Nintendo: More than Just Mario and Luigi

Japanese Lesson #10:

1) Karuta - "card game," derived from the Portuguese word "carta." Incidentally, "Carta" is the Greek word for card as well. Gotta love the Europeans and their amagalm of languages.
2) Waka - traditional Japanese poems, predominantly dating from the Heian period.
3) Kotowaza - Japanese idioms

My Japanese reading teacher is one of my favorites, next to conversation and the crazy grammar teacher. Instead of having class on Friday, which was the last day before vacation, she decided to forgo the lesson and teach us karuta for the New Year. In particular "uta-garuta" and "iroha-karuta." (There are tons of karuta, but two are especially played in the New Year.) We still had our weekly vocabulary quiz - I totally forgot about it, but I knew the words regardless. I got lucky this week.


The first is "uta-garuta." There are two sets of card in this deck, amounting to 200 cards. One one set of 100, there are "waka," with a picture of the composer underneath. The other set has the last two lines of the waka printed on it. You scatter the cards (the ones with the last two lines of the poem printed), face-up, and then a person takes the waka card and reads the poem aloud. The first person to get the matching two-lines card from the scattered pile wins the round. Whoever has the most cards after reading out all 100 wins the whole game. There are actually professional uta-garuta competitions that can get quite nasty; even from hearing the first syllable of the waka, professionals can grab the card from the pile of two-line cards. Even towards the end, most of us were competing with one another when we both saw the card at the same time.

You can play another game with the same deck, using the cards with the waka and the illustration on it. Get 4 people and arrange the cards into 4 stacks, facedown. Draw a card - if its a male, draw another; bald man, lose your turn. Draw a female, and you take all the cards that the person before you has. Play until all the cards are drawn; whoever has the most cards, wins. This one can get quite interesting, since it is all due to chance, rather than skill.


Iroha-karuta uses kotowaza for its phrases. It's played the exact same way as uta-garuta. Each card that is spilled out face up has one hiragana character, which corresponds to a kotowaza that begins with that same character, and has a picture that expresses the meaning of the idiom. Unlike uta-garuta which is probably a really old game, iroha-karuta dates from the Edo period, which is around the 15th century.

Little bit of trivia: who usually makes the karuta decks, at least the uta-garuta sets?

Nintendo.

Nintendo is actually much older than people in the States think, and is not just known for Mario and Luigi. Nintendo dates back to the Meiji period (19th century) and mostly started making the card games. I had known that but totally forgot about it; so I did a double take when my teacher said that she got these from Nintendo.

Nintendo should make a video game of the karuta. Play against the computer. Since the DS Lite has a little stylus, you can definitely pick the cards from the deck with the phrases on it. Or since DS has infrared, play with other people.