After playing some recent matches with the good folks at the Competitive Karuta Club (Discord invite link here), and also in person with the Seattle Karuta Club, I realized that, as of writing, I’ve been learning to play for 11 weeks. It felt longer somehow. I even double-checked the calendar and, sure enough, it has only been eleven weeks from my very first karuta experience.
In that time I have managed to memorize all 100 kimari-ji. It wasn’t always easy, and I recall some of them faster than others, but practicing fuda-nagashi does help.
Further, I haven’t won a single match yet (online or in person), but I feel like more confident than before, am more aware of my opponents card arrangement (tei’ichi 定位置), sometimes able to keep track of cards that have already been read, and even take a few cards now and then. My rate of penalties is still higher than I like, but that’s still a work in progress.
In short, I have grown as a Karuta player. Not a lot, but it’s nice to look back and actually see progress.
Using the analogy Fire Emblem: Three Houses again, if I may,* there is a part of the story where your students have the option to face the dreaded Death Knight. Unless your student’s name is Lysithea, very few characters can defeat the Death Knight without considerable luck and strategy. It’s not that the characters are weak, they’re just not ready. So the game encourages you to know your limits, and just skip if you’re not prepared. Much later in the game, when your characters are much stronger, you will encounter the Death Knight again and have a much better chance to emerge victorious.
In the same way, battling an advanced player in Karuta probably won’t result in victory, but those little incremental wins, each card taken, each penalty avoided, is still a sign of growth.
As a game, karuta is more difficult to learn upfront compared to things like Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon TCG, etc. However, once you pass that hurdle, it becomes a game you can carry with you the rest of your life. You don’t have to keep buying new sets of cards, dealing with “power creep” with new card sets, etc. The 100 poems of the Hyakunin Isshu have been around for centuries and will continue to be around for many more. The more you play, the more your skills refine. There’s no rush, come as you are, enjoy the poems, learn a little bit each time.
Finding a community of players isn’t always easy, but the budding international community continues to grow and we are always welcoming new people.
If you’re unsure, feel free to take the plunge anyway. Hopefully, you’ll be glad you did. I was.
P.S. featured photo taken at Ryonaji temple in Kyoto, Japan, in summer of 2023.
* the best part of owning your own blog is that you can write whatever silly stuff you want. 😋 Also, if you own a Switch, please try FE:3H. It’s a pretty neat game.
Recently I learned about the concept of go-shoku Hyakunin Isshu (五色百人一首), or five color Hyakunin Isshu.
During my recent trips to Japan, while shopping for Karuta sets, I did see some advertised as “five color sets” but didn’t understand the significance, and there is no information in English.
According to this helpful website, it’s a kind of teaching aid for grade school kids to learn Karuta by diving the cards into 5 sets of 20, color-coded: Blue, Pink, Yellow, Green and Orange. The website above has a comprehensive chart for each color, and which poems belong to each.
The cards are grouped this way to ease the memorization of the kimari-ji for playingkaruta by organizing easier versus more difficult cards into different groups. The website above suggests the following game to help (my rough translation below):
This is a 1v1 game
Of the five color groups, select one at random (or however you want to decide).
Shuffle the 20 cards and then divide into two piles. Using rock-paper-scissors to decide, the winner can pick their preferred pile.
Each player will lay out their cards in two rows of 5 cards each. Lay your cards out so that you can read them.
The tops of your cards on the top row will touch the top of your opponent’s cards on their top row. Your cards do not have to be touching each other.
You have one minute to memorize your cards.
The reader will reader the upper verses of the poem, then the lower verses, one time each.
When you are going to take the card, yell hai!
If both players touch the card at the same time, you can decide the winner using rock-paper-scissors.
If one player’s hand is on top of another, the player who’s hand is at the bottom is the winner.
When the reader is not reading cards, you are allowed to flip the cards over to see the upper verses. (Me: I guess the official five color cards print on both sides?)
When 17 cards have been read, the match is over.
Whoever took the most cards wins.
There is a helpful instructional video too (sorry, no English):
It also points out some penalties: touching the wrong card (even if you touch the correct one later) and such. Most of this is geared towards grade school kids, so adults would not likely make such mistakes.
Also, some groups seem easier than others. Based on reviews in the website above, yellow and blue seemed easiest, while orange and green were the hardest.
Since I don’t own an official five-color set (yet), I decided to make my own set by using one of my non-competitive sets, and dividing it up into the five color groups. You can see my efforts above in the featured photo. Also, please buy Dr Mostow’s book on the Hyakunin Isshu. This blog is graciously his debt. 😌
Even if you don’t play the five color Hyakunin Isshu game, you can still use an online reader app like Karuta Chant (iOS and Android). The app even has options for reading only the specified color group:
This established method of dividing up the cards into five colored groups is a very handy way to divide and conquer in your efforts to learn the karuta cards.
Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments!
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
Rough Translation1
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 falling snow
那何久流加母
流れ来るかも
Nagarekuru kamo
from the gleaming heavens
1 Amateur translation, apologies for any mistakes
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
Rough 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.
I’ve been writing in my other blog several articles about my family’s visit to Kyoto and Nara in July 2023, but for this particular article, I wanted to write it on this blog instead. You’ll see why shortly. While in Kyoto, we made an unexpected stop at a Shinto shrine called the Kitano-Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮) right in the middle of the city.
Kitano-Tenmangu Shrine (English / Japanese homepages) is devoted to a Shinto kami named Tenjin, who’s essentially the God of Learning. Each year, thousands of kids trying to pass their entrance exams visit local shrines, and pray for success. I’ve prayed at the Yushima Tenmangu Shrine in Tokyo myself years ago when trying to pass a Japanese-language certification test (I passed). The one in Kyoto, though, Kitano Tenmangu, is the original shrine.
But what’s the big deal?
The kami Tenjin is a deified form of the poet and scholar, Sugawara no Michizane, who composed poem 24 in the Hyakunin Isshu. When he was ousted by the powerful rival Fujiwara no Tokihira (father of Atsutada, poem 43), and died in exile, people worried that his vengeful spirit had returned to plague the capitol. The untimely deaths Tokihira and Atsutada certainly didn’t help this. Michizane was posthumously re-instated to the Imperial Court bureaucracy, elevated to a high rank, and venerated as a Shinto kami1 to appease him.
Anyhow, Kitano Tenmangu is the original shrine devoted to Michizane and has since grown into a large network of shrines across Japan.
The Shrine itself is relatively small, since it’s inside the city, but it has lots of neat things in it. When you first come in, there is a walkway like so leading to the inner sanctum:
To the right, is a plum tree, though not blossomging in July:
Plum blossoms (umé 梅) are associated with Michizane due to a famous poem he wrote in exile:
Japanese
Romanization
Translation
東風吹かば
Kochi fukaba
When the east wind blows,
にほひをこせよ
Nioi okose yo
let it send your fragrance,
梅の花
Ume no hana
oh plum blossoms.
主なしとて
Aruji nashi tote
Although your master is gone,
春を忘るな
Haru o wasuru na
do not forget the spring.
Sugawara no Michizané (845 – 903), translation by Robert Borgen
Anyhow, if you continue you get to the gate to the inner sanctum:
The inner sanctum is here (I prayed for my Japanese-language exam this year as well… we’ll see if I pass again 😄):
What’s really neat is that if you loop back around toward the main entrance, you’ll see this:
The pavilion near the front entrance had displays of various poems from the Hyakunin Isshu in the form of yomifuda karuta cards! If you look at the photos, you might even see my reflection, too. ;-p
The inside room of the pavilion was interesting too, with lots of really old pictures and paintings affixed:
I also picked up an omamori charm as well:
I keep this in my wallet.
Kitano Tenmangu is a great place to visit while you are in Kyoto, and its tribute to both the famous scholar, and to the Hyakunin Isshu really warmed my heart.
1 This isn’t that unusual in Shinto since the notion of a kami is very broad, and includes not just gods, but also nature spirits, great historical figures, and “anything else that inspires awe” according to one writer.
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.
Hello from Japan! The family and I are here visiting family, but we are also using the time to visit some sites my youngest son hasn’t seen before (Pandemic ruined past travel plans).
Anyhow, yesterday my wife and I stumbled upon a fascinating book at the local bookstore titled Nemurenai Hodo Omoshiroi Hyakunin Isshu (眠れないおもしろい百人一首), meaning “[Facts about the] Hyakunin Isshu that are so interesting, you can’t sleep”. The publisher’s product link is here.
The book groups the 100 poems in a different order and seeks to get inside the mind of Fujiwara no Teika (poem 97), the compiler of the anthology, in order to determine why he selected these poems above thousands of others. The book tends to favor more salacious aspects of the authors and theories about why they composed the poems they did, but much of it lines up with Professor Mostow’s book too.
For example, I am currently memorizing poem 61, and the book explains some of the backstory of why the Ise no Tayu, and not someone more senior like Lady Murasaki (poem 57) got the privilege of reciting the poem for that occasion.
The illustrations in the book are amazing. The fantastic artwork really brings the stories of the authors to life.
Anyhow, as I read more, and as I come across more stuff related to the Hyakunin Isshu, I’ll be sure to post here, and update existing poem entries with more backstory details.
Throughout this blog, I’ve alluded many times to poetry contests, called uta-awase (歌合), as the origin of many of the poems of the Hyakunin Isshu. These contests were a popular past-time among the nobility of Nara and Heian periods of Japanese history, and onward. The first such contest was recorded as far back as 885, and became a staple of nobility since.
The poetry contest was a ritualized affair, and worth exploring here.
An excerpt from an illustrated copy of the Tales of Ise showing two contestants in a poetry contest, with an incense brazier on between. The lady here serves as the judge of their poetry.
This image comes from an illustrated copy of the classic Japanese text, the Ise Monogatari (Tales of Ise)1 and shows an example of a typical poetry contest. The contestants sit facing one another as a pair, while some contests had multiple pairs facing off.
Presiding over the contest was a judge or hanja (判者) who would provide a topic for the contest. A small incense brazier would burn between the two contestants (方人, kata-udo), who would each come up with one poem to fit the given theme. Each participant would also trash-talk the opponent’s poem while praising their own, or their Allie’s (if multiple sets of participants). Basically, an ancient Japanese rap-battle. Once the winner was declared, the contest could go another round, and each contestant would come up with another poem.
According to the Hyakunin Isshu Daijiten, the longest recorded poetry contest during the classic Heian Period was said to have continued for 500 rounds!
In more formal settings, usually held at the Imperial palace,2 with a director overseeing the contest (a tokushi, 読師), with the poems and their theme recorded by a scribe (kazusashi, 籌刺) who sat off to the side. Musical accompaniments were often added to formal poetry contests, too. Finally, the particularly good poems often ended up later in Imperial Anthologies.
You can see an example of an Imperial uta-awase from a popular manga here:
My progress in memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu poems, for the sake of learning to playkaruta, continues, but since returning to the US, it has taken some twists and turns.
When I got back home, it became clear how busy my day to day life is compared to Japan, where I didn’t have to worry about work commitments, and had fewer natural distractions from hobbies, projects, etc. So, my original strategy of learning one poem a day quickly unraveled.
Further, as the number of cards I memorized has grown (38 out of 100 as of writing), the effort to review them all has grown too. As the number grows even larger, it gets harder and harder to review all of them daily.
So, I started switching to a spaced-repetition style of learning to help manage the load. This means I focus more on the cards I still need to improve on, and focus less on the ones I know well, while still reviewing periodically. To accomplish this, I needed a way to not only organize my cards, but also manage the progress of each one.
I brushed off one of my old Legion brand deck boxes from when I used to actively play Magic the Gathering (yes, I am a giant nerd).
Inside, I used a few card dividers (some borrowed from other deck boxes) into sections. The section in the back represents cards that I know well and can recite with little or no effort. The section in the middle represents cards I am still struggling with. The section in the front is the “new” queue: cards I have yet to learn but have lined up next.
I mostly focus on the middle queue, since I am actively learning them, but not comfortable enough yet to move them to the “back” queue. I also review the back queue from time to time, and occasionally have to move cards from there to the middle queue in situations where I feel a poem needs a bit more active review. I also try to add a new card from the “front” queue every 1-2 days.
This process took some trial and error to get right, and it may not work for everyone, but it has helped me regain my pace in memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu after some interruptions after coming back to the States.
My original goal was to finish by end of April, and this is still possible, but I have lost some time and now I am hopeful I can memorize all one hundred poems by June.
In Japan, gift-giving (omiyagé お土産) among friends and relatives is a common tradition, and recently a friend returned from Japan and gave us some special crackers (senbei) featuring poems from the Hyakunin Isshu. The crackers come in different flavors, and the wrapper each has a random poem.
I got a curry-flavored one:
The first two verses of the poem, poem 99, are written on the front. On the back are the remaining verses:
Hyakunin Isshu-themed crackers are sold here and there, and I’ve posted about it in the past, but it’s still nice to get them from time to time.
P.S. This vendor sells Hyakunin Isshu themed senbei crackers as well (it was the vendor featured in the original post).
This is Mount Ogura (小倉山) also called Arashiyama (嵐山) near the city of Kyoto. The place name “Ogura” is where the Hyakunin Isshu gets its full-name: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu.
At that time, it was trendy for aristocrats to compile their own “hundred poems by a hundred poets” anthologies, all named “hyakunin isshu”, but the one that is by far the most famous is the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, which of course is the source and inspiration of this blog. 🙂
Thanks to KyotoDailyPhoto on Twitter for taking this photo. It’s nice to see the place that inspired the anthology.
The Hyakunin Isshu 
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