IROHA AND ODE-CARDS.
Sugoroku is played in the long winter evenings, and especially during the first days of the New Year. Among other New Year’s games may be mentioned the cards known as the Iroha and uta cards. Iroha, being the first three characters of the Japanese syllabary or alphabet, is the name given to the whole syllabary; and the iroha cards are so called because they have inscribed on them each a proverbial saying beginning with a different character of the syllabary. There are forty-seven characters in the Japanese syllabary, and another card is added to make the number even and divisible. Besides the pack of forty-eight cards with the proverbs, there is another of the same number of cards with pictures corresponding to these proverbs; these latter have also marked in the corner the first character of the proverbs they illustrate to facilitate identification. Thus, if the card in the first pack has the proverb, inu mo arukeba bō ni ataru (A dog, by walking, may come upon a stick, a saying which is now taken to mean that by wandering about, one may meet with good fortune), the corresponding card in the other pack has a picture of a dog knocking against a stick and the character i in the corner. The card of the second character of the syllabary has the proverb, ron yori shōko (Proof is better than argument), and the third has hana yori dango (Better a dumpling than a flower, that is, use is better than ornament), and so on. The illustrations in the second pack are often fanciful, as they cannot but be when the proverbs do not refer to concrete objects. Thus, the illustration to the second proverb above given has an angry man with one hand on his sword and holding in the other the straw figure which the jealous wife used in the old days to nail to a tree at dead of night when she invoked curses upon her rival. The man is apparently showing his wife in spite of her protestations the straw image she has been using against his mistress. The game is played sometimes by spreading all the pictures in the middle and the players sitting around them. One person reads out the proverbs in any order he pleases, and the corresponding pictures are seized and put away. The player who has taken the largest number of cards in this way is the winner. The game, however, is more frequently played in the following manner:—The cards are dealt evenly among the players who spread them out exposed before them. When a proverb is read out, a player takes out the corresponding picture if he has it, and if not, he looks over the other players’ hands and seizes the card as soon as he sees it. He takes it and gives one of his own exposed cards to the player from whose hand he has taken it. A slow-witted person’s hand is always full, while a sharp player clears his quickly; and the one who has first got rid of his hand is the winner. As the cards are often pounced upon at the same time by several players, the game is an exciting one, and not a few come out of it with their hands scratched and bleeding. Friends and relatives of both sexes join in these games in winter evenings, and some of them, it is said, consider it the best part of the game that they can touch or squeeze the hands of the players of the opposite sex by pretending to seize the same cards. For this reason, a strict paterfamilias not unfrequently forbids his household to play the game with those who are not its members.
PLAYING ODE-CARDS.
The uta or ode-cards are in two sets of a hundred each. There is a famous collection of a hundred odes composed by as many poets, which used in former days to be learnt by heart. These odes are used for the ode-cards. An ode, as has been explained in a former chapter, is made up of two couplets of five and seven syllables each, closing with a line of seven syllables. For the purposes of the cards, the odes are divided into two parts, the first comprising the first three lines, that is, the lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and the second the last two lines of seven syllables. The cards in one set give each the whole ode with the name and picture of the poet, while in those of the other set appears generally the second part, and rarely the first part, of the ode. Thus, in the first set the first ode of the hundred runs:—
Tenji Tenno
Aki no ta no
Kariho no iwo no
Toma wo arami
Waga koromode wa