These are the 100 poems behind karuta — the card game from the anime Chihayafuru — chosen near Kyoto over 800 years ago, and still memorized by children across Japan today. This is the very first of them.
What is Hyakunin Isshu? Read the full guide →
The poem
秋の田の かりほの庵の 苫をあらみ わが衣手は 露にぬれつつ
Romaji: Aki no ta no / kariho no io no / toma o arami / waga koromode wa / tsuyu ni nuretsutsu
In the autumn fields, the harvest hut is roughly thatched,
and so my sleeves are wet, soaked through with the falling dew.
Who was Emperor Tenji?
Emperor Tenji (626–672) was one of the most consequential rulers in early Japanese history — the sovereign behind sweeping reforms that helped shape the Japanese state itself. And yet the poem chosen to open this entire thousand-year anthology, the very first of the hundred, is his. Stop and consider that: of all the ways to begin, Japan’s most beloved poetry collection opens not with a battle or a boast, but with an emperor standing in a cold field at night.
Meaning & background
The poem shows a ruler keeping watch over the autumn rice harvest from a rough, hastily thatched hut. The thatch is so coarse that the night dew seeps through and soaks his sleeves. In just 31 syllables, it draws a picture of a sovereign who shares the discomfort of the farmers who feed his people — power expressed not as grandeur, but as quiet empathy. That this image, from over 1,350 years ago, still opens the anthology every Japanese child learns is a small miracle of cultural memory.
The commemorative medal
Each poem in the Hyakunin Isshu is cast as a 31mm brass commemorative medal, struck by master craftsmen in Japan — the poem and the figure of its poet pressed into metal that will not fade like paper or screens. Poem 1, Emperor Tenji, is the first in the series and available now.
View the full medal collection →
Catalogued on Numista: N#584973
Explore the series
Poem 2 (Empress Jitō) → · What is Hyakunin Isshu? Full guide