Obake karuta

Karuta (かるた, from Portuguese carta ["card"]) are Japanese playing cards. Playing cards were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese traders during the mid-16th century. These early decks were used for trick-taking games. The earliest indigenous karuta was first invented in the town of Miike in Chikugo Province at around the end of the 16th century. The Miike Karuta Memorial Hall located in Ōmuta, Fukuoka is the only municipal museum in Japan dedicated specifically to the history of karuta.

Karuta packs are divided into two groups, those that are descended from Portuguese cards and those from e-awase.E-awase originally derived from kai-awase, which was played with shells but were converted to card format during the early 17th-century. The basic idea of any e-awase 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 and is often played by children at elementary school and junior high-school level during class, as an educational exercise. Chinese playing cards of the money-suited and domino types existed in Japan from at least the late 18th century until the early 20th century. Their games would influence those played with the Hanafuda pack.

The first indigenous Japanese deck was the named after the Tenshō period (1573–92). It was a 48 card deck with the 10s missing like Portuguese decks from that period. It kept the four Latin suits of cups, coins, clubs, and swords along with the three face cards of female knave, knight, and king. In 1633, the Tokugawa shogunate banned these cards, forcing Japanese manufacturers to radically redesign their cards. As a result of Japan's isolationist Sakoku policy, karuta would develop separately from the rest of the world. In order to hide the proscription of Portuguese derived cards, makers turned the cards into very abstract designs known as mekuri karuta. By the mid-20th century, all mekuri karuta fell into oblivion with the exception of Komatsufuda (Japanese: 小松札) which is used to play Kakkuri, a matching game found in Yafune, Fukui prefecture.

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