぢ, etc. I presume this is by design, and yet after all this time I had simply never noticed before. 😅 In any case, my brain struggled to make sense of my board for the first few minutes until I started to pick out verses I knew. But it was too little, too late.
The card on the right, the yomifuda (読み札) uses normal Japanese syntax. The card on the left, the torifuda (取り札) is very streamlined for visual simplicity.
Further, I realized quickly that knowing a poem, and being able to listen to a poem are two different skills. If your ears aren’t tuned to the reading, you’ll totally miss a poem you might otherwise know. For example, poem 24 is near and dear to my heart, but when it did come up in a match, my brain registered it much too slow.
So, in the end, I lost 25-0. Lore was amazing. They really knew their stuff, and not only helped me through etiquette and good arrangement strategy, but also some pointers about what to listen for, mnemonics, etc.
Afterwards, the club members and I had a fun chat about all things related to the Hyakunin Isshu, how folks met, and so on. I was surprised by how many people were inspired but the Japanese anime Chihayafuru (which embarrassingly, I never watched 😅), and how useful that anime is for learning strategy.
Then, abruptly, we had to relocate venues due to shutting down from inclement heat, and club member Rachel gave us all a ride. Thanks Rachel!
For my second match, I played again Kiri, another founding member. As with Lore, Kiri was another sharp player and super nice. Kiri also drew amazing illustrations on the back of their cards. This is recommended by the club to help keep track of one’s own deck versus others, but Kiri definitely went the extra mile. 😊
My match with Kiri was similarly 25-0, but this time around, my brain had adjusted somewhat to the rhythm of poetry recitation, and I could pick out a cards I could now recognize. Further, I started to develop a crude strategy for arranging my cards. I haven’t covered the concept of kimari-ji in this post but have one coming up soon. That’s a topic worth its own blog post (or three).
I knew going into this I’d be poorly prepared, but I also really wanted the experience, because I knew reading about and watching YouTube videos just wasn’t enough. Even if I got clobbered, I’d learn a lot and the Seattle Karuta Club did not disappoint. I genuinely had a great time and was fired up about learning Karuta for next time.
After I got home, I busted out my decks from Japan and starting practicing a few things, including listening, kimari-ji and so on. Also, my daughter had some old copies of the manga Chihayafuru in Japanese which I am borrowing.
Issue 1 of the Chihayafuru manga, Japanese versionA special edition of the manga, devoted toward learning to play Karuta.
All in all, competitive karuta was super fun. Compared to my days playing Magic the Gathering where it was all about money, and competitive dude-bros, “grifters”, “grinders”, etc, the karuta scene, by contrast, was much more about fun.
Rachel, Kiri and Lore were all solid, no-nonsense players, but they knew how to have fun and make people feel welcome too. I can’t tell you the last time I was at something like this that didn’t make you feel dumb or awkward. Everyone is learning together.
Further, compared to a hobby like Magic, Karuta has more cost upfront (for a deck, goza mat, etc) plus memorizing the kimari-ji, but then that’s it. It becomes something you just enjoy and perfect over a lifetime. Further, the deeper you go, the more you get out of it.
So, I am already thinking ahead toward the next meeting, and practicing for my next game.
The Hyakunin Isshu 
