Karuta: Sports or Culture?
The silence in the wide
tatami room is absolute. About two dozen people, kneeling in the
formal seiza style, face each other in pairs here and there on the
mats. To us observers, they may as well be statues. Nothing moves.
Each is dressed in an elegant kimono, ranging from the muted darker
tones of those worn by the elderly ladies, to the bright patterns and
long sleeves worn by their daughters, both set off by the grey and
black hakama worn by all the men. Everybody is staring intently down
at the floor, where a number of small white cards are laid out in
neat rows between each couple. Everything is frozen in place.
An elderly gentleman, also attired in formal
hakama, sits on a cushion at the head of the room, surveying this
scene. He holds more of the cards in his outstretched hand. Suddenly
he begins to chant ...
Waga koromode ni
...
His voice is old and harsh, and he strains to
produce the higher pitch at the end of each line.
Yuki wa furi tsutsu
...
The last syllable trails off into silence. Still
nothing moves.
Naniwa gata
...
And then, just on the sound of that
'ga', the entire
room explodes in a sudden eruption of movement and noise. The old man
is perhaps still chanting, but it is impossible to make out what he
is saying above the sudden chaos. Long kimono sleeves are waving
about ... Cards have been tossed into the air, some to land far over
on the other side of the room. Everybody is talking at the top of
their voice ... People are moving around to retrieve the scattered
cards, holding them up in triumph ... The bustle of noisy activity
continues for about a minute, during which these former statues
gradually restore everything to its correct position, putting the
cards back into their neat rows, and tucking all the long kimono
sleeves back into place. The room becomes still again, and the
tableau is restored. All is silent once more. The cycle begins anew
...
Awade kono wo yo
...
What was in that chant that
it could cause such an eruption? Naniwa
gata ... 'The marsh at Naniwa ...' It is
of course, poetry. A line of a poem penned by the lady Ise just about
eleven hundred years ago. A love poem. Passed down through the
centuries both in writing and orally, it still lives today more than
a millennium after the day she created it. Everybody in this room
knows every syllable of it, and every syllable of each of the other
99 poems that will be chanted here today. For these poems are the
famous 'Hyaku-nin Isshu', One Hundred Poems from One Hundred Poets, and this is a
competition being held to determine the best player of the game known
as karuta. We are watching a sports event. But surely ... old poetry
... elegant kimono ... Shouldn't we describe this rather as a
cultural event? Perhaps it is really something of both.
In order to understand what
karuta is, it is necessary to look at three aspects of the game,
three things which 'came together' over the years to make up what we
know as karuta today.
The first of these, and most fundamental to the
game, is the poetry collection on which it is based. The Japanese
people seem always to have been enamoured of making up 'sets' or
'series' of things, whether it be a group of three 'must-see'
sightseeing locations, forty-seven famous samurai warriors,
fifty-three post stations along a highway, or, as in this case, a
collection of one hundred poems. The poems in this Hyakunin Isshu
collection are not the haiku type so common these days (with their
5-7-5 rhythm), but the older form known as waka (or tanka), which are longer, and
have a 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm. Recent manuscript discoveries seem to
confirm what historians have generally accepted for centuries, that
the collection was created by the nobleman Fujiwara no Teika in about
1235, using poems that spanned the time from the seventh century up
to his own day. He is known to have edited many books of poetry, and
to have made other collections similar to this one. Whether he was
indeed asked to make a selection of poems to decorate fusuma panels,
as some claim, or whether he needed no particular reason to make the
collection, is a matter of dispute among scholars, but what is beyond
dispute is the extremely high quality of the selection. Not the
quality of the poems themselves, which vary quite widely, but the
quality of the selection. Literally hundreds of books have been
written trying to explain why this particular hundred were chosen.
One writer shows that the poems can be placed into exactly balanced
groups based on similar themes, another shows how they can all be
placed into a 10x10 grid, each one having links to all the others
around it, yet another demonstrates that they were chosen to
represent scenes from the famous Genji Monogatari ... It is a most
intriguing literary mystery.
The second 'leg' of the karuta tripod can be
traced back to the Heian era, to some of the games then fashionable
among the nobility. From what we know of the daily life of this
class, many of their days must have been extremely long and dreary
indeed, sitting in prescribed locations, in prescribed clothing, and
able to speak only to certain people. Perhaps as a result of this
enforced idleness, certain games came into fashion, games which of
necessity utilized many of the things with which these people were
surrounded - poetry, calligraphy, literature, etc. One very popular
game was the kai-awase, or 'shell matching' game. On the inner surface of the two
halves of a clam or oyster shell would be painted matching scenes,
perhaps flora and fauna, or perhaps something with literary
allusions. Large sets made up of many such shells would be spread out
face down on the floor to test everyone's ability to match them up,
the same way that children still do today with playing cards. A
number of astonishingly delicate and beautiful sets of these shells
have come down to us today, including some that use written poetry,
rather than illustrations, and it is in these that we can best see
the historical link to the karuta.
The word karuta is spelled
in Japanese usually by using the katakana syllabary, thus indicating
that the word is of foreign origin. The language from which it came
is Portuguese, and it is presumed that European playing cards, the
third leg of our tripod, were first introduced into Japan by these
nanban-jin, from
about the mid-sixteenth century. Most of our knowledge of the early
days of karuta comes not from actual surviving cards themselves, but
from images of contemporary life painted on screens, the byobu-e. On
quite a number of these screens people can be seen playing with
cards, of which various types were apparently popular. It seems that
at first, playing with these cards had been something that the bushi
class had taken up, but within half a century, the games had spread
to women and children, and to all social levels of society.
The ten-sho cards, coming in sets of
72, and pretty much identical to the Portuguese cards, were the
earliest popular type, but these were replaced by the un-sun karuta,
in a completely Japanese style. These too rather quickly evolved into
something else, this being the still-famous hanafuda, the flower cards.
These transformations did not come about because people were
particularly bored with each game, but rather as a consequence of
government edicts against gambling. This was during the early days of
the Edo bakufu, when the government was attempting to regulate
practically every aspect of life for people at all levels of society.
Gambling was of course considered a highly anti-social activity, and
innumerable decrees against it were issued. But just as with pachinko
and mah-jongg in our own day, official government disapproval of a
game did not always seem to have much effect. It seems that as the
pressures against each type of game became too intense, the people
simply switched to a new, at first completely innocuous, form of
playing with cards.
With many types of cards thus common in society,
it is no surprise to find that some of the old Heian era games also
made the transition to this new form. The former kai-awase using
shells now became the e-awase, a picture matching game
using cards. These cards were produced in sets of matching pairs
containing illustrations of almost anything under the sun. Of course
the old literary themes were well represented, but even such plebeian
things as vegetables, household objects, or craftsmen at work all
served as subjects. These cards were at first all hand painted
individually, but towards the middle of the Edo era, as wood-block
printmaking became more refined, cards were mass-produced with this
technique. One theme that remained ever-popular was poetry, and it is
here that the three parts of our story now come together, and we see
the origin of the Hyakunin Isshu karuta.
Nobody can put any but the roughest date to this
event, or even hazard a guess as to who was responsible, but in
retrospect at least, it seems like a fairly inevitable development.
During those years that various forms of playing cards had been
becoming popular, the Hyaku-nin Isshu had itself developed into an
important aspect of Japanese life. Whether due to Teika's skill in
selection, or just by serendipity, knowledge of this particular set
of poems had become expected of all those who considered themselves
to be 'cultured' people, and just as they still are today, they were
then a standard theme for calligraphy practice. One common form of
this practice was to write the entire set of poems (sometimes with
accompanying illustrations) onto a single large sheet of paper, which
would then be folded many times to bring it down into a manageable
size. It needs no large leap of imagination to imagine this sheet
then being cut up into individual poems, and then even further, for
the poems themselves to be cut into two parts, to create a version of
the old matching game. The idea obviously caught on, and many such
cards were soon available, some hand-drawn, others being printed from
woodblocks. The Hyakunin Isshu karuta had been born.
This new form of karuta
turned out to have an influence in society far greater than one would
expect from a simple game. It spread knowledge of the Hyakunin Isshu
poetry to a far wider audience than it had previously enjoyed. Many
of the locations mentioned in the poems, and the amorous situations
or poetic phrases, passed into the general language of the day, and
many of these allusions are still current, even if their origin is
generally unrecognized. The popularity of the game grew over the
years, until by the Meiji era, a set of cards was to be found in
nearly every home, and learning the poetry was now a standard part of
the education of every person. An immense number of books on the
subject was published, giving not only the poems themselves and their
background, but descriptions of techniques for playing the game; how
to best memorize the poems; how to properly lay out the cards for
quickest recovery; how to win! The sport was getting serious.
At this point it is perhaps best to look at how
the game is actually played. The basic equipment for all versions is
a set of 200 small (74x52mm) pasteboard cards. 100 of these, the set
held by the chanter, contain the complete poems, one to a card, along
with a small illustration purporting to be the corresponding poet.
(These are of course all completely imaginary portraits, and now
follow standard patterns laid down during the centuries.) The other
100 cards, the tori fuda, contain no illustration, but only poetry - and only the
final phrase of the poem (the 7-7 portion). The players must thus
rely on their memory of the complete poems to direct them to the card
which matches the poem being chanted at any particular moment.
The
standard form of the game, which we got a glimpse of earlier, is
known as kyogi
(competition) karuta. The set of 100 tori fuda cards is split 50-50
between two players (or 25 each among four people). Before play
starts, each player spreads his cards out on the tatami face-up in
front of him, using any one of a number of methods. This is a point
of great importance to serious players, as not only must one be able
to retrieve one's own cards as quickly as possible, but one must also
attempt to 'steal' cards from the other side. With your own cards
placed 'just so' in your own special way, it is not necessary to even
look down when it comes time to find them, and you can thus
concentrate on catching cards from your opponent. The basic idea of
course, is to end up with the most cards at the end of the game. When
all is in place, the chanting of the poems begins. As everybody's
knowledge of the poetry is so complete, it is never necessary for the
reader to reach the last stanza of the poem before the players
recognize which card to retrieve, but there are some interesting
quirks. In seven of the poems, the first syllable is unique to the
set of one hundred, and thus enough to identify the poem. The
explosion of activity comes as soon as the first sound is out of the
reader's mouth. But for all the rest of the poems, the players must
wait until the first unique syllable is spoken, and in some cases,
this may be as far into the poem as the sixth syllable. In the
example we saw earlier, 'Naniwa gata ...', the players had to wait
until the 'ga' was spoken to distinguish the poem from a similar one
which starts 'Naniwa eno ...' But of course, if that 'other' poem has
already been taken, one need not wait that long, so it is always
necessary to keep mental track of which cards have been removed from
play.
When we met the elderly gentleman reading the
poems a few pages back, the first two lines we heard were actually
the 'left-over' final two seven-syllable lines of the previous poem.
He had paused mid-way through reading it, after the explosion of
activity, to give time for order to be restored to the room. He
always starts anew with these two lines, to provide a transition to
the next poem, letting the final syllable hang in the air ...
During a kyogi karuta match, there is certainly no
time during play to reach down leisurely to actually pick up the
cards. At the instant the chanted poem is recognized, the two
contestants both dive for the corresponding card, each trying to be
the first to get a finger on it, and flick it off to one side. The
movement is far faster than the eye of the observer can follow. The
action gets particularly tense towards the end of every game, when
the number of cards left in play is small, and it is then that the
player with the fastest reflexes will triumph. Top champions are thus
usually fairly young, still with good reaction times, but it is
fascinating to watch a competition involving quite elderly ladies.
They slowly fold themselves into place before their cards, stretch
lazily, chat a bit with their neighbours ... but once that poem is
recognized ... it is as though a snake has darted out from each
kimono sleeve!
Variations on the standard kyogi karuta include
chirashi tori,
in which the 100 cards are spread out randomly on the floor in front
of any number of players, each of whom then tries to collect more
than the others, and genpei gassen, where the cards are split 50-50
between two teams rather than two individuals. A relay version of
this is also played, with the members of each team playing in turn.
The form of the game used to introduce children to karuta is known as
bozu-meguri. The children, who may know nothing of the poetry yet,
play by using the illustrations found on the reader's set of 100
cards, winning or losing cards depending on the 'luck of the draw'.
As they get older, listening to their elders play 'real' karuta, they
gradually become familiar with the poems.
As for the physical makeup of the cards
themselves, although the form is fairly standardized now, that is a
fairly recent innovation. Cards were formerly made in many shapes and
sizes, and not only from pasteboard. Elegant sets were fashioned in
lacquered finishes, or drawn on slips of thin wood. Well-known
painters down the years have turned out sets of cards, perhaps the
most famous of which is the much-photographed set by Ogata Korin,
backed with fine gold foil, and of which reproduction sets sell for
as much as 1,100,000 yen. In the Edo era it was apparently common for
sets of cards to be produced by relatively upper-class people, as
they had both the time, and the elegant calligraphy skills that were
required. One drawback to this of course, was that cards produced in
such a way were quite difficult to read. This was especially so when
the tori fuda were written in complicated Chinese characters, as was
inevitably the case back in those times. It was in the mid-Meiji era
that a newspaper company had the idea of producing sets of cards
written using the cursive hiragana syllabary, which could be read
easily by anyone, even young children. To give an impetus to the sale
of their new cards, they began to organize large-scale competitions,
and it is here that we see the origin of today's nationally organized
groups and competitions. (This Meiji-era burst of popularity in
karuta saw the birth of another Japanese institution - the Nintendo
company, of video game fame, who started out as producers of karuta
and hanafuda, which they still make. Home entertainment has come a
long way in a hundred years ...)
It is also in those early newspaper competitions
that we find the beginning of the connection between karuta and the
New Year. Although most Japanese assume that karuta has been a New
Year's custom for centuries, such an association in fact only dates
back to Meiji 37, to one of these large newspaper competitions. But
the association is now very strong, and playing karuta has become
part of the standard repertoire of New Year activities in most homes
around the country. The national competitions to select the karuta
'queen' and her male counterpart take place at this time of year, and
many TV news broadcasts in early January feature scenes of karuta
playing. To many Japanese now it's just not New Year without some
karuta action!
But strong as this association may be, the playing
of karuta is definitely not restricted to this season. In community
centres around the country, and in most Junior and Senior high
schools and colleges, one can find 'circles' devoted to studying and
practicing karuta. "It's important that children are exposed to this
tradition," a local teacher who guides one such group said. "No one
can really understand our history and language without a knowledge of
these poems." But when pressed as to whether children could really
understand the poetry, much of which is full of convoluted allusions
and archaic word play, he replied that the 'meaning' was not
important. It was enough that they simply get a general idea of the
image the poet was trying to convey. "More importantly, the 31
syllables of each poem must roll off the tongue smoothly, with no
hesitation. Even though these poems are well documented and written
down, we must think of them as an oral heritage, and each one of us
has a responsibility to pass them on to future generations."
From
the point of view of an English-speaking foreigner, one quite
striking thing about the Hyakunin Isshu tradition is the vastness of
the historical time span involved. The earliest poem in the series
was written by the Emperor Tenchi in the seventh century, some
1300-odd years ago, and this poem is still remembered by a very large
proportion of the population of these islands, more than fifty
generations later! And remembered not by scholars of ancient
literature, but by normal people - people who thus have a measuring
stick with which they can form in their minds an image of the long
history of their country. It is difficult to think of an equivalent
in Western literature. We have Greek plays from two thousand years
ago, but if you were to stop your man-on-the-street and ask for a few
quotations ... Perhaps the only things in the West that survive from
such a long time ago in anything like such a popular form, are
religious writings such as the bible. It makes an interesting
contrast: one society holding up a bible as a pillar of cultural
tradition, and the other choosing to remember instead, a collection
of love poetry!
What then would the Emperor Tenchi think of that
karuta competition we visited a few pages back? Would he be appalled
to see his poetic creation used as the basis for such a 'sporting'
activity, or perhaps he would rather be content that it still
survives, being studied, memorized and analyzed, more than 1300 years
later. And studied and analyzed it certainly is. In any local library
anywhere in the country, one will find an extensive shelf of books
devoted to Hyaku-nin Isshu and karuta playing, to which additions are
made regularly as new commentators add their theories and
elucidations of the subject. And in a development that would surely
surprise the old emperor and his 99 companions, Hyakunin Isshu has
gone international. The earliest complete translation of the series
into English was published as far back as 1892, and that early effort
has been followed by many more in the intervening years, in other
languages also. Hyaku-nin Isshu may have been born in Japan, and is
certainly Japanese culture, but it is no longer only Japanese.
Although it seems rather doubtful that the Japanese sport of karuta
will one day follow Japanese judo to reach the Olympic Games, it is
on its way to becoming part of the general culture of mankind.
Now, if everybody is ready ...
Akinota no kariho no
...
David Bull, 1996
