The New Year is here already. If you were one of the three-or-so JETs or other foreign residents that stayed in Oita as the globe invested in new calendars, perhaps you took a little time to celebrate shogatsu in style and play the traditional Japanese game of Karuta.

Karuta (typically written in katana as カルタ, but can also be written as 歌留多, or 加留多, or 骨牌… you gotta love this language) originates from the Portuguese word carta, which means card, as in playing cards. The game is simple. Each card in a Karuta deck has a poem, proverb, or saying written on it. The cards are then spread, poem face up, over a flat surface, preferably a table, floor, or whale rug. One person who has all the sayings written on some master sheet reads them off one by one, at random. The first person to locate and snatch up the card with the same saying keeps the card. The person with the most cards after the table has been cleared is the winner. Sounds simple, boring, and trivial? I forgot to mention there tends to be alcohol involved. And you can always feel free to socialize with your friends as you play. Still bored? Have another drink, killjoy.

There are all sorts of minor variations. In the most classic version of the game, only the last half of the poem is written on the card. The reader reads the first half of the poem and everyone scrambles to locate the corresponding card. Grizzled experts can identify the correct second half of a poem after hearing only a few syllables. Sometimes there is a picture on the opposite side of the card coupled with the first character of the poem (as in the version shown in にほんごであそぼ, a delightful children’s program, full of famous quotes, children’s rhymes, and Konishiki, on every morning at 8:00 and afternoon at 5:00 on NHK Educational Television.) There are all sorts of variations.

The traditional set of poems used in playing Karuta is the famous and ancient Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首, literally One Hundred People, One Poem), a collection of one hundred waka, each composed by a different famous Japanese poet of old, including emperors, priests, statesmen, and court ladies. Fujiwara Teika, the renowned poet and scholar, is said to have compiled the Hyakunin Isshu in the early Kamakura period. Traditionally, all the poems are in classical Japanese and wouldn’t make sense without a dictionary, a bottle of aspirin, and some time, but there are of course translations in modern Japanese as well as high school study books about the originals poem that provide nice, simple explanations. Book stories typically carry all sorts of Karuta, from the haiku of Basho to famous contemporary quotes.

Karuta can be easily played in the comfort in your own home, with the comfort of your own friends. You can use two decks of playing cards (the reader simply calls out “Jack of Spades,” “Eight of Diamones,” etc.), or you can make your own using famous song lyrics, movie quotes, and/or dirty limericks. Feel free to embellish the rules as you see fit. And don’t forget the drinks.

Originally appeared in The Tombo times, Dec/Jan ‘04.