One of the most essential skills in playing karuta is to quickly and accurately recall the Kimari-ji for each card. Speaking from experience, if you recall the cards too slow, your opponent takes them first. If you are not accurate you take otetsuki penalties which are painful. As a new player, I tend to do both. 🤦🏼‍♂️

The trick is looking at the torifuda card, the last two verses of the poem, and from that recall what the kimari-ji is. This is not easy to do with 100 cards possible, but with practice it is possible to get good at this. With even more practice you can do this both accurately and quickly. Since there are only 100 cards possible, it is a finite set of information to learn.

The online app provides a handy mini game called “Flashcard” that’s lets you practice this. In Japanese, this method is called fudanagashi (札流し, “flow of cards”). This means to quickly sift through flash cards and correctly guessing the kimari-ji.

The app will let you practice this easily, and posts the correct answer in red. It also randomly shows the cards upside down (since half the cards on the board would be upside down anyway):

But you can also do this using flash cards. In Japan they often sell cards like this. I bought this ring of flashcards at the Tengu-dō store in Kyoto (product link here):

On the other side is the kimari-ji:

Sometimes I take this with me when walking around the neighborhood and just practice a few cards here and there.

As for the flashcard game on the online app, my first run-through I finished in 7:33 (7 minutes, 33 seconds), but also made several mistakes. Within two days, I narrowed the time down to 4:23 and fewer mistakes. After that, I decided to be more strict about mistakes (as they are costly in the game) and would reset the stack even if I made one mistake.

That was difficult at first, but I learned each time I mess up, even when I made the same mistake more than once. I probably had to reset 12-15 times but eventually I finished without errors and with a time of 4:21. Yay.

Finally, you can do this while blasting your favorite Fire Emblem: Three Houses song to keep you motivated:

The point is, is that fuda-nagashi is an essential skill for any karuta player, and there’s many ways to approach it. Find what works, and make it fun. If you do, you’ll be surprised how quick you can improve.

Edit: after writing this post, got to 04:18.

Edit #2: as of December 2023, I am down to 3:14.