karuta

Today we had our "World Karuta Classic," which is a karuta tournament for the elementary school kids in our town.  Karuta is a card game in Japan (it comes from the Portuguese word for card!!!), where you lay out cards in the middle and the players have to determine which card to grab before their opponent does.  Many karuta sets are divided into yomifuda (reading cards) and torifuda (the cards you take).  A lot of sets are set up so that the torifuda have a letter in the corner, which is the first letter of the reading cue, so you have to listen for what the first letter is and you'll know which card to grab.  Others are somewhat more challenging in that you have to think more and you could be wrong.  So for example in the first picture below, the set is played so that I read a hint or description of the object, and they have to find it. 

The karuta sets we play with all our all handmade by the members.  They're super cute!  This year we made one that was themed "forest and nature." It made its debut today.

"What is bitter, but is very nutritious?" Green pepper!

Our Karuta club name is "doidakke" which is kind of like "which is it?!" in the local dialect

some of the sets we played with

our Karuta club happi
we all have our nicknames printed on the back in a yomifuda 
my nickname is 「わいはハワイガール」

flower karuta

it's really difficult

our latest karuta set's theme was "forest and nature" so these were the cards I drew 

the finished product