HIDDEN✦TEMPLE
Archive of the Rare
Showa Note’s Japanese Pokémon karuta box line, organized by era with box-art and card-photo upload slots.
Karuta (かるた) is a Japanese matching game, not a trading card line. One player reads aloud from a stack of character cards (字札) while everyone else races to snatch the matching picture card (絵札) off the floor, and whoever holds the most picture cards wins. Showa Note (ショウワノート) has printed a Pokémon edition every year since 1997, making it the only line in this archive that is a game first and a card set second. Japanese boxes are labelled ポケモンかるた or かるた ポケットモンスター. English-speaking collectors say karuta cards or matching cards, and sellers outside Japan often list them as a Pokémon card game.
Every box is built the same way. The contents printed on the current box (JAN 4901772670650) are 45 picture cards, 45 character cards, two supplementary cards (補助札) and one hiragana chart, and the lid offers three games: karuta itself, a counting game (かずあそび) and ABC cards. Forty-five is not a rounding of forty-six. The kana run goes あ through を and skips ん, so a finished box is 45 pairs. That count is read off the current box; the vintage era boxes have not been separately verified, so their pair counts are treated here as unconfirmed. The boxes are small: a recent one is roughly 134 by 174 by 30 mm, the 2006 Diamond and Pearl box 158 by 195 by 40 mm.
Karuta carries no card numbers. The kana is the index, so a card is identified by its kana together with the Pokémon printed on it, and the box has to be identified by its packaging instead. Showa Note prints a nine-digit item code on the box side beside MADE IN JAPAN, grouped in threes and fours (674 7290 02), with the JAN barcode alongside it; retailers quote the same code unspaced. The JAN is 4901772 followed by six digits and climbs in release order across the whole line, so a gap in the JAN run reads as a product this archive has not found yet, not a numbering quirk.
Showa Note named its boxes after the game era through Sword and Shield in 2019: Kanto 1997, Gold and Silver around 1999, Advanced Generation around 2003, Diamond and Pearl 2006, Best Wishes 2010, XY 2013, Sun and Moon 2016, then Sword and Shield. From the 2020 release onward every box is named only かるた ポケットモンスター and the trade separates them by a year label instead. That label is the New Year season the box was sold for, not the date it shipped, so it sits one year ahead: the box released in October 2024 is sold as かるた 2025. Reading it as a release year is the surest way to misfile one of these boxes. The year boxes are listed here as separate sets because their contents genuinely change: the あ card is Zorua in 2024, Fuecoco in 2025 and Chikorita in 2026.
A karuta box whose card list is not finished shows a locked tile here. The box is listed so collectors know it exists, and that is all: no card list, no photo slots and no progress bar. It opens for everyone on the day the last of its 45 kana positions is read off a photograph of a real card. The Diamond and Pearl page shows one printing at a time so that four separate decks are never stacked into a single list. Locking a set costs this archive search traffic, and it is still the right call: a list that quietly fills its gaps from the numbering scheme is worse than no list.
How this checklist was verified Pokemon menko sets Relics archive
Correction, 2026-09-13. The identification note above says the line name on the lid, 3倍あそべる！ against 3倍まなべる！, dates nothing. That is now known to be wrong in an informative direction. The switch happens at the 2018 release: a retailer record run across the whole Pokémon karuta JAN sequence for 2016 to 2025 puts あそべる on the boxes before it and まなべる from it onward, with the 2015 XY and Z box the exception the earlier note was built on. So the slogan is a weak date signal rather than no signal at all, and it is never a substitute for the box-side item code and JAN, which remain the only reliable printing identifier. The note above is left standing so the change is visible.
Era overview · box art and card checklists
Showa Note’s annual boxes · each year is its own set
It is the Japanese matching game karuta, printed with Pokémon art. A box holds 45 picture cards and 45 matching character cards. One player reads a character card aloud and everyone else races to grab the matching picture card. Showa Note has printed a Pokémon edition every year since 1997, and it is sold in Japan only.
The picture cards go face up on the floor. One person reads from the character cards, and the other players race to find and take the picture card that matches. Whoever holds the most picture cards when the character cards run out wins. Pokémon boxes also print two other games on the lid, a counting game (かずあそび) and ABC cards, so one box covers three.
Ninety two pieces of card in total: 45 picture cards, 45 character cards, two supplementary cards and a hiragana chart. That is 45 kana pairs, not 46, because the run goes あ to を and skips ん. This is read off the current box; the vintage era boxes have not been separately verified and are treated as unconfirmed.
Yes, on the box pages linked above, kana by kana, with both the English and the Japanese species name. A box page only publishes its list once every one of its 45 kana positions has been identified from a photograph of a real card. Boxes still short of that stay locked rather than showing a part-filled list.
Read the nine-digit item code on the box side beside MADE IN JAPAN, and the JAN barcode next to it. Do not trust the year in a retailer's name for the box: that is the New Year season it was sold for and it runs a year ahead of release, so the box that shipped in October 2024 is sold as かるた 2025.
The official Pokémon Center store sells the ordinary Showa Note year boxes rather than an exclusive of its own. Searches recorded in this archive turned up no Pokémon Center exclusive karuta. The Pokémon Center game called Taruka (タルカ) is a different product and is not karuta, so it is deliberately excluded from these pages.
None has been found. This archive searched specifically for a magazine-supplement karuta and for variant types such as English, proverb, encyclopedia and bath karuta, and found no evidence that any exists. What is genuinely missing from these pages is not exotic product types but further printings of the boxes already listed.
45 kana × N boxes · per-card grids
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