Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/79

 and by, as the game received aristocratic patronage, shells of special beauty were selected, carefully polished, and placed in circular boxes of rich gold lacquer, which figured among the furniture of every refined lady's boudoir. Then a new feature was added: the affinity of two shells was indicated by inscribing on one the first half of some celebrated couplet and on the other the second half. The writing of poetry—or, to speak more accurately, the knack of expressing some pretty fancy in metrical form—had a place among the essential accomplishments of an educated lady or gentleman in Japan, and involved intimate acquaintance with all the classical gems in that field of literature. It is easy to see, therefore, that these "poem shells" became at once a source of pleasure and of instruction. The Portuguese, coming in the sixteenth century, brought with them playing-cards as well as Christianity and firearms. Strange to say, however, though the Japanese welcomed the cards, they rejected the foreign manner of using them, and devised a game of their own, which may be compared to whist, but is, on the whole, more complicated and difficult. It is called "flower-joining" (hana-awase). The essentially Japanese feature of the game is that every card bears a representation of some flower, with the name and appearance of which the player must be familiar. Cards are also substituted for shells in the "poem-shell" pastime described above, and these uta-garuta