Historical Figure

                The person that I consider a “pioneer” in Hanafuda is Fusajiro Yamauchi. He was a japanese entrepreneur who founded the company called Nintendo. Back in 1633 in Kyoto,  Japan, their government had banned all foreign playing cards and games. They did this to get rid of illegal gambling. This went on for many years and the popularity of playing cards were slowly declining.

The popularity of cards finally went up when Yamauchi brought up the idea of a new card game. They then eventually allowed the game, Hanafuda, which uses illustrations instead of the numbers that is used in western cards.  They are smaller than regular playing cards and had images painted on them. Such as, cherry blossoms, deer, birds, and other nature types of illustrations He developed unique hand crafted illustrations for the card game hoping to boost up sales. It was interesting how the hanafuda cards were made because  in a book, Nintendo the company and its founders, by Mary Firestone she said “In the early days, making the cards began with pound-ing the bark from a mulberry tree into a paste” and this past mixed with clay were made to make backings(16).

 He then opened his first Hanafuda card shop, Nintendo Koppai, in 1889.  In the company name he used chinese kanji wich means, “leave luck to heaven”. The hand painted cards he sold were a success and grew popular all over japan. Soon with high in demand his company became one of the top gameing company. His business boomed even higher when the Yakuza (japanese mafia) began to use his hanafuda cards in gambling casinos. Gamblers use a brand-new decks when they start a each new game so they went through a lot of cards.

                With the increase of demand grew even more with time he needed to hire and train new employees to produce more cards. He then expanded his company again to produce american-style playing cards. stated “Nintendo became the first company in Japan to produce Western-style playing cards”(17). I though this was cool to actually think that this company would try to go into dealings with the west. Yanauchi also made a deal with a national tobacco company, which then in turn made it possible for him to sell his cards in tobacco shops all over japan.