In the late nineteenth century, Nintendo acquired its begin making one other kind of sport: enjoying playing cards. The firm continues to make playing cards, and whether or not it’s those from previous or immediately, the decks showcase the great thing about Japan.
Hanafuda is a floral-covered card sport that represents the flower and foliage of various seasons. For instance, the 12 fits embody plum blossoms, cherry blossoms, peonies, chrysanthemums and maple leaves, amongst others, with every reflecting seasons all year long.
Nature is likely one of the most necessary motifs in Japanese artwork, kimono textiles and tattooing. Considering how flowers are emblazoned on Japanese cash, it solely is sensible for one of many nation’s most well-known card video games to be coated within the nation’s pure magnificence.
“I purchased this specific deck at a web based public sale a few years in the past for a ridiculously low quantity,” Osaka-based hanafuda collector and skilled Marcus Richert. “I’m undecided if I even paid 1,000 yen (underneath $10) for it.”
Japan has no scarcity of hanafuda collectors, and outdated, hand-made Nintendo decks like this are uncommon. Still, Richert says the few instances he’s come throughout such playing cards, he’s been lucky sufficient to snap them up at bargain-basement costs. Richert doesn’t know the precise date for the deck, however believes it may have been made between 1900 and 1930.
What makes this set of Nintendo playing cards additional particular is that this deck was hand-printed. The approach, known as kappa-zuri, makes use of a spherical brush by stencilling. The black outlines, Richert provides, have been almost certainly woodblock-printed or finished with a copper plate.
The apply of hand-stenciling playing cards, which had additionally been widespread in Europe, began to died out in Japan by the mid-Forties because the final artisans retired. Nintendo continued to make use of hand-made steps within the manufacturing of its hanafuda playing cards by the early Nineteen Seventies, says Richert, at the same time as they have been machine printed. “The final step of pasting the backing paper onto the playing cards was actually exhausting to automate.”
Hanafuda is now performed at house in the course of the Japanese New Year holidays, however over a century in the past, the sport was a mainstay at illicit playing dens. As Rebecca Salter notes in Japanese artwork journal Andon, “The relationship between playing cards and playing and official makes an attempt at suppression, if not prohibition, is a theme that runs by the story of playing cards in Japan.”
The playing cards turned so carefully related to betting, that gamblers would contact their noses to find a deck or a den as a result of the Japanese phrase for flower (花 or hana) is a homophone for nostril (鼻 or hana), maybe explaining why the long-nosed yokai Tengu is discovered on hanafuda decks.
Today, Nintendo continues to make hanafuda playing cards, even giving them a decidedly Mario spin. But Nintendo isn’t the one hanafuda maker within the nation—it’s not even the only real one in Kyoto. Oishi Tengudo, which was based in 1800, nonetheless makes its hanafuda the outdated method: by hand. And whereas Oishi Tengudo by no means made the leap into video video games, it’s maybe Nintendo’s oldest rival, crafting stunning playing cards of its personal.
Richert has teamed up with Oishi Tengudo for a set of gorgeous, hand-made hanafuda playing cards known as Shiki. You can study extra about it on the venture’s Kickstarter.
