Karuta: When Medieval Poetry Becomes a 21st-Century Japanese Sport
Masters of Reviving Tradition
In the gymnasium of a high school in Saitama, the silence is so dense that you can hear nothing but the breathing of the players. Twenty teenagers in uniforms sit on tatami in seiza position, hands resting neatly on their knees, eyes locked on the cards. Between them, perfectly aligned in the middle, lie fifty torifuda — small white rectangles inscribed in hiragana with the final two lines of tanka poems written a thousand years ago. At the far end of the room, the reciter lifts his head and begins his chant: “Aki no ta no…” — “In the autumn fields…”. These are the opening syllables of a poem by Emperor Tenji from the 7th century. In an instant, the tension detonates: hands shoot forward with a force that seems out of place in such a serene scene. Cards glide across the mats like thin plastic petals, one gets knocked out of bounds, someone else triumphantly “sends” their own card to an opponent. To the side, someone finishes a bottle of Pocari Sweat, someone else adjusts the sleeve of their school uniform. This is the 21st century. Smartphones wait in backpacks, yet here on the tatami, a sports match of medieval poetry unfolds.
To understand what’s happening, we must return to a time when Japan was a land of palace ceremonies, silk calligraphy, and intimate letters secretly exchanged between lovers at the imperial court of Heian-kyō. Hyakunin Isshu — 百人一首 (“one hundred people, one poem each”) — is an anthology compiled by Fujiwara no Teika around 1235. One hundred tanka poems, and within them an entire universe: dew on a kimono sleeve, the crimson of maple leaves reflected in the Tatsuta River, the sorrow of unfulfilled love, the fleeting nature of youth, solitude along a mountain path. Over the centuries, they became a foundation of Japanese language and culture.
And it is precisely on the border between the ancient and the modern that the phenomenon of karuta is born. Even Nintendo’s story began with producing karuta cards — before they made video games, they made cards for this very game, and they still do today. And that’s the essence of it: thousand-year-old poems, medieval printing techniques, and the Portuguese word carta meet today on tatami mats in school gyms, in mobile apps, and in anime like Chihayafuru, streamed on smartphones. Japan shows that tradition doesn’t need to be preserved behind glass like a museum artifact — you only need to draw from it sincerely and actively. Teenagers who voluntarily memorize hundreds of medieval poems and “train” them after class? A national sport, broadcast by the country’s largest TV networks, based on poetry written a thousand years ago? Anime, apps, and games revolving around literature from before the age of samurai? If there is one thing worth learning from the Japanese, it’s this — how to cultivate tradition so that it not only endures but truly lives. In today’s article, let us find out — how do they manage it?
In a Japanese High School, 2025
The gym smells of old varnish and tatami. Fluorescent lights buzz softly, and outside the windows, a fine October drizzle falls — as it often does in Kantō. Ten teenagers in tracksuits bearing the school emblem kneel opposite one another. Someone finishes a bottle of Pocari Sweat, another adjusts a mask already slid beneath the chin — a reflex left over from the pandemic years. On the wall hangs a poster of Ōmi Jingū drawn in anime style, alongside the black-and-red logo of the club: かるた部 (Karuta-bu).
On the tatami lie rows of small, white cards. These are torifuda — “grabbing cards,” twenty-five per side. Between them runs the kūkan (空間) — a three-centimeter “corridor of air,” each row aligned as perfectly as a ruler’s edge. In the center sits the reciter — the yomite — the school’s English teacher, who chants entirely from memory. In his hand, he holds the yomifuda — “reading cards” with portraits of poets and the full text of the poems.
“Shokugyō an…” — he pauses abruptly. The students freeze, focused, silent. The teacher smiles. “Just kidding. But I see you’re all ready. Let’s start for real.”
First comes the jōgo — the warm-up poem, one not included in the hundred. It’s there just to help everyone catch the rhythm of the voice. Then silence again, like the tense pause before the starter pistol of a 100-meter dash.
- “A…” — someone’s hand is already tensing.
- “…ki no…” — and then an explosion: two hands launch at once, cards slide across the tatami like thin petals of plastic, and there’s a sharp hiss of air. Who will touch the right one first? A student from the blue team knocks a card out of the playing zone — allowed. With a muffled roar of triumph (hushed, because “silence in the room!”) he sends one of his own cards to the opponent — “sending.” He’s now one card closer to clearing his field.
“Aki no ta no…” — autumn rice fields;
“…kariho no io no” — the reaper’s hut;
“…toma o arami” — the sparse thatched roof.
This isn’t chaos; it’s choreography of memory. Everyone knows by heart the kimari-ji — the “decisive syllables.” Seven poems are identified by their very first sound (“mu,” “su,” or “se”), forty-two by two syllables, others only after three, four, or even five… When the reciter begins “chi…,” half the room freezes — there are three poems that start that way: Chihayaburu, Chigiriki na, Chigiri okishi. Whoever completes the second syllable in their mind first gets the card.
“Chihayaburu / kamiyo mo kikazu / Tatsutagawa…” — the boy in a T-shirt with “Chihaya” written on it (yes, from the anime Chihayafuru) waits for “kara-” and sweeps the card off the board in a flash. The teacher nods approvingly: good technique — a clean sweep on your own side is allowed, as long as you don’t touch an opponent’s card. The girl opposite him spreads her hands like wings over the cards — blocking with her gaze, rearranging the layout between turns (re-arrange is permitted), as though playing chess with space itself. Half a minute later comes “Hana no iro wa” — by the great poet Ono no Komachi. No one needs to hear the entire first line.
In the corner of the room sits a small Bluetooth speaker — the club’s warm-ups sometimes use the Karuta Chant or Wasuramoti apps, but during a match, the reading is always live. On the windowsill is a box from 大石天狗堂 (Ōishi Tengudō), the maker of official tournament cards. Beside it lies a stack of flashcards with kimari-ji, notebooks filled with handwritten calligraphy where someone is midway through copying out the entire hundred — just like the old-school study notebooks from Kinokuniya’s shelves. Phones are on airplane mode — no notifications to break the rhythm.
After fifteen minutes of standard memory warm-ups — card layouts internalized, “dead” karafuda memorized — the game accelerates. There’s no referee; just like in real tournaments, disputes are resolved among the players themselves, honorably (“how very Japanese!” a foreign observer might think). At the end, the winner sits with an empty half of the board. Sweat rolls down foreheads as if this were volleyball or a relay race. Someone jokes, “So, when are we going to Ōmi Jingū?” — half teasing, half serious. They snap a group photo. In it: young faces, sweaty hands, and a hundred medieval poets, alive within their memories.
And what exactly are these kids doing? Playing? Competing? Preserving culture? Reciting poetry?
Only the Japanese can so seamlessly transform tradition into modernity: the medieval tanka becomes, all at once, a social game, a competitive sport, and a ritual of memory for 21st-century students. This isn’t an exaggeration or a literary trick — there are countless karuta clubs across Japanese schools, and after several hugely successful manga and anime series about Hyakunin Isshu, there are even more of them.
But let’s slow down. Step by step.
What exactly have we just witnessed?
“Hyakunin Isshu”
To truly understand what karuta is, we must step back nearly eight hundred years, to the beginnings of the Kamakura period, and in spirit even further — into the golden age of the Heian court. For karuta, though today a game and, in its competitive form, a dynamic contest, grows out of something much older and far more profound: poetry that for centuries has shaped the very core of Japanese sensibility.
Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首) is the title of one of Japan’s most celebrated poetic anthologies. The name itself is simple yet strikingly precise:
- 百 (hyaku) — one hundred,
- 人 (nin) — people,
- 一 (i[chi]) — one,
- 首 (shu) — literally “head,” but in a poetic context meaning “poem” or “verse.”
百人一首, then, is “one hundred people, one poem each” — exactly what it is: a collection of one hundred poems written by one hundred different poets.
The form of every poem is uniform: each is a tanka (a type of waka), a short poem with a fixed meter of 5–7–5–7–7. Yet this selection of a hundred poems was anything but arbitrary — nor was it commissioned by imperial decree, as in the case of earlier official anthologies. Hyakunin Isshu is a representative anthology, a deeply personal selection by a master of words, not a collection assembled for the court.
Its compiler was Fujiwara no Teika (藤原定家, 1162–1241), a brilliant poet, calligrapher, scholar, and aesthete who, in the early 13th century, created this extraordinary set. Tradition has it that Teika gathered these poems to decorate the sliding doors (fusuma) of a villa in Ogura near Kyoto, the residence of his patron Utsunomiya Yoritsuna. Some theories, however, suggest that this commission was merely a pretext, and that the very idea of a “hundred” was Teika’s personal artistic experiment — an attempt to create a microcosm of language and emotion.
The anthology spans poems from as early as the 7th century up to Teika’s own time. Side by side stand the verses of emperors, court ladies, hermit monks, warriors, and aristocratic poets. Within them lie poetic landscapes of the four seasons, intimate confessions of love and parting, reflections on impermanence, pilgrimages, temple visits, and memories of childhood.
This is not a uniform collection — it is a chest overflowing with worlds. Here are miniatures suffused with melancholy, heartrending confessions, delicate observations of nature, and subtle allusions to literature and history. It is precisely this diversity, combined with the harmony of Teika’s selection, that allowed Hyakunin Isshu to endure through the centuries as something more than just a book of poems. For the Japanese, it became a distilled image of the Heian spirit and the birth of a sensibility that, centuries later, came to be called mono no aware — an awareness of the fragility of all things, the tender sorrow of impermanence, and the fleeting beauty of the moment that is destined to vanish.
Poetry That Still Breathes
Imagine this: more than eight hundred years have passed, and Japanese high school students recite these poems from memory, competing to recognize a verse from a single syllable. The words of poets who lived at the imperial court in Kyoto (Heian-kyō) a thousand years ago become the starting signal for a 21st-century gymnasium match.
Let us take a closer look at one of these poems — the very first in the collection (we “heard” it earlier in our opening narrative):
秋の田の
かりほの庵の
苫をあらみ
わが衣手は
露にぬれつつ
Aki no ta no / kariho no io no / toma o arami / waga koromode wa / tsuyu ni nuretsutsu
“In the autumn fields,
in the reaper’s hut,
through the sparse thatched roof,
the sleeves of my kimono
grow damp with drops of dew.”
Its author is Emperor Tenji (天智天皇, 626–671), one of the earliest poets in the anthology. The image is fleeting, simple, and yet universal: the chill of night, the dampness of dew, solitude amid the fields. In 21st-century Japan, the very same poem is a call to action — the reciter utters the opening syllables, “Aki no ta no…,” and the room erupts into motion.
It is precisely at this boundary between past and present that the phenomenon of karuta unfolds. Hyakunin Isshu is not merely a book of poems; it is a living cultural heritage that the Japanese have carried from scrolls and calligraphy onto tatami mats, transforming it into a game, a sport, and a ritual of memory. We are accustomed to thinking that poetry this old belongs in dense academic treatises written by university historians of literature. Not in Japan. Here, these poems are shouted by laughing teenagers ready for “battle.”
Poems of Hyakunin Isshu — Examples
***
花の色は／移りにけりな／いたづらに／わが身世にふる／ながめせしまに
Hana no iro wa / utsurinikeri na / itazura ni / waga mi yo ni furu / nagame seshi ma ni
“The colors of the flowers
have faded — in vain,
while I, lost in my gaze at the rain,
have passed away with this transient world.”
— Ono no Komachi
Komachi, a Heian-era poet and legendary beauty, weaves together the image of fading blossoms with the passing of her own youth. Nagame here is a kakekotoba — a poetic pivot word — meaning both “to gaze into the distance” and “to sink into wistful reverie.” In karuta, the initial “hana” is all that’s needed — and suddenly everyone hears the echo of a melancholy written over a thousand years ago.
***
ちはやぶる／神代も聞かず／竜田川／からくれなゐに／水くくるとは
Chihayaburu / kamiyo mo kikazu / Tatsutagawa / karakurenai ni / mizu kukuru to wa
“Even in the age of the gods,
no one had ever heard
that the Tatsuta River
could bind its flowing waters
into a weave of crimson maples.”
— Ariwara no Narihira
Here, the image is almost painterly: the Tatsuta River flows among maples, its waters catching their scarlet hues, as though becoming a woven fabric itself. The epithet chihayaburu is an archaic expression denoting divine power, long unused outside poetry (until it resurfaced thanks to the popular anime Chihayafuru, whose title comes from this very poem). In karuta, this is one of the fastest cards: the opening “chi” is recognized instantly, and players’ hands shoot forward like arrows.
***
来ぬ人を／松帆の浦の／夕なぎに／焼くや藻塩の／身もこがれつつ
Konu hito o / Matsuho no ura no / yūnagi ni / yaku ya moshio no / mi mo kogaretsutsu
“I wait for someone
who never comes —
on the shores of Matsuho,
in the evening’s stillness,
I burn like salt upon the fire.”
— Fujiwara no Teika
The poem brims with longing and the slow burning of the heart. The speaker waits endlessly for someone who does not arrive, and this waiting is likened to salt roasting in flames, burning away to its essence. In karuta, this is a moderately challenging poem: the opening “konu” has several similar-sounding counterparts, so everything depends on a fraction of a second. It is also the closing poem of the entire anthology, written by Fujiwara no Teika himself, giving it symbolic weight — as though the compiler has bound the collection together with his own sigh of yearning.
Philosophy of the Hundred: Memory, Ephemerality, Everyday Life
Hyakunin Isshu is not merely a poetry anthology — it is a microcosm of the Japanese imagination. These poems express the deep feeling of mono no aware — a subtle compassion for the world, a sensitivity to the fact that everything exists only for a moment before it passes away. The faded hues of Ono no Komachi’s flowers, Tenji Tennō’s damp sleeves, the purple waters of the Tatsuta River — each image is like a breath that is born and vanishes in the same instant. Ephemerality here is not a reason for despair but rather what sharpens the flavor of life: a moment is precious precisely because it cannot be held. In this sense, the hundred poems are an exercise in accepting impermanence — a collective meditation on the fact that beauty is always bound up with departure.
Yet Hyakunin Isshu is also an extraordinary training of attention. One hundred short tanka, each only 31 syllables long, compel poets to condense the world into its purest form. No superfluous words, no ornament — only the essence of experience. In this way, from seemingly small fragments — a drop of dew, a shaded path, the scent of wet grass — the fullness of life emerges. And when students in the 21st century recite these same lines, repeating them to the rhythm of kimari-ji, they participate in something greater than a game. It is not merely a sport — it is the mnemonics of a culture, encoded in the sounds and cadences of the language, in tones that have endured unbroken for thirteen centuries.
Perhaps most fascinating is how these poems move from intimacy to community. Many were originally composed as private love letters, exchanged in secret among courtiers of the Heian era. They were meant to be a whisper between two people, not a national heritage. And yet over the centuries they became a foundation of education, an element of identity, and today — the very content of karuta clubs in Japanese high schools. It is a remarkable journey: from a thin sheet of paper bearing an intimate confession to the thunder of cards striking tatami in a hall full of teenagers. Hyakunin Isshu has endured because it could change its function while preserving its emotional core. Poetry that was once a whisper has become a shared ritual of memory. And perhaps that is the most beautiful thing — an intimacy that has become collective, yet has lost none of its fragility.
Karuta — How Did Medieval Poetry Become a Sport?
Now that we know what Hyakunin Isshu is, it’s time to step down from the corridors of the imperial palace onto the tatami of 21st-century school gyms. For though the poems are a thousand years old, in Japan they live just as vividly today — only in a different form. Karuta is not only a game. It is a hybrid of culture, sport, and memory. The very name reveals its history: “karuta” (かるた) comes from the Portuguese carta, for it was the nanban-jin, the Portuguese merchants of the 16th century, who brought the first decks of cards to Japan. From there, it took a distinctly Japanese path: European cards quickly metamorphosed into local inventions, from tenshō karuta to the colorful unsun karuta, ultimately becoming the hanafuda still known today.
But the genesis of karuta rests on three intertwined “legs.” The first is, of course, the Hyakunin Isshu anthology — the hundred poems that supplied the content. The second is the parlor games of the classical Heian period (10th century), especially kai-awase, in which aristocrats matched shells painted inside with literary scenes. The third is European playing cards, which sparked a small visual revolution in Japan. In the Edo period, karuta began to be mass-printed using woodblock techniques, and poetry from the imperial chambers reached the thatched roofs — quite literally. Sets of cards appeared in homes, and newspapers organized New Year’s tournaments: this was the first time poetry was “gamified” on a large scale. Even Nintendo’s history begins with karuta — before they turned to video games, they produced hanafuda and karuta cards, and they still do so today.
Today, if you walk into any bookstore in Japan — in Tokyo, Osaka, or Hakodate — just head to the “children and education” section and you’ll see entire shelves of uta-karuta sets. The most famous manufacturer, Ōishi Tengudō (大石天狗堂) of Kyoto, creates cards that look as if they came straight from an artist’s brush, preserving a style straight out of the Edo period. The portraits of poets on the yomifuda are pop-culture icons, repeated for centuries according to a single model that every Japanese child recognizes. And herein lies the phenomenon: thousand-year-old poems, medieval printing techniques, and the Portuguese word carta meet in the 21st century on tatami, in a junior high gym in Saitama, where someone sips Pocari Sweat and adjusts a school uniform sleeve before the next bout.
How to Play — Rules of Karuta
Karuta is a fast game that demands reflexes, memory, and concentration, yet its basic rules can be grasped in a few simple steps. The game uses two sets of 100 cards each:
- Yomifuda (読み札) — cards bearing a poet’s portrait and the full text of the tanka. These are the cards from which the poems are read.
- Torifuda (取り札) — the “cards to be taken,” containing only the last two lines of the poem.
At the start, 50 torifuda are drawn at random from the full hundred. The remaining 50 are karafuda — “dead cards,” which will not appear in this particular match. Each player receives 25 cards and arranges them in three rows in front of them — this is their territory. A three-centimeter “corridor of air” (kuukan) is left between the players’ fields to separate the sides.
Before the game begins, there are 15 minutes to memorize the layout. During this time, players learn the position of every card, relying on spatial memory. In the final two minutes, they may practice hand movement — the so-called “hand run-through” over the cards — preparing the body for a lightning-fast reaction.
When the reciter (or a recording) begins to read a poem from the yomifuda, players listen for the kimari-ji — the decisive syllables by which one can identify the target card. In some cases a single opening syllable is enough; in others, two, three, or more are needed. This moment is crucial: whoever first touches the correct torifuda takes it. If the card lay on the opponent’s side, the winner may “send” one of their own cards across. The goal is to clear all the cards from your field faster than your rival.
There are also mistakes, called otetsuki:
- touching the wrong card,
- reaching for a card on the wrong side,
- reacting to a karafuda (a dead card),
- using both hands at once.
The penalties sting: for an error, your opponent “sends” you an additional card.
Though the official form, kyōgi karuta (競技かるた), is a one-on-one duel played under the rules of the All Japan Karuta Association, there are also variations. Genpei gassen is played in teams, while relay karuta introduces player substitutions during a match. For children, there are simplified games like bōzu-mekuri, where the cards are recognized by their illustrations rather than their poems. On Hokkaidō, a regional variant called shimo no ku karuta is popular, in which only the lower half of the poem is read — a system so confusing that switching to the northern version after playing on Honshū is notoriously difficult and slow.
Karuta as a Sport: Organization, Ranks, Tournaments, Heroes
Though it may seem puzzling to outsiders, kyōgi karuta in Japan is treated seriously — essentially as a competitive sport. Players are divided into classes according to the dan ranking system: from E (beginners), through D (1-dan), C (2-dan), and B (3-dan), up to the elite class A (4-dan and above). Advancement requires victories in official tournaments, and reaching the top level takes years of rigorous training. Class A competitors know all 100 poems of Hyakunin Isshu by heart and can often identify the correct card after a single syllable — sometimes in less than a second.
The most prestigious event in the calendar is the January tournament at Ōmi Jingū Shrine in Ōtsu (Shiga Prefecture). This is where the matches for the titles of Meijin (for men) and Queen (for women) are held. The atmosphere rivals that of the Wimbledon finals or Koshien — the legendary national high school baseball championship. Players wear formal hakama trousers, tatami mats are laid in perfect alignment, and the matches are broadcast live on major television channels. In July, the high school championships take place, and their level is so high that many future Meijins sharpened their skills there. It is a stage where heroes are born — where children raised on the anime Chihayafuru have a chance to become real karuta stars.
Training to become a professional player is demanding: one must memorize all 100 poems, practice lightning-fast reflexes, perfect hand precision, and build leg strength — since spending several hours in seiza position is a true test of the back and knees. Karuta is both a sport of the body and the mind: the strategy of card arrangement is just as important as reaction speed. One curious aspect is the absence of a referee: if a dispute arises, the players themselves must resolve it, which requires not only athletic skill but also integrity, a spirit of fair play, and self-discipline.
According to estimates by the All Japan Karuta Association, there are currently around 10,000–20,000 active players in Japan, with roughly 2,000 belonging to classes A and B. Hundreds of clubs operate in high schools and universities, and broadcasts of the Meijin and Queen matches can draw hundreds of thousands of viewers on television and online — the very best games reaching audiences of millions. Financially, however, karuta remains a “minor league” sport: prize money is modest compared to, for example, judo or baseball. But players gain something far more valuable than money: a place within a tradition that stretches back to the 13th century, and the chance to become modern-day guardians of collective memory.
A Renaissance in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Just a hundred years ago, karuta was primarily a New Year’s ritual. Since the Meiji era, Hyakunin Isshu card sets had appeared in nearly every household, and newspapers organized grand, broadcasted tournaments each New Year’s Day. Japan even coined a term, o-chirarashi (お散らし) — the family tradition of scattering cards across the tatami on January 1st, as grandparents recite verses, parents try to guess the cards, and children grab them amid laughter, often confusing the “dead” karafuda with active ones. To this day, in many households karuta remains a symbol of January, alongside kagami-mochi and kadomatsu decorations. Even if no one knows all hundred poems by heart, the sound of the opening syllables of these ancient verses has been part of the Japanese New Year for centuries — like an echo returning year after year.
The true renaissance of karuta, however, came through pop culture. In 2007, Yuki Suetsugu’s manga “Chihayafuru” was published, and it became a cultural catalyst. The story of high schooler Chihaya, who dreams of becoming the Queen of karuta, turned out to be surprisingly universal: rivalry, friendship, passion, tears, and the profound sense of connection with tradition. After its anime adaptation in 2011 and three live-action film releases between 2016 and 2018, hundreds of new karuta-bu (かるた部, karuta clubs) sprang up across Japanese schools. After the first season of the anime aired, the number of high school tournaments doubled, and during the High School Championships at Ōmi Jingū, the stands began to fill not just with families but with cheering fans holding banners for Chihaya.
The influence of Chihayafuru spread beyond Japan as well: the first karuta clubs appeared at universities in the United States, exhibition matches are held in Europe, and an active Reddit community now studies kimari-ji together.
The new millennium also brought digital tools that have transformed how karuta is learned. Mobile apps like “Wasuramoti” (Android), “Karuta Chant” (iOS/Android), and “Hyakushu Yomiage” (百首読み上げ, iOS) allow players to train reflexes and memory by simulating the recitation of yomifuda. Educational five-color card sets are also popular, with kimari-ji marked in different colors to make the first syllables easier to memorize. There are even online karuta platforms, like “Kyōgi Karuta Online”, where players can compete with opponents from around the globe. The Boston Nakamaro Karuta Club operates in the U.S., South Korea has established its own karuta federation, and Oceania now hosts its first local tournaments. This is especially fascinating because, outside Japan, entering the world of karuta often begins with… learning hiragana. Thus, a set of ancient tanka becomes a gateway into one of the pillars of the Japanese language.
Back in Japan, karuta is also making its way into schools, but now in a new dimension. Hyakunin Isshu is used in classical language classes as material for teaching grammar and rhetoric. Students study 掛詞 (kakekotoba) — multi-layered wordplays, like Ono no Komachi’s nagame mentioned earlier, and 縁語 (engo) — subtle semantic associations between motifs in poetry. In calligraphy lessons, they practice writing in hiragana by copying tanka onto washi paper. Poetry from eight centuries ago thus becomes part of living educational practice, and children who play karuta after school gain an advantage: their memory, speed, and “ear” for classical Japanese are sharper. In this way, karuta today fulfills multiple roles simultaneously — as a sport, entertainment, educational tool, and cultural bridge across the centuries.
“Sport or Culture?”
When we look into a gymnasium where a dozen high school students in the 21st century are playing karuta, it’s easy to assume it’s “just a sport.” They train reflexes, memorize card layouts, and compete for titles, points, and prestige. But if you listen closely to the words guiding their hands into motion, you’ll sense something far deeper: poetry written a thousand years ago. In karuta, sport and culture do not exist side by side — they interpenetrate, like two layers of the same experience. The game is a ritual of memory; competition becomes a form of reverence; victory depends not only on reflex but also on communing with the language that has shaped Japanese consciousness for centuries. This is not a dichotomy. It is a uniquely Japanese unity of body, word, and tradition.
Within this unity lies an extraordinary sense of community. The poems of Hyakunin Isshu were born as intimate letters: confessions of love, reflections on impermanence, records of fleeting joys and sorrows. Their authors lived in a completely different world — ceremonial, palatial, separated from today by a thousand years of technological progress. And yet, the very same words, unchanged, now live on tatami mats, in school gymnasiums, in mobile apps, and in anime streamed on smartphones. Poetry that was once a lover’s whisper has become a shared ritual of memory, a code of recognition, and a way of connecting generations. It is one of the few examples in the world where a centuries-old language exists not just in libraries but in the hands of teenagers, listening intently for the syllables of medieval verse.
And this is the paradox of Japan — though, in truth, it’s not a paradox at all. A technologically advanced nation where children are taught to play with poetry from before the samurai era — a country where tradition pulses in step with modernity instead of fossilizing in museums. Karuta is neither a relic nor a reconstruction. It is a living practice of preserving meaning, a bridge between a world a thousand years gone and the reality of the digital age. In a country of shinkansen, omnipresent drones, artificial intelligence, and neon-drenched metropolises, high school students recite the verses of Fujiwara no Teika and Ono no Komachi as though time itself has paused.
Japan teaches us that tradition doesn’t need to be preserved like an artifact locked in a display case — you need only draw from it actively and sincerely.
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"Strong Japanese Women"
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
Write us...
Ciechanów, Polska
dr.imyon@gmail.com
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