Japanese Girls and Women: Revised and Enlarged Edition

								

Japanese poems which give the name to the game. The poems are well known
to all Japanese, of whatever sort or condition. All Japanese poems are
short, containing only thirty-one syllables, and have a natural division
into two parts. The one hundred cards containing the latter halves of
the poems are dealt and laid out in rows, face upward, before the
players. One person is appointed reader. To him are given the remaining
hundred cards, and he reads the beginnings of the poems in whatever
order they come from the shuffled pack. Skill in the game consists in
remembering quickly the line following the one read, and rapidly finding
the card on which it is written. Especially does the player watch his
own cards, and if he finds there the end of the poem, the beginning of
which has just been read, he must pick it up before any one sees it and
lay it aside. If some one else spies the card first, he seizes it and
gives to the careless player several cards from his own hand. Whoever
first disposes of all his cards is the winner. The players usually
arrange themselves in two lines down the middle of the room, and the two
sides play against each other, the game not being ended until either one
side or the other has disposed of all its cards. The game requires great
quickness of thought and of motion, and is invaluable in giving to all
young people an education in the classical poetry of their own nation,
as well as being a source of great merriment and jollity among young and
old.
Scattered throughout the year are various flower festivals, when, often
with her whole family, our little girl visits the famous gardens where
the plum, the cherry, the chrysanthemum, the iris, or the azalea attain
their greatest loveliness, and spends the day out of doors in æsthetic
enjoyment of the beauties of nature supplemented by art. And then there
is the feast most loved in the whole year, the Feast of Dolls, when on
the third day of the third month the great fire-proof storehouse gives
forth its treasures of dolls,--in an old family, many of them hundreds
of years old,--and for three days, with all their belongings of tiny
furnishings in silver, lacquer, and porcelain, they reign supreme,
arranged on red-covered shelves in the finest room of the house. Most
prominent among the dolls are the effigies of the Emperor and Empress in
antique court costume, seated in dignified calm, each on a lacquered
dais. Near them are the figures of the five court musicians in their
robes of office, each with his instrument. Beside these dolls, which are
always present and form the central figures at the feast, numerous
others, more plebeian, but more lovable, find places on the lower
shelves, and the array of dolls' furnishings which is brought out on
these occasions is something marvelous. It was my privilege to be
present at the Feast of Dolls in the house of one of the Tokugawa
daimi[=o]s, a house in which the old forms and ceremonies were strictly