Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/78

 of which the player progresses according to the number thrown by him with a single die. The game is said to have had its origin in India, whence it found its way to Japan in the eighth century. At first it was prohibited on account of its gambling character, but eventually Buddhist priests took it up, and converted it into an instrument for inculcating virtue. An illustrated ladder of moral tenets, varied by immoral laches, led to heaven or precipitated into hell, and young people were expected to derive a vicarious respect for the ethical precepts that marked the path to victory. The game thenceforth became a vehicle of instruction as well as amusement, its pictures representing sometimes official grades or religious terms.

A cognate amusement, without the use of dice, is the "poem card" game (uta-garuta). This, as its name karuta—a Japanese rendering of the Spanish word carta—suggests, is partly of foreign origin. Before their contact with the West, the Japanese had a pastime called "poem shells,"—uta-kai, or kai-awase,—the precursor of "poem cards." In its earliest day, this amusement consisted simply in joining the shells of a bivalve. A number of shells—twenty, thirty, or more—constituted the pack, from which one was taken by each player, the remainder being spread on the mats to form a "deck." The player's object was to find the mate of the shell dealt to him. By