5.00 USD

Karuta is the most popular among the many kinds of card games in Japan. It is played mostly on New Year's Day, but there are also national conventions for playing Karuta. Each card has a poem, or portion thereof, written on it with a total of 100 poems in the game.


On this card you can see Matsushita Zenni, Zen Nun who is wife of Hojo Tokiuji (son of Hojo Yasutoki, the third shikken (regent) of the Kamakura shogunate in Japan). "Tsurezuregusa" (Essays in Idleness) mentions at the paragraph number 184 an anecdote that she herself repaired the paper sliding door and taught the spirit of frugality to Tokiyori ( one of her sons), and this anecdote was also picked up by the textbook of Japanese-language in the Showa period.
The other card talks about the story in Japanese.



****** PLEASE NOTE THIS IS NOT THE ENTIRE CARD SET but rather some of the cards as it was an incomplete game so we broke them up into smaller sets.

2 cards in this set.

In this set, the game of karuta involves two types of cards.

1 "reading" card with drawings: yomifuda
1 "grabbing" card with words: torifuda

There are whole phrases of waka from the collection called Hyakunin Isshu written on the yomifuda. Only the lower phrase of the waka is written on the torifuda. When the reader reads out the waka on the yomifuda, the player quickly searches for the card among the torifuda to look for the phrase that matches the one that the reader is reading. This is the basic rule.

These are from the "昭和" "showa period" . The "showa" period is from 1926-1989 but these are from 1937.

These would be great for using in your art...mixed media, collage etc.
Each card measures 7 x 4.8 cm.

You get the cards you see in the pictures.

To see more vintage prints, please click here http://etsy.me/2clGtIa