ANTARCTICA; CARD GAME.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Nankyoku Tairiku karuta ("The Antarctic Card Game"). A charming set of playing cards based on the film Nankyoku Tairiku ("The South Pole"), recounting the story of the 1956-57 Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition. The cards show scenes of penguins, the research ship Soya, and the expedition members.In 1955 the Japanese government announced plans to send a research group to Antarctica in the following year. A team of 53 scientists led by Professor Nagata Takeshi set off on 8 November 1956, the first time Japan had explored the south pole since the early 1900s. They set up the Syowa Station on East Ongul Island before being emergency airlifted out of a storm.A documentary film focusing on the expedition was released in June 1957, directed by Hayashida Shigeo and titled Nihon nankyoku chiiki kansokutai no kiroku: Nankyoku Tairiku. This game was released to complement the film. Karuta is a traditional Japanese matching game where each pictorial card is assigned a letter of the Japanese alphabet and must be paired with an associated poem, sentence, or proverb. The player who can make the most matches wins.

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