Click on a thumbnail to view the E-fuda (picture card) alongside it's corresponding Yomi-fuda (reading card) and English translation below.

Other than the sayings, which have been translated, each Golion Yomi-fuda also has "hyaku ju oh goraion" (GoLion King of Beasts) written on the bottom right, and the final card for the character wo has a cute little phrase explaining to Japanese children that "wo no ji wa kotoba no ato ni tsuku" (The character wo is attached to the end of words)

Scroll down to learn more about Karuta

Karuta is a traditional Japanese card game. There are two forms of Karuta. One with poems, called Uta karuta. And one with short sayings or proverbs, called Iroha Karuta. The Golion Karuta cards are an Iroha Karuta set.

Iroha Karuta:
There are two sets of cards. The first set are called 'E-fuda' meaning picture cards, or 'Tori-fuda' meaning 'grabbing cards', because they have a picture on them, and the point of the game is you have to grab them. As well as the picture they also have a single kana (Japanese syllable) on them.

The other set, are called either 'Ji-fuda', meaning 'character cards'. Character referring to Kana (syllable scripts) or Kanji. Or they are called Yomi-fuda, meaning 'reading cards'. The Yomi-fuda have a saying or proverb on each card. Each one starts with one of the kana and matches one of the E-fuda.

To play, all the E-fuda are placed picture up on the ground. One person reads out the Yomi-fuda one by one, and the other people have to try and grab the matching card. The person with the most E-fuda at the end wins.

Iroha Karuta gets its name from a very old poem from the Heian period. Which is believed to have been written by a Buddhist monk named Kukai (774-835). It contains every different hiragana script (a form of japanese kana), used only once each throughout the poem. And the first three kana are 'i' 'ro' 'ha'. Which is where the poem got its name.

The game Iroha Karuta was named after the poem, because, traditionally that poem was used for the order of kana. And so Iroha, had the same meaning as 'ABC' does in english. This ordering isn't used anymore. As they are now grouped in order according to sound groups. But the Iroha order is still used in the game. Also the name is apt because it almost means something similar to 'abc cards' and one of the functions of Iroha is to teach recognition of the written scripts to people.

There is an E-fuda and Yomi-fuda for every kana, except 'n' because no word starts with that, and also because it doesn't appear in the Iroha poem. There aren't any words that start with 'wo' either, but it is pronounced the same as 'o' so the game creators got around that by having the 'wo' saying starts with 'o', and making 'wo' appear elsewhere in the sentence.

The Iroha poem also contains the now disused syllables 'wi' and 'we'. But as they are no longer a part of the modern Japanese language, they are not always included in the deck of cards. This golion set omits them, but you can often still find game sets that do include them, even ones made recently.

Uta Karuta:
Uta Karuta means 'poem cards'. It is much harder than Iroha Karuta.

The Yomi-fuda (reading cards), have a full poem on each one. (and often an artists impression of the poet). The other set of cards, 'Tori-fuda' (grabbing cards), don't have pictures, only the second half of the poem.

Good players, know the poems so well that when the start of the poem is read out. They already know the end of it and can grab the Tori-fuda before the reader even gets to the second half.

The poems used are a famous collection of poems called, Hyakunin-Isshu which is a collection of one hundred poems, each by a different poet, which was compiled by the thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Sadaie. Because there are two cards for each poem, there are two sets of one hundred cards used in the game.

Both games are popular around the new year period in Japan. Also, competitions are often held all throughout Japan, especially at schools, where the students compete. The poems were considered so culturally important (generally speaking, not just because of the card game) that it used to be compulsory to learn them all in high school, and the poems are still often studied as a part of education.

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