Having played Karuta now for three months and against a variety of opponents, including computer opponents, I realize that I get otetsuki (お手付き, “penalties”) a lot. Like, a lot.
In one in-person game, I was nervous and got eight penalties which is simply painful. Even when playing against the computer on hard mode, I get 2-4 penalties at a time.
I had 4 this particular game (the red X’s shown). 🤦🏼♂️
Anyhow, after finishing some other long-term projects recently, I’ve been investing time to practice karuta, and to grow and develop my skills. One of my big goals has been to reduce penalties as much as possible, and so after some introspection, I realized that my biggest issue, besides being nervous and jumpy, is that i don’t pay attention enough to the reader.
As folks who have been following the blog know, the key to playing karuta is to know the kimari-ji syllables, those first, unique syllables each poem has to distinguish from other poems. Until you hear those syllables, you can not be 100% sure which poem is being read, and if you guess wrong, you get a penalty. Sometimes, I got lucky and guessed correctly, obviously though, sometimes I guessed wrong.
Memorizing the kimari-ji is the first step. You also have to recognize them when you hear them, and hopefully faster than your opponent.
I decided this month that I wanted to invest more time in discipline and listening skills, and less on speed, so I have switched to playing “solo mode” on the online karuta app. There are other ways to do this of course, but the point is that I am playing against a “goldfish”.
Why a goldfish?
A “goldfish” is a term in Magic: The Gathering, for when you are practicing against a completely passive opponent. They are there, but do nothing. Like a goldfish. 🐠
If you play solo mode on the online karuta app, you are not pressed for time. You can slow down, pay attention to the reader, and then take the card when you recognize it. It is also a good way to catch your bad habits, test your different card arrangements, etc. It’s a surprisingly handy tool for improving your game.
Also, it’s a great way to analyze your play style. when playing “solo mode” against the computer, I still got jumpy and took a penalty.
Further, as your listening improves, your speed will gradually improve, but it does require a touch of patience, and a willingness to sacrifice speed over accuracy. I need this. My accuracy is poor, and speed cannot fix that. If I don’t play more accurately, I will continue to suffer loss after loss.
Even when I practice fuda-nagashi drills, I realized that I had to slow down a bit, or I would mis-identify cards again. It’s important to recall cards quickly, but if you mis-identify a card, then it’s not worth it. Better to accurately recall the correct kimari-ji, even if slower.
So, if you are learning karuta, and you feel like you are struggling, stop, backtrack, slow down, and focus on playing good karuta, not fast karuta. With a bit of time and patience, it should pay for itself.
P.S. Special thanks to the crew on the Competitive Karuta Discord group (Discord invite link here) for their helpful advice, much of which was incorporated in this blog post. ☺️
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 poem was composed by Supernumerary Middle Counselor Sada’ie (権中納言定家, 1162-1241), better known as Fujiwara no Teika, or alternatively Fujiwara no Sadaie.1 He is considered one of the greatest poets in all of Japanese history. Teika was the compiler of this Hyakunin Isshu anthology and was also one of the major compilers of the officialShin Kokin Wakashū anthology. He was also the tutor for Shokushi Naishinno (poem 89), and it is thought that they had a romantic relationship too, though eventually they would be separated for good. In any case, his talent and his family’s influence were so great that the family virtually monopolized the Court poetry for centuries to come. But we’ll talk more about that shortly.
Fujiwara no Teika composed many of his own poems in his lifetime, and yet in compiling the Hyakunin Isshu, why did he select this particular poem for inclusion?
Like many of the later poems in the anthology (poem 90, 91 and 94), this poem alludes to a much older one. In Teika’s case, his poem alludes all the way back to the original anthology in Japan, the Manyoshu. Unlike later anthologies, the Manyoshu was a loose connection of poems, compiled 400+ years before Teika, and the particular poem he alludes to was written from the perspective of a man whose love was burning for a woman like the boiling of seaweed at Matsuo Bay. As you can see, Teika reversed the perspective to be that of a woman, while still alluding to the original. Additionally, Teika gives his poem a sadder tone than the poem from the Manyoshu, which came to be a hallmark of Teika’s style.
Incidentally, Matsuo Bay (written as Matsuho 松帆 here) is on the very northern tip of the famous Awaji Island in the Inland Sea. It is a scenic part of Awaji Island, and even has its own homepage. Awaji Island is also the scene for poem 78. The technique of extracting salt by boiling seaweed, or moshio (藻塩) is a time-honored tradition in Japan, and the seaweed gives the salt a special flavor. There’s a really good article about it here.
Fujiwara no Teika was a master of expressing yūgen (幽玄) or subtle, profound beauty in his poetry. This kind of subtle beauty centuries later came to influence other arts in time in Japan including Noh theater, tea-ceremony, etc.
But who was Fujiwara no Teika?
Teika, alternatively read as Sada’ie, was born from an illustrious family of poets though a minor branch of the powerful Fujiwara clan. His grandfather was Fujiwara no Toshitada and his father was Shunzei (poem 83). As a youth, Teika was a sickly boy but as the eldest son, he was obligated to carry on the family legacy. Unfortunately due to complex court politics, Teika was overlooked for much of his early life. However after a fortunate turn of events, he was noticed by Emperor Go-Toba (poem 99) who eventually commissioned him to compile two new anthologies, including the Shin Kokin Wakashū.
Over time though, Teika and Emperor Gotoba disagreed over poetry and compiling the anthology, leading to an increasingly distant and cold relationship. Teika found Gotoba overbearing, while Gotoba didn’t care for Teika’s free-wheeling style. At times, Teika and Gotoba openly criticized one another through poetry, or in their diary entries, and Gotoba even banished Teika for a year from the capitol. Teika meanwhile grew closer to Gotoba’s son who later became Emperor Juntoku (poem 100), while Gotoba became increasingly occupied with the martial arts, and with wresting power back from the samurai rulers in Kamakura (cf. poem 93)
Unfortunately for Emperor Gotoba, his meager forces were utterly routed by the Kamakura army in the short-lived Jōkyū War, and Gotoba was sent into exile (since it was sacrilege to kill the Emperor). Teika was not involved in the war, so he remained in Kyoto, and even reached the Imperial post of Middle Counselor. During this time, he also completed another Imperial anthology, the Shin Chokusen Wakashū, which shows more of his down-to-earth later style.
Finally though, his health declined from old age and from the famine at the time, so he retired and took Buddhist tonsure. It was during his final years in a Buddhist monastery that he was invited by his son’s father-in-law, Lord Utsunomiya no Yoritsuna, to his villa at Mount Ogura near Kyoto.
This stone marker at Jojakko-ji Temple in west Kyoto, near Arashiyama, marks where Teika had compiled the Hyakunin Isshu. More on that in this post. Photo taken in August 2024.
Lord Utsunomiya asked Teika to compile 100 poems in his own hand, so that they could be adorned on the silk screens of his villa, and these 100 eventually became the collection that we know today.
After Teika died at the age of 80, he was interred at Shokoku-ji Temple in Kyoto. The featured photo above shows his grave marker (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.). His grandchildren formed into three rival schools of Waka poetry that dominated the poetry scene for centuries:
Nijō School (nijō-ha 二条派) – the conservative and dominant school at first. Over time, a series of misfortunes eventually caused the school to decline and fade by the medieval period in Japanese history.
Reizei School (reizei-ke 冷泉家) – the more liberal branch, but a few generations later became the dominant branch. By the middle of the Muromachi Period, two branches had formed: the upper Reizei school (kamireizei 上冷泉家) and the lower Reizei school (shimoreizei 下冷泉家), which the upper school prevailing in the long-run. This school still maintains a large compound in Kyoto to this day.
Kyōgoku School (kyōgoku-ha 京極派) – this school died out in only a couple generations.
But more importantly, the legacy of Fujiwara no Teika is in his celebrated poetry anthologies, particularly this one. Even today, many kids in Japan enjoy playinguta-garuta in school competitions, and there are even Japanese anime about the Hyakunin Isshu. All of this is due to Teika’s talent and taste for selecting good poetry.
And now, this anthology is enjoyed by international readers like yourself. This blog was a originally a little experiment of mine, but I have enjoyed your readership, your comments, and of course your support. Thank you everyone from the bottom of my heart.
As this is the 100th and final poem of the Hyakunin Isshu, that is all I have to offer on this blog. I may take it up again sometime in the future and cover other anthologies like the Kokinshu and the Shinkokinshu, but for now, I decided that I prefer to leave it as it is.
1 The Chinese characters (kanji) for his given name (定家) have multiple readings possible, and both are seemingly correct. However, based on a cursory glance in Japanese, it seems that “Teika” is the more common reading.
The author, Nyūdō Saki no Daijōdaijin (入道前太政大臣, 1171 – 1244), or “Buddhist novice and former Chancellor of the Realm”. His personal name was Fujiwara no Kintsune. He was a powerful member of the elite Fujiwara clan and extended his support to the Hyakunin Isshu’s compiler, Fujiwara no Teika (poem 97), after Teika married Kintsune’s older sister. He was also well-liked by members of the old Imperial Court and the new military government at Kamakura.
According to Mostow, Kintsune married a niece of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun of the new military government. After Yoritomo’s son Sanetomo (poem 93) died a tragic death with no heir, Kintsune pushed to make his grandson Kujō Yoritsune, a distant relation to Sanetomo, the next shogun. My new book states that his reputation worsens in his later years as he kept manipulating the power of shoguns from behind the throne.
It also implies that Kintsune may have helped tip off the new military government about Emperor Gotoba’s (poem 99) plans to wrest back control, helping to contribute to the demise of the Emperor and his son (poem 100).
Ah, times had changed since the earlier generations of the Hyakunin Isshu mostly worried about poetry contests and marriage arrangements.
But I digress.
This poem, unlike other poems recently posted which were more clear-cut in meaning, often was the subject of much interpretation. The contrast between the aging man and the scattering of flowers in the wind, called hana fubuki (花吹雪) led to many interpretations by later commentators particularly about the man growing old, according to Professor Mostow. Perhaps he won’t be back next year?
The image of hana fubuki also is noteworthy, because it isn’t a small scattering of flowers. It refers to great scattering of blossoms in the wind, just like a snowfall. Thus Kintsune is witnessing this great scattering even as he contemplates his own decline even after so many years in power.
Pretty awesome poem, really, for a man who lived a noteworthy life.
Speaking of scenic views, Kintsune’s residence of Saionji (西園寺), which was also established as his clan’s new name (Saionji), later became the famous Golden Pavilion.
Taken by me in July 2023
Indeed Kintsune’s contribution to Japanese culture and history, dubious as it may be, can be felt even today.
The Hyakunin Isshu 
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