Hanafuda (Flower Card)

  Hanafudais Japanese flower cards, and a card game which evolved from Western playing cards.





  Though refined card games were played in Japan by the nobility since its early eras, they were not commonly used for gambling, or played by the lower classes. This changed, however, in the 18th year of Tenmon (A.D. 1549) when Saint Francisco Xavier landed in Japan. The crew of his ship had carried a set of Hombre (48-card Portuguese) playing cards from Europe, and card games became very popular among the Japanese. When Japan closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned.

  Since the banned card games had been highly popular, an unknown gamer designed a card game known as "Unsun Karuta". These cards were decorated with Chinese art, depicting such subjects as 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.

  Through the rest of the Edo era through the Meiwa, Anei, and Tenmei eras (roughly 1765-1788), a game called "Mekuri Karuta" took "Unsun Karuta"'s place. Consisting of a 48-card deck divided into 4 sets of 12, it became wildly popular, and was one of the most common forms of gambling during this time. In fact, it became so commonly used for gambling that it was banned in 1791, during the Kansei Era.

  Over the following few decades, several new card games were developed and subsequently banned due to the fact that they were used almost exclusively for gambling purposes. However, the government began to realize that some form of card game 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. By this point, however, card games were not as popular as they had been due to the past few decades of governmental repression.





  In 1889, a man named Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a company named Nintendo Koppai for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted Hanafuda cards painted on mulberry tree bark. Though it took awhile to catch on, soon the Yakuza began using Hanafuda cards in their gambling parlors, and card games became popular in Japan again.

  Today, Hanafuda is commonly played in Hawaii and Korea, though under different names. In Hawaii, it is called Sakura or Higobana; in Korea it is Hwatu. It is a four-person game, and is often paired cross-table, though the Korean and Japanese versions are usually played with three players, with two-person variants. Despite its focus on video games, Nintendo still produces the cards, although this business is dying.

  The following rules are by no means official: there are many different games played with Hanafuda, and there are as many different variations as there are players.

  Another way to spell it is Hanafura. This is how it is sometimes spelled in Hawaii.


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