This summer my family went back to Japan to visit relatives while I stayed home, and one of the souvenirs they brought back was this wonderful book (publisher’s link here):
This book was sold at a local Kinokuniya bookstore in Japan, and each page of the book features a poem from the 100 poems of the Hyakunin Isshu, in traditional numerical order. Within that page, you can practice your own handwriting by writing out the poem, first on the right-hand side, and again on the left.
Here’s a close-up of one of the pages, depicting poem 41 (こい), one of two poems from a famous poetry contest (poem 40 is the other). You can see the poem is written out in traditional style: right to left, vertically. There is a special handwriting guide on the left-side of this page with tips to help with certain difficult Chinese characters. You can also trace the poem on the right side of the page to practice your penmanship.
On the following page, there are some historical details about the poem. In this case, it is a lineage chart of the Imperial family at the time, and focuses on the reigning Emperor Murakami who succeeded the throne after the death of Emperor Daigo. On the bottom right is a glossary of terms, since the poem is composed in old Japanese, and thus the spellings and vocabulary are not clear to modern speakers.
This is a pretty neat book, and I am hesitant to practice my handwriting on it, since it is pretty poor. But I love the idea, and it’s a lot of fun to look through. It also seems like a nice relaxing exercise if you go slow, and take in each poem one by one.
If you are ever in Japan, and happen to be browsing a local bookstore, keep an eye out for books like this. The Hyakunin Isshu continues to be a populartopic, and you’ll find many such excellent books and many ways to savor and enjoy this wonderful anthology.
My journey with the game of Karuta began one August day in 2023 with the kind folks at a local karuta club, and right away I loved the game. However, over time, I realized that the competitive style of karuta, like you see in the anime Chihayafuru, was not for me. The constant pressure to grind out game after game to make incremental improvements, especially as a working parent with little time or energy for such endeavors, made me feel increasingly hopeless about making any real gains.1 Finally, with my children getting older, and one of them graduating, I had to take a long break from karuta. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
Recently, I’ve been playing again with a small informal group where we just mess around a bit, and play shorter Karuta games using the casual format. This is how most Japanese people play in Japan, by the way.
Thus, I wanted to share my experiences lately with readers in hopes that they may find ways to keep enjoying karuta, or help introduce it to people outside of Japan who didn’t learn it in grade school.
For starters, I ordered this 5-color Hyakunin Isshu set online from the good people at Oishi Tengudo last year,2 and after using the set a few times, I finally realized this five-color set is different than the more well-known version sold in Japan. It uses different colors, and divides the cards differently. My karuta reader apps were not set to recite poems according to Oishi Tengudo groupings, so I was really confused at first.
Using my favorite karuta reader app, Wasuramoti (Android and iOS), I decided to make custom lists based on the Oishi Tengudo groupings. You can do this too in Wasuramoti by selecting Advanced Config, then Set of Poem:
In the Oishi Tengudo set, the “red” group (also called Group A), is comprised of poems whose kimari-ji (starting syllables) start with む (mu), す (su), め (me), せ (se), う (u), つ (tsu), し (shi), も (mo), ゆ (yu), ち (chi), and ひ (hi). These cards have very few or no tomofuda (cards with similar kimari-ji), so they’re distinct and easy to learn first. I created my custom list with 20 cards, just like my physical set.
I made a similar custom list for Group B (“blue”) as well. This group is a bit harder because it includes cards whose kimari-ji have slightly more tomofuda cards (3-4): い (i), み (mi), た (ta), and こ (ko). So, there’s a bit more effort required to distinguish one card from another. Yet it’s still the second easiest group.
… and so on.
When I practice, I just grab the color I want to play (“red”, or Group A in this case) and scatter then on my desk, casual-style.
Then in the Wasuramoti app, I select the group of poems I want (see above), set the app to display the torifuda, same as cards on my desk, and set the reader to “auto” mode so it doesn’t stop with each poem. I just want to see if I can recognize the poem before too late. I don’t care very much about speed.
It is fun to play this way. I can finish a game pretty quickly (roughly ten minutes) and it is not very exhausting. Since I chose the easiest set of cards first, I remembered many of them pretty quickly despite the long hiatus, which was gratifying.
This format of playing smaller sets of cards, with optional levels of difficulty, and no threat of penalties, seems to be a great way to introduce to new players as well. I was happy to see that a new player, who had experience with Japanese language, quickly pick up the game, took a few cards of her own, and had a great time. If people aren’t having a great time, why play karuta?
Karuta is super fun, and a great game to enjoy throughout one’s life. However, if you are struggling, don’t blame yourself. Instead, find what you enjoy about karuta, pick a more gentle format, and focus on that, not what the A-rank players are doing.
Happy gaming!
1 The final nail in the coffin was when I joined some online communities which I soon realized were very focused on competition, and very little on actually enjoying the culture of the Hyakunin Isshu. It was just another sport, with physical training regimens, and techniques to edge out your opponent. That is not why I created this blog back in 2011, and not why I continue to enjoy the Hyakunin Isshu now. I had left the world of competitive card games behind when I quit playing Magic the Gathering before the Pandemic, and didn’t want to resume.
2 They only ship in Japan as far as I can tell, and with tariffs making things more expensive, it might be hard to get outside of Japan. Thus, I am adding a new index page for five-color Hyakunin Isshu to help readers make their own sets
As I wrote previously, I have been spending a lot of time trying find more effective training methods for myself and for new, foreign Karuta players because of the scarcity of resources. One website that has been particularly helpful in Japanese is Karuta Club, managed by the Meijin (master player) Kawase Masayoshi and his wife.
It’s a pretty nice site and has a ton of training and resources, though almost all of it is in Japanese. There is a nice English-language introduction that is worth reading.
But for this post I wanted to focus on one particularly helpful article. This teaches a method of memorization called nakama-waké.
The method seems a bit complicated upfront but really helps in those 15 minutes (or 30 seconds on the app) when you have to memorize the board, and uses knowledge you probably already know: the kimari-ji.
Let’s look at my kimari-ji chart here. You can see how the cards are group by first syllable : “ha” cards, “tsu” cards, “ki” cards, “wa” cards and so on.
Kawase’s article suggests that after you learn the kimari-ji, next invest time memorizing how many are in each group. If you look at the chart, there are only two cards in the “tsu” (つ) group, compared to seven in the “wa” (わ) group, or 16 in the “a” (あ) group. Some groups are very large, some are very small.
Let’s use the examples of the “ha” group. From the chart we can see that there are four cards that start with “ha” (は):
If we remember that the “ha” group has 4 cards total, and when you are memorizing at the start of the match, you can determine which of the four are on the board. The rest can be safely ignored as kara-fuda (“empty cards”).
This separation of similar cards (“friends”) between the ones on the board and the ones that aren’t is why this is called nakama-waké (仲間わけ): “separating friends”.
Using the online karuta app, let’s demonstrate this. Here’s a game I played earlier, using default settings: 8 cards per side, only 30 seconds to memorize. The cards are all laid out, and my opponent (the computer) and I are memorizing.
Of the four “ha” cards, I can see two on the board, highlighted in purple. The two cards are “haruno” (はるの) on my side and “harusu” (はるす) on the opponent’s side. That means the other two in the group “hanano” (はなそ) and “hanasa” (はなさ) can be totally ignored if they are read aloud. That helps me avoid accidentally taking the wrong “ha” card and getting a penalty.
While we’re here, you might notice that both “shi” (し) cards are on the board, highlighted in green: “shira” (しら) and “shino” (しの). Even better they are on my side. That means I can just put group them together and simply listen for “shi” (し). Of course, the danger is that the opponent knows this too. Position matters.
Similarly, both cards of the “tsu” (つ) group are on the board too, highlighted in red. They are on opposite sides of the board though, so I still have to be careful to distinguish which is which when read. But it also means there are no “empty” tsu cards either.
Finally, of the seven unique “one syllable” cards, only one of them is on the board: “sa” (さ) which I’ve highlighted in blue. That means I can totally ignore the other six: “mu” (む), “su” (す), “me” (め), “fu” (ふ), “ho” (ほ) and “se” (せ) if they are read.
This may seem like more work upfront, and it does take time to get used to thinking like this, but it really helps in a couple ways:
Your memorization process is more structured, less haphazard, and so you can memorize a full board of 50 cards more easily.
Less risk of penalties because you’re only paying attention to the cards you know are on the board per group, and disregarding the rest.
If you’re relatively new to karuta and you find this process intimidating, you can focus on smaller, easier groups of cards for now: the one, two, and three card groups. With experience, and familiarity, you can then expand to larger, more difficult groups and even use this trick with the huge “a” group.
As part of my efforts to improve my practice routine and make small, incremental gains, I got some helpful advice from the Seattle Karuta Club, and was pointed toward this website. This Karuta Club, the Akita Kohohana Karuta Club, in Akita Prefecture demonstrates how to practice Karuta using a method called fuda-waké (札分け), meaning “distributing cards” or “dividing up cards”, etc.
This technique takes a bit of setup at first but is a great way to both reinforce kimari-ji and also positioning your cards (tei’ichi 定位置).
First, you need to make a chart large enough to place your cards on a 7×4 grid, like so:
Then fill in the Japanese hiragana like so. I’ve added both romaji (Roman alphabet) and kiriji (Cyrillic alphabet) for convenience.
や ya я
み mi ми
は ha ха
た ta та
さ sa са
か ka ка
あ a a
ゆ yu ю
む mu му
ひ hi хи
ち chi ти
し shi си
き ki ки
い i и/й
よ yo ё
め me мэ
ふ fu фу
つ tsu цу
す su су
う u у
わ wa ва
も mo мо
ほ ho хо
な na на
せ se сэ
こ ko ко
お o o
I wanted to try out this method, so I used my old battle-map from Dungeons and Dragons, and drew the same chart on there:
My handwriting is terrible, but hopefully legible. You can see a close-up here:
To be honest, I made my grid a bit too small, so as I piled cards, I couldn’t see which space was which. If you make something similar, make sure the squares are extra big.
Anyhow, the method for fudawaké is to pile up your torifuda cards to the side, then time yourself:
Grab a handful (doesn’t matter how many)
One by one, put them in the right square based on the first letter of their kimari-ji.
Grab more cards as needed.
When you place all 100 cards, stop the timer.
According to the Akita Konohana Karuta Club website, their team standard is 1:40, which is quite fast. You can see that some members finish in less than one minute!
When I tried it the first time, it took me 8:05, and then on my second try, it took 6:07. Not even close to their standard, but it was a fun exercise. It is more challenging than fuda-nagashi, but still teaches many of the same skills. It also helps with the initial board setup too, because you can correctly remember where to group your cards based on common kimari-ji.
Dedicated to “Rachel” and “Lore”, and to blog reader 猫. Thank you all for the encouragement!
In my last post, I talked about taking stock after a bad loss in karuta and focusing on small, incremental improvements rather than “shooting for the moon”. I used the Nintendo Switch game Fire Emblem: Three Houses as a source of inspiration.
The blog post title comes from the main character Byleth, who sometimes says this after combat. In the game, if your students defeat a foe in combat, they gain experience points making them grow stronger. If they are attacked by an enemy, they still gain experience. If they dodge an attack, do something supportive or other things non-combat related they also gain experience.
In other words, the characters get stronger not just from defeating foes, but from many other things too.
In the same way, I realized that Karuta isn’t just winning battles. It’s lots of small things you do and get gradually better at.
If you use the flash card “minigame” on the karuta app, how long did it take you to finish all 100 cards? Did you beat your time? If so, experience gained. If not, experience still gained.
If you tried a new way to arrange your cards on the board (tei’ichi 定位置), did it work better or worse? Experience gained either way.
If you practice listening and distinguishing tomofuda cards (cards with very similar kimari-ji), did you succeed? Even if not, experience gained.
If you listen to audio readings of the Hyakunin Isshu is it starting to sink in? Experience gained.
And so on.
Like Byleth says, each encounter or task is a chance to grow. It may not seem like it, but given a few weeks or months, you’ll begin to see the difference.
If you’re feeling down or discouraged, keep looking toward the skies and take it one step at a time.
Good luck and happy karuta’ing!
P.S. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a criminally underrated game. Definitely check it out if you can. Also, image source above is from Nintendo.
Centuries before the Hyakunin Isshu was compiled and before official Imperial anthologies such as the Kokin Wakashū were promulgated there was the Manyoshu (万葉集) or “collection of ten thousand leaves”.
The Manyoshu is the oldest extant poetry collection, completed in 759 CE for the pious Emperor Shomu, and has much that resembles the Hyakunin Isshu, but also much that differs. I have been reading all about it in a fun book, which is in the same series as this one.
The Manyoshu was purportedly compiled by one Ōtomo no Yakamochi (大伴家持, 718-785), author of poem 6 (かささぎの) in the Hyakunin Isshu, but it’s also likely that he only compiled the collection toward the end, and that others were involved too.
Sadly, English translations are very few in number and usually quite expensive. Translating the Hyakunin Isshu hard enough, and this is even more true with a larger, more obscure volume like the Manyoshu.
Format
The Manyoshu is a collection of poems from a diverse set of sources, including members of the Imperial family and the aristocracy, but also from many provinces across the country and people from many walks of life. In fact, 40% of the poems in the collection are anonymous, with sources unknown. It also includes a few different styles of poetry:
265 chōka (長歌), long poems that have 5-7 syllable format over and over (e.g. 5-7-5-7-5-7…etc), until they end with a 5-7-7 syllable ending. These are often read aloud during public functions. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本 人麻呂, 653–655, or 707–710?), who wrote poem 3 in the Hyakunin Isshu, was considered the foremost poet of this format, but the longest was composed by one Takechi no Miko (高市皇子) at 149 verses.
4,207 tanka(短歌), short poems as opposed to the long poems above. The “tanka” style poems are usually 5-7-5-7-7 syllables long, and are what we see in later anthologies such as the Hyakunin Isshu. At the time, they were often included as prologues to long poems above. The Hyakunin Isshu is entirely tanka poetry, by the way.
One bussokusekika (a poem in the form 5-7-5-7-7-7; named for the poems inscribed on the Buddha’s footprints at Yakushi-ji temple in Nara),
Four kanshi (漢詩), Chinese-style poems often popular with male aristocrats that contrasted with more Japanese-style poetry.
22 Chinese prose passages.
Additionally, these poems were often grouped by certain subjects:
Sōmonka (相聞歌) – Originally poems to enquire how someone was doing, but gradually involved into couples expressing romantic feelings for one another.
Banka (挽歌) – Funerary poems honoring the deceased.
Zōka (雑歌) – Miscellaneous poems about many topics. Basically everything else that is not included into the other two topics.
Manyogana
One of the interesting aspects of the Manyoshu compared to the later Hyakunin Isshu, and other related anthologies, is the written script used. When people think of karuta or Hyakunin Isshu, they think of the hiragana script, but the hiragana script didn’t exist in the 8th century when texts such as the Manyoshu, the Kojiki or Nihon Shoki were composed. Such texts were composed purely using Chinese characters, but in a phonetic style native to Japanese later called Manyogana. Confusing? Let’s take a look.
The book above explains that in Manyogana, Chinese characters such as 安 and 以 are read phonetically in the Manyoshu as “a” and “i” respectively. Even modern Japanese people can easily intuit this.
Then you get more difficult examples such as 相 (saga) and 鴨 (kamo) in Manyogana. These are more obscure, but still possible for native Japanese speakers to understand them.
Then you get much harder examples such as 慍 (ikari) and 炊 (kashiki).
And finally you get even more difficult examples such as 五十 (also read as “i“) and 可愛 (just “e“). My wife, who has an extensive background in Japanese calligraphy, struggled with these.
In any case, words in the Manyoshu were all spelled out using Chinese characters like this, with no phonetic guide. You just had to know how to read or spell them, and as you can imagine this was a clunky system that only well-educated members of the aristocracy could make sense of. However in spite of its issues, this system of phonetic Chinese characters is how the later hiragana script gradually evolved.
Technique
When we compare the Manyoshu with the Hyakunin Isshu, there are many similarities. Both have tanka poetry (5-7-5-7-7 syllables), and cover a variety of topics. Further, both collections make good use of pillow words. In fact the same pillow words you see in the Hyakunin Isshu, such as hisakata no (poems 33 and 76), also show up centuries earlier in the Manyoshu:
Original Manyogana
Modern Japanese
Romanization
My Rough Translation
和何則能尓
我が園に
Waga sono ni
Perhaps
宇米能波奈知流
梅の花散る
Ume no hana chiru
the plum blossoms will
比佐可多能
ひさかたの
Hisakata no
scatter in my garden
阿米欲里由吉能
天より雪の
Ama yori yuki no
like gleaming snow
那何久流加母
流れ来るかも
Nagarekuru kamo
from the heavens
This poem, incidentally was composed by Yakamochi’s father, Ōtomo no Tabito, when he organized a flower viewing party at his villa (book 5, poem 822).
Another commonality, the book explains, is the use of preface verses or jo-kotoba (序詞) where the first verses are just one long-winded comparison to whatever comes after. Poem 39 in the Hyakunin Isshu is a great example of this since the first 3 verses describe various grasses in order to make a point: that love is hard to hide.
The Manyoshu used this technique as well:
Original Manyogana
Modern Japanese
Romanization
My Amateur Translation
千鳥鳴
千鳥鳴く
Chidori naku
Just as the plovers’ cries
佐保乃河瀬之
佐保の川瀬の
Sabo no kawase no
along the wavelets
小浪
さざれ波
Sazare nami
of the Sabo river
止時毛無
やむ時もなし
Yamu toki mo nashi
never end,
吾戀者
我が恋ふらくは
A ga ko furaku wa
so too are my feelings of love.
Author: Ōtomo no Saka no Ue no Iratsume (大伴坂上郎女), book 4, poem 526
Historicity
Similar to the Hyakunin Isshu, the Manyoshu covers a fairly broad span of history, but much of it is now pretty obscure to historians. Even so, the poems in the Mayonshu can be grouped somewhat reliably into 4 specific eras:
first half of 5th century to 672 CE, starting with the reign of Emperor Nintoku onward.
672 to 710 CE
710 to 733 CE
733 to 759 CE
These periods mostly coincide with certain authors who contributed poetry, but also appear to have breaks due to historical events such as conflicts, temporary political upheavals, etc.
Differences with the Hyakunin Isshu
Although there are many commonalities between the Hyakunin Isshu and the Manyoshu, there are also differences. The most obvious is that the Manyoshu is a mixed-format collection, so it includes poetry other than Tanka style. Another difference is its broad sources for poetry, not just contributions by the elite aristocracy.
However, the book above notes that on a technical level there are other differences.
For example, the use of “pivot words” frequently used in the Hyakunin Isshu ( poems 16, 20, 27, and 88 for example) is a technique that is almost absent in the Manyoshu. Similarly, puns are also rarely used.
Legacy
As the largest and earliest extant poetry collection, it set the standard for Japanese poetry that people were still studying and emulating centuries later. Poems such as 22, 64, and 88 are all examples that use themes or poetic styles that closely resemble poems in the Manyoshu.
Further, compared to more polished anthologies that came later, the Manyoshu’s bucolic and unvarnished content has often been revered by later generations (including Japanese nationalists and Shinto revivalists in the 19th century) for getting to the “heart of Japanese culture”.
The book has been a great read, with amazing illustrations, and it helps show how the roots of the Hyakunin Isshu, including a few of its early authors, lay centuries earlier in the Manyoshu.
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.
The Hyakunin Isshu 