ＧＲＥＥＴＩＮＧ of December, 2008

The basic idea of any karuta game is to be able to quickly determine which card out of an array of cards is required and then to grab the card before it is grabbed by an opponent. There are various types of cards which can be used to play karuta. It is also possible to play this game using two standard decks of playing cards.

There are two kinds of cards used in karuta. One kind is yomifuda (読札) or "reading cards", and the other is torifuda (取り札) or "grabbing cards." As they were denoted, the words in the yomifuda are read and players will have to find its associated torifuda before anybody else does.

The two types of karuta cards that are most often seen are the "uta-garuta" and "iroha-garuta".

In "uta-garuta", players try to find the last two lines of a tanka given the first three lines. It is often possible to identify a poem by its first one or two syllables. The poems for this game are taken from the Hyakunin Isshu and are traditionally played on New Year's Day.

Anyone who can read hiragana can play "iroha-garuta" (いろはがるた). In this type, a typical torifuda features a drawing with a kana at one corner of the card. Its corresponding yomifuda features a proverb connected to the picture with the first syllable being the kana displayed on the torifuda.

Karuta is often played by children at elementary school and junior high-school level during class, as an educational exercise. Although several kinds of Karuta games are described below, in reality any kind of information that can be represented in card form can be used - including shapes, colours, words in English, small pictures and the like.

Waka (和歌) or Yamato uta is a genre of Japanese poetry. Waka literally means Japanese poem in Japanese. The word was originally coined during the Heian period to differentiate native poetry from the kanshi (漢詩 "Chinese poems") that were also familiar to all educated Japanese people.

For this reason, the word waka originally encompassed a number of differing styles. The main two are tanka (短歌, lit. "short poem") and chōka (長歌, lit. "long poem"), but there are others: bussokusekika, sedōka (旋頭歌, lit. "whirling head poem") and katauta (片歌, lit. "poem fragment") . These last three forms, however, fell into disuse at the beginning of the Heian period, and chōka vanished soon afterwards. Thus, the term waka came in time to simply imply the one sub-form, tanka.

Japanese poet and critic Masaoka Shiki created the term tanka in the early twentieth century for his statement that waka should be renewed and modernized. Until then, poems of this nature had been referred to as waka or simply uta ("song, poem"). Haiku is also a term of his invention, used for his revision of the old hokku form, with the same idea. For economy of thought, we will use here the term tanka for further description.

Traditionally waka in general has had no concept of rhyme (indeed, certain arrangements of rhymes, even accidental, were considered dire faults in a poem), or even of line. Instead of lines, waka has the unit (連) and the phrase (句). (Units or phrases are often turned into lines when poetry is translated or transliterated into Western languages, however.)