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Japanese culture conveyed through competitive karuta and origami

Mocco-Shibata

Hi, I'm Mocco. It's time for my weekly Saturday morning article writing challenge in English.　
Today, I would like to write about Japanese culture that I have had the opportunity to experience in recent weeks. I'm talking about "competitive karuta" and "origami".

Conpetitive karuta

You may be wondering, what is "karuta"? And what is the difference between "competitive karuta"? If you have any doubts, please see this video first for a clear understanding.

Competitive karuta is an ancient Japanese culture, derived from waka poems about love and melancholy. On the other hand, as the word "competition" implies, the speed of the game, the heated atmosphere, and the gentlemanly fighting style overwhelm the spectators.

Famous Comics

Competitive karuta has become a proud part of Japan's culture, with fans in many countries around the world. One of the things that sparked it was a famous manga.

This is a story about a high school student who is passionate about competitive karuta and dedicates her youth to it. I think most people who go to the world of competitive karuta know this manga.

It depicts the emotions and struggles of the main character who continues to play competitive karuta. Through these emotions and conflicts, the hardships of continuing to play competitive karuta are conveyed in this manga. It is a wonderful manga for competitive karuta.

Karuta Club @worldwide

Last weekend, I joined an online karuta club. I just happened to see this club on Twitter. It was a worldwide club with participants from all over the world.

As I mentioned in my tweet above, the passion of the people I met at the online karuta club was amazing. First of all, their Japanese is so good. They can translate English into Japanese!

And their passion for karuta was unbelievable. They were playing competitive karuta matches online using an app. I was amazed at how fast everyone was able to take it!

It was a great meeting with very wonderful people. I would like to train myself in competitive karuta with the application, become a little faster, and participate again.


Origami

Last week, I heard about this activity in one of the online study groups for intellectual property.

This is an origami studio run by Taro Yaguchi, who is a licensed patent attorney in both Japan and the United States.　In the above online training, we heard about the story of how the origami studio was established, how it is being used for advertising and other purposes, and how the design rights were obtained for the origami packaging. It was very interesting.


Origami Apps

Until I heard the above story, I had strangely never thought of looking for an origami application. It's such an all-too-familiar existence for us, and probably many Japanese can fold the "vine" origami shown at the beginning of this article without reading any books.

Then I checked out an origami app and found a lot of amazingly advanced origami designs. It felt like a new culture of folding for the sake of creating a work of art, instead of folding the way we remember it.


Challenge from where I can

Well, I have loved origami since I was a child. But my artistic sense is unfortunately low. So I started with paper cutting, which seemed easy and interesting.

Would you like to see my paper work?


Finally

I love my country's culture, food, and people. I am deeply attracted to competitive karuta and origami as a means of communicating this Japanese culture.

In the future, I would like to know and learn more about this kind of Japanese culture myself, and through this culture, I would like to talk to people from many countries!


English articles I've written so far


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