Hyakunin Isshu Gave Karuta Its Hundred Poems

A hundred poems. A hundred poets. One editor, working in the 1230s, who chose exactly one poem from each of them for the hyakunin isshu. That is the whole idea behind the collection, and it is one of the most durable ideas in Japanese literature.

The anthology began as decoration for a villa near Kyoto, written out by hand on coloured paper for sliding doors. Eight centuries later, the same hundred poems of the hyakunin isshu are printed on cards, played at New Year, and fought over in a national championship every January. Few books have travelled so far from their first purpose and still kept every word intact.

This article follows the hyakunin isshu from that villa to the card table. It looks at who chose them, who wrote them, what a waka actually is, and how a set of verses for a house became the most famous card game in Japan.

What the hyakunin isshu actually is

The name is the whole description. Hyakunin isshu means one hundred people, one poem each. The hyakunin isshu holds one hundred waka poems, each by a different poet, and the most famous version was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika, who lived from 1162 to 1241, while he lived in the Ogura district of Kyoto. Its full name is the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, after the mountain beside the villa where the poems were first written out.

Teika himself seems to have called the set Hyakunin-shuka, which means one hundred poets, excellent poetry. The name that stuck was the plainer one, and the mountain was added to the front because other collections also gathered a hundred poems by a hundred poets. When people say hyakunin isshu today without any other context, they almost always mean Teika's set, but the Ogura prefix is what marks it out from the rest.

It is worth pausing on how strange the idea is. An anthology usually gathers the best work of a period, or the best work of a single poet, or poems on a single theme. Teika's rule for the hyakunin isshu was different and much stricter. One poet, one poem, no exceptions, and no second chances for a favourite. The rule is what gives the hyakunin isshu its shape. Every poet in it stands on a single verse, and every verse has to carry the whole weight of its author's reputation.

The hyakunin isshu is now the best known anthology of classical Japanese poetry, and it holds that place even though Teika was better known in his own lifetime for other work. He had already helped compile the Shin Kokin Wakashu, one of the great imperial anthologies, and in 1200 he prepared another hundred poem set for the retired Emperor Go-Toba, called the Shoji Hyakushu. The hyakunin isshu was a smaller job, almost a favour, and they became the work he is most remembered for. That is a pattern worth noticing. The things that last are not always the things their makers thought were important.

A villa on Mount Ogura and a set of sliding doors

The story of how the collection came to be survives because Teika kept a diary. In his Meigetsuki, the record of the clear moon, which he kept from 1180 to 1235, he wrote that his son Tameie asked him to arrange the hyakunin isshu for Tameie's father in law, Utsunomiya Yoritsuna, who was furnishing a residence near Mount Ogura. Teika produced the calligraphy poem sheets, known as shikishi, to decorate the screens of the house. The poems were first a decoration for a home, and only later a book.

Mount Ogura rises in the Saga district of Kyoto, on the western edge of the city near Arashiyama, and Yoritsuna's villa stood in its shadow. The diary entry records the work in 1235, and the hyakunin isshu is generally dated to the mid 1230s, which is the date this article uses. Teika wrote in his diary that the request was a burden and that he took up the brush reluctantly, which makes the result more human rather than less. A man who did not much want the job still chose with care, and the care shows.

The screens themselves no longer exist. What survives is the selection, and the calligraphy used in modern editions comes from the book form of the collection published in 1680, when printed books were first becoming a real industry in Japan. That gap of more than four centuries is part of the story. The hyakunin isshu was not published in Teika's lifetime in anything like the form we know it. It was copied, recopied, memorised, and passed along by hand before it ever reached a printing press, and it reached the press because people had already decided it was worth keeping.

One poem from each of one hundred poets

The range of the hyakunin isshu is its real achievement. The first poem is attributed to Emperor Tenji, who reigned from 661 to 672, and the hundredth to the retired Emperor Juntoku, who reigned from 1210 to 1221. Between them lie roughly five and a half centuries, from the seventh century to Teika's own day, and the poets of the hyakunin isshu come from every corner of court life. There are emperors and empresses, priests and nuns, high ministers and low ranking officials, and court ladies whose names survive only because of the poems Teika chose.

The list reads like a roll call of classical Japanese literature. Empress Jito, whose poem about white robes drying on Mount Kagu is the second in the set. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the great poet of the Man'yoshu, the oldest surviving anthology. Ono no Komachi, the most famous woman poet of the Heian period, whose verses on love and ageing are still quoted. Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shonagon, who wrote The Pillow Book, both appear, which means the two most celebrated women writers of the age sit side by side in a collection made for a villa wall. The priest Saigyo, the great wanderer poet, is there too, and so is Ariwara no Narihira, the elegant courtier whose poem beginning with the word chihayaburu would one day give a manga its title.

Teika included himself as well. His own poem is number 97, and the retired Emperor Go-Toba, his patron, is number 99. Including himself was not vanity so much as honesty. He was one of the hundred, and the rule was one poem each, so he took his single place in the line like everyone else. I find that restraint admirable. An editor with the power to choose a hundred poems could easily have given himself more room, and he did not.

Most of the poems in the hyakunin isshu were drawn from earlier anthologies, above all the imperial collections such as the Kokin Wakashu and the Shin Kokin Wakashu, and Teika arranged them roughly in the order the poets lived. The order is not a strict timeline, and scholars still argue about individual choices, but the general drift is chronological, from the seventh century forward to the thirteenth. Reading the hyakunin isshu in order is therefore a little like walking forward through time, one voice at a time, with each poet given exactly the same space as the last.

What a waka is

Every poem in the hyakunin isshu is a waka, also called a tanka. The form is strict and short. Five lines in a pattern of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables, thirty one syllables in all, and every poem in the hyakunin isshu follows it. There is no room for a story, and there is barely room for a scene. A waka is a single moment held still: dew on a sleeve, moonlight on a river, maple leaves waiting for a royal visit that may never come.

Each waka in the hyakunin isshu divides naturally into two parts. The first three lines, the kami no ku or upper phrase, set the scene. The last two lines, the shimo no ku or lower phrase, turn it, answer it, or deepen it. That split is not a detail for scholars. It is the hinge on which the whole card game turns, because the reading cards carry the full poem while the grabbing cards carry only the lower phrase. A player hears the upper phrase and reaches for the lower one, which means the game is built directly into the shape of the verse.

The poems are written in classical Japanese, which differs substantially from the modern language, so even native speakers usually learn them as sounds and shapes before they understand every word. The subjects are the classic subjects of the court: the seasons, love, parting, travel, the moon, cherry blossom, and autumn leaves. The first poem in the hyakunin isshu is a good example. Attributed to Emperor Tenji, it describes a rough hut in an autumn field, where the poet's sleeves are wet with dew. In translation it runs: "In autumn paddies under the temporary dwelling made of rushes, my sleeves are wet with the dew." Nothing happens in the poem, and yet it has opened the hyakunin isshu for eight centuries, because the image is exact and the feeling behind it is plain. A ruler imagines the hardship of farmers, and the poem lets a reader stand in the field for a moment.

Another poem in the set speaks directly to the mountain that gave the hyakunin isshu its name. Poem 26, by Fujiwara no Tadahira, looks at the maple leaves on Mount Ogura and asks them, if they had a heart, to keep their brilliant leaves until the ruler passes by once more. It is a courtly compliment dressed as a wish, and it ties the hyakunin isshu to its place in a way no preface could. The mountain is not just a name on the cover. It is in the poems, and one of the poems is about the mountain itself.

From wall decoration to printed book

The hyakunin isshu did not become famous all at once. For a long time the hyakunin isshu was a court text, copied by hand and studied by people who were learning to write poetry themselves. The change came with print. In the Edo period, the artist Hishikawa Moronobu, who lived from 1618 to 1694, provided woodblock portraits for each of the hundred poets, and in 1775 Katsukawa Shunsho designed prints for a full colour edition. The poems now had faces to go with them, and the faces made the book easier to love and easier to remember.

Teika's selection was also questioned over the centuries, and alternative hundred poem collections appeared, especially in the 1800s. That is normal for any famous list. Once a selection becomes a standard, other people want to make their own, and the arguments about who was left out are part of the fun. But no rival set displaced Teika's. The hyakunin isshu he presented in the 1230s was the first of its kind, and it remains the standard against which the others are measured.

What kept it in place was not authority alone. A list survives when people keep using it, and people kept using the hyakunin isshu because it was short enough to memorise, varied enough to stay interesting, and beautiful enough to repay the effort. A longer anthology would have been a reference work. A hundred poems is a companion, and companions get carried around.

How the poems became cards

The step from book to card game took about four centuries, and it began at the top of society. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the first game was created for the monarchy using the hyakunin isshu, and it was given the name uta-garuta, or poetry cards. The word karuta itself comes from the Portuguese carta, meaning card, and it arrived in Japan with Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century. Japan took a foreign object and filled it with the hyakunin isshu, the most Japanese material it had, which is a pattern that runs through the whole history of the game.

The deck has two halves. The yomifuda are the reading cards, one hundred of them, each carrying a complete poem and a picture of its poet, and the reader keeps them. The torifuda are the grabbing cards, also one hundred, each carrying only the second half of a poem, the shimo no ku, and these are the cards the players reach for. The reader reads the first half aloud, and the players race to find the card with the second half. That is the whole game, and it is harder than it sounds, because the poems must be known well enough to recognise from a few syllables.

The game spread slowly downward through society. By the beginning of the eighteenth century uta-garuta was widely known, and in the 1800s it became popular among common people, played in homes when families met to celebrate the New Year. The family version is still the way most Japanese people meet the game. The cards come out after the shrine visit and the meal, the reader reads at a gentle pace, and nobody is keeping score in any serious way. For a closer look at the game itself, including the competitive rules and the famous trio of poems that begin with the sound chi, see karuta turns a hundred poems into Japan's fastest card game.

The New Year setting matters. During matsunouchi, the week when the pine decorations stay up at the gate, families gather and the old games come out, and karuta is one of them. A child who plays then learns, without studying, that poems have a shape and a rhythm, and that a verse written centuries ago can still decide who reaches a card first. The game carries the hyakunin isshu into homes that would never open a book of classical poetry, and it carries it as play rather than homework. I think that is the cleverest thing about the whole tradition. The poems survive because they are fun to handle, not because anyone ordered them to be remembered.

The championship at Omi Shrine

Every January, the best competitive players in Japan gather at Omi Shrine, or Omi Jingu, in Otsu, in Shiga Prefecture. The shrine enshrines Emperor Tenji, the author of the first poem in the hyakunin isshu, which makes it a fitting home for the game. The title matches are played in the hall beside the shrine, and they decide the two great titles of the sport. The men's champion is awarded the title of Meijin, a title given since 1955, and the women's champion is awarded the title of Queen, given since 1957.

The format is simple to describe and hard to survive. A challenger who has won through the qualifying rounds faces the reigning champion, and the two play a series of matches until one of them has won the title. The matches are played in silence, broken only by the reader's voice, and a single mistake, touching the wrong card at the wrong moment, can hand a card to the opponent. The players kneel on tatami, the cards lie in three rows before them, and the whole contest turns on hearing a syllable and moving before the other player does.

The shrine connection gives the hyakunin isshu championship a weight that a sports hall could not. The first poem of the hyakunin isshu is about a field and a farmer's hardship, written by the same emperor the shrine honours, and the players compete in his presence, in a sense, every January. That sounds grand, and it is, but it is also practical. A shrine is a quiet place, and karuta needs quiet. The game is played in the gap between hearing and touching, and noise would ruin it.

A separate national championship for high school students is held every July, also at Omi Shrine, and it is the tournament dramatised in the manga that brought the game to a new generation. The high school event is often called the karuta Koshien, after the famous high school baseball tournament, and the comparison is fair. Both are national school championships with long histories, devoted followings, and finals that people remember for years. The difference is that the karuta championship is played in silence, with poems instead of pitches.

The Chihayafuru effect

For most of its history, the hyakunin isshu was something Japanese people met at school or at New Year and then put aside. That changed with a manga. Chihayafuru, written and illustrated by Yuki Suetsugu, was serialised in Kodansha's Be Love magazine from December 2007 to August 2022, collected in fifty volumes, and it has more than twenty seven million copies in circulation. It follows a high school girl, Chihaya Ayase, who takes up the card game of the hyakunin isshu after a classmate introduces her to it, and it treats the sport with the seriousness of any other sports story: training, rivals, injuries, and the long road to the national championship at Omi Shrine.

The title comes from poem 17 in the hyakunin isshu, by Ariwara no Narihira, which begins with the word chihayaburu. It is one of three poems in the hyakunin isshu that begin with the sound chi, and players must wait to hear more before they can tell the three apart. Naming a manga after a single word from a single poem is a bold choice, and it worked, because readers learned the poems alongside the heroine. A reader who follows Chihaya through fifty volumes has heard the names of the poems dozens of times, and some of those readers went on to join clubs and play for real.

The series was adapted into a televised anime in three seasons and three live action films released from 2016 to 2018, and it is credited with boosting the popularity of competitive karuta in Japan and abroad. The first international tournament was held in September 2012, with players from the United States, China, South Korea, New Zealand, and Thailand taking part, and in 2020 a new tournament, the Ogurayama Cup, was established to introduce fans to the joys of watching the game. A manga about a card game does not usually create a tournament, and that is a measure of how far the series reached.

There is a risk in a story like this, and it is worth stating plainly. A game can become a fashion and then fade when the fashion passes, and karuta has already seen its popularity fall and rise more than once. But the manga did something that a fashion alone cannot do. It showed the game from the inside, as a discipline, and it gave its readers a reason to learn the poems rather than only to watch the matches. A reader who memorises a poem because a character loves it has already joined the tradition of the hyakunin isshu, whether or not that reader ever kneels on a tatami mat. The poems do not care how you arrived. They only ask to be remembered.

Why a hundred poems still matter

The hyakunin isshu has survived for nearly eight centuries because it keeps changing its shape without changing its words. It began as calligraphy on sliding doors, became a printed book with portraits, became a deck of cards, and became a manga and an anime. Each new form brought new people to the hyakunin isshu, and each new group of readers found something in them that the previous group had missed. The poems are short enough to carry and strong enough to last, and that combination is rare.

There is also a quieter lesson in the way Teika worked. He was asked to decorate a house, and he answered with a survey of five centuries. He gave each poet one poem and no more, and he took one place for himself. The restraint is the achievement. A hundred single verses, chosen with care, have outlasted the villa they were written for, the screens they were written on, and the world that commissioned them. The house is gone. The poems are still being played with, every January, by people who were not born when the cards were printed.

If you ever get the chance to hear the poems read aloud, take it. You do not need to understand every word. Listen for the shape of the verse, the turn between the upper phrase and the lower one, and the silence that follows when a card is taken. That shape is the hyakunin isshu in miniature, and it has been enough for eight hundred years. A hundred poets, one poem each, and a game that still asks you to know them by heart.