Hanafuda and Karuta: Nintendo’s Original Business

Nintendo Made These First

In 1889, Yamauchi Fusajiro founded a company in Kyoto called Nintendo Koppai to make handmade hanafuda cards. Everything else — the arcade games, the Famicom, the Switch — came afterwards, and much later.

What is genuinely surprising is that they never stopped. Nintendo remains one of Japan's principal hanafuda manufacturers, and three of their card brands are still in production today.

And Nintendo sells hanafuda through its own official store abroad, including Mario-illustrated decks. That makes this one of the very few traditional Japanese products with a first-party English purchase route — you can buy it from the same shop that sells you a Switch game.

Three Games, One Word

Karuta comes from the Portuguese carta, arriving with sixteenth- century traders, and in Japanese it is the general word for playing cards. So the naming works out like this: hanafuda is formally hana-karuta, "flower cards" — a kind of karuta — even though English treats the two as separate things.

Hanafuda — the actual card game

Forty-eight cards, four for each of twelve months, each month with its own plant: pine for January, plum for February, cherry for March, and so on. No numbers, no suits as a Western player would recognise them — the month is the suit and the artwork is the rank.

You match cards by month and build scoring combinations. It plays like a trick-and-set game rather than a memory exercise, and it is the only one of the three that is a game in the ordinary sense.

Iroha karuta — reading and grabbing

Two matching decks: one of picture cards, one of text cards. A reader reads a proverb aloud; the players race to snatch the picture card that goes with it.

This is a children's game and a family game, and it is genuinely useful for anyone learning Japanese — the proverbs are short, the vocabulary is fixed, and the competitive pressure does more for recall than flashcards do.

Hyakunin Isshu — the same, at speed, from memory

One hundred classical poems, compiled in the thirteenth century. The reader recites the first half; the players find the card carrying the second half.

Played competitively — kyogi karuta — this becomes a serious sport. Players memorise all hundred poems and the layout of the cards, and win by recognising a poem from its first syllable or two before the reader finishes the phrase. There are school leagues and national championships.

Why Japanese — Why the Cards Are So Thick

Pick up a hanafuda card and the first thing you notice is that it is wrong. Too small, far too thick, and stiff — closer to a tile than a card.

Good ones are built up from layers of paper laminated together, then finished so the faces are smooth and the edges are square. They do not bend. You cannot shuffle them the way you shuffle a Western deck, and you are not meant to.

The thickness is functional. In hanafuda you play cards onto a table and snap them down; the weight makes that satisfying and audible, and it stops cards sliding under one another. In karuta you swipe a card off the floor at speed — a thin card would crumple, and a stiff one skims.

This is where the difference between a good deck and a souvenir deck lives. A cheap printed set on thin card looks identical in a photograph and feels like nothing in the hand. The weight and the snap are the product.

How to Actually Play

Hanafuda: start with Koi-Koi

Hanafuda supports many games; learn Koi-Koi and ignore the rest for now. It is a two-player game and the rules fit on a card.

• Eight cards to each player, eight face up on the table.
• On your turn, match a card from your hand to a table card of the same month and take both. No match, and you discard face up.
• Captured cards form scoring sets — combinations of the special cards, the ribbons, the animals, and plain cards by quantity.
• When you complete a set you either stop and score, or say koi-koi — "come on" — and keep playing for more. If your opponent completes a set first, you get nothing.

That last decision is the whole game. Koi-Koi is a press-your-luck game wearing a matching game's clothes, and it is why the deck has survived four hundred years.

Karuta: the rules are trivial, the skill is not

• Spread the picture or second-half cards face up between the players.
• A reader reads. Players race to touch or sweep the matching card. Most cards wins.
• Touching the wrong card costs you — in competitive play, a penalty card.

With iroha karuta a beginner can play immediately. With Hyakunin Isshu you need to know the poems, which is the barrier and also the point — the game is a memorisation contest disguised as a physical one.

What to Buy

Keeping Them, and Giving Them

• Store them in the box, standing or flat, somewhere dry. Laminated paper cards absorb humidity and the layers can separate at the edges if they get damp repeatedly.
• Do not shuffle them like Western cards. Riffling stresses the lamination. Mix them face down on the table instead — which is how it is done.
• Keep them out of direct sun. Hanafuda relies on strong flat colour, and the reds go first.
• They last decades. A good deck outlives the children who learned on it, which is most of the argument for buying a proper one.

As a gift they work unusually well: small, light, cheap to post, visually striking, and almost nobody outside Japan owns any. A hanafuda deck also comes with a story that lands in one sentence — which is more than most souvenirs manage.

Frequently Asked Questions