It Figures! - Nintendo brand Hanafuda (花札) playing cards

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• published: 10 Aug 2015
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Today I take a look at a box of hanafuda (花札) playing cards. These are reproductions by Nintendo of their original cards that helped start the company back in the late 1800s! I purchased this set at a small shop in Kyoto, but you could order some online or maybe in stores depending on where you live. Nintendo is not the only company that makes them, as they're traditional Japanese cards used for gambling. Here's some more information about them via Wikipedia: "In 1549, the 18th year of Tenbun, a missionary Francis Xavier landed in the country and the crew of his ship had carried a set of 48 Portuguese Hombre playing cards from Europe, and eventually card games became popular, along with their use for gambling. When Japan subsequently closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned. Despite that prohibition, gambling with cards remained highly popular. Private gambling during the Tokugawa Shogunate was illegal. Because playing with card games per se was not banned, new cards were created with different designs to avoid the restriction. For example, an anonymous game player designed a card game known as Unsun Karuta. These cards were decorated with Chinese art, each depicting Chinese warriors, weaponry, armor, and dragons. This deck consisted of 75 cards, and was not as popular as the Western card games had been, simply because of the difficulty of becoming familiar with the system. Each time gambling with a card deck of a particular design became too popular, the government banned those cards, which then prompted the creation of new ones. This cat and mouse game between the government and rebellious gamblers resulted in the creation of many differing designs. Through the rest of the Edo era through the Meiwa, Anei, and Tenmei eras (roughly 1765–1788), a game called Mekuri Karuta took the place of Unsun Karuta. Consisting of a 48-card deck divided into four sets of 12, it became wildly popular and was one of the most common forms of gambling during this time period. In fact, it became so commonly used for gambling that it was banned in 1791, during the Kansei Era. Over the next few decades, several new card games were developed and subsequently banned because they were used almost exclusively for gambling purposes. However, the government began to realize that some form of card games would always be played by the populace, and began to relax their laws against gambling. The eventual result of all this was a game called Hanafuda, which combined traditional Japanese games with Western-style playing cards. Because hanafuda cards do not have numbers (the main purpose is to associate images) and the long length to complete a game, it has a partially limited use for gambling. However, it is still possible to gamble by assigning points for completed image combinations. By this point, however, card games were not nearly as popular as they had been due to past governmental repression. In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted Hanafuda cards painted on mulberry tree bark. Though it took a while to catch on, soon the Yakuza began using Hanafuda cards in their gambling parlors, and card games became popular in Japan again."