Ex-Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamauchi is to become the president of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu Project Foundation. The foundation is responsible for promoting the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu – a collection of 100 short poems by 100 different poets, written between the 7th and 13th centuries.
The collection is also the basis for a traditional card game, where players must match halves of each poem together. The foundation is to be run on a budget of around ¥1 billion ($9.1m), most of which has been contributed by Yamauchi. The project will begin by establishing a museum in the Sagano district of Kyoto, with a “software application” to follow shortly after.
