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There are many games that use cards (fuda). Karuta asobi, or card games, have been played since ancient times. The word for cards you play with in Japanese is karuta. Typical examples are iroha-garuta and uta-garuta. The former involves using syllables on cards to make proverbs; in the latter, you match together cards inscribed with stanzas of poems. The word’s origin is the Portuguese “carta” adapted into Japanese.

However, the Japanese word for the playing cards that arrived from the West is kādo. The word is an adaptation of the English “card.” Nowadays, the word kādo is the most popular of these different expressions. The cards on display in a shop front are kādo. Academics write notes on kādo. It is the so-called mai-nanbā-kādo (my number card) that identifies individual residents in Japan. Nobody refers to any of these as karuta.

However, the medical records that doctors keep are an exception; they are known as karute. This is a Japanese rendering of the German “Karte.” So, in Japanese, the word kādo is the most prevalent. But karuta, for card games, and karute, for medical records, are rendered with words deriving from Portuguese and German respectively.

The differences in these terms provides clues regarding Japan’s acceptance of Western culture.