Hanafuda

Hanafuda (Japanese: 花札, lit. 'flower cards') are a type of Japanese playing cards. They are typically smaller than Western playing cards, only 5.4 by 3.2 centimetres (2.1 by 1.3 in), but thicker and stiffer. On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, tanzaku (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects. One single card depicts a human. The back side is usually plain, without a pattern or design of any kind, and traditionally colored either red or black. Hanafuda are used to play a variety of games including Koi-Koi and Hachi-Hachi.
In Korea, hanafuda are known as hwatu (Korean: 화투, Hanja: 花鬪, 'flower battle') and made of plastic with a textured back side. The most popular game is Go-stop (Korean: 고스톱), commonly played during special holidays such as Lunar New Year and Chuseok (Korean: 추석).
In Hawaii, hanafuda is used to play Sakura. Hanafuda is also played in Micronesia, where it is known as hanahuda and is used to play a four-person game, which is often played in partnerships.
Playing cards were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the mid-16th century. The Portuguese deck consisted of 48 cards, with four suits divided into 12 ranks. The first Japanese-made decks made during the Tenshō period (1573–1592) mimicked Portuguese decks and are referred to as Tenshō Karuta. The main game was a trick-taking game intermediate in evolution between Triunfo and Ombre. After Japan closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned.
In 1648, Tenshō Karuta were banned by the Tokugawa shogunate. During prohibition, gambling with cards remained highly popular which led to disguised card designs. Each time gambling with a card deck of a particular design became too popular, the government banned it, which then prompted the creation of a new design. This cat-and-mouse game between the government and rebellious gamblers resulted in the creation of increasingly abstract and minimalist regional patterns (地方札). These designs were initially called Yomi Karuta after the popular Poch-like game of Yomi which was known by the 1680s.
Through the Meiwa, An'ei, and Tenmei eras (roughly 1764–1789), a game called Mekuri took the place of Yomi. It became so popular that Yomi Karuta was renamed Mekuri Karuta. Mechanically, Mekuri is similar to Chinese fishing games. Cards became so commonly used for gambling that they were banned in 1791, during the Kansei era. On the other hand, Uta-garuta such as Hyakunin Isshu were officially permitted as being educationally beneficial. So as a loophole to the ban, early hanafuda were made to have old poems on some of the cards, disguising them as Uta-garuta. Remnants of this can be seen via the tanzaku-ranked cards.
The earliest known reference to hana awase (a previous version of hanafuda) is from 1816 when it was recorded as a banned gambling tool. The earliest decks contained between 12, 20, and even 32 suits, each with one high value card, one tanzaku card, and two low-value cards.
As hana awase modernized into hanafuda, it standardized at 12 months (suits) with four rank-like categories. The majority of hanafuda games are descended from Mekuri although Yomi adaptations for the flower cards survived until the 20th century. Though they can still be used for gambling, its structure and design is less convenient than other decks such as Kabufuda. In the Meiji period, playing cards became tolerated by the authorities.
In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted hanafuda. Nintendo has focused on video games since the 1970s but continues to produce cards in Japan, including themed sets based on Mario, Pokémon, and Kirby. The Koi-Koi game played with hanafuda is included in Nintendo's own Clubhouse Games (2006) for the Nintendo DS, and Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics (2020) for the Nintendo Switch.
Though modern Japanese hanafuda is primarily made today by either of the long-standing Oishi Tengudo (1800) or Nintendo (1889), dozens of others have manufactured hanafuda, such as Angel, Tamura Shogundo, Matsui Tengudo, Ace, Maruē, and many more.
Hanafuda were likely introduced to Korea during the late 1890s and to Hawaii in the early 1900s. Since then, companies and individuals in Korea and Hawaii have produced their own hanafuda, sometimes adapting the original Japanese imagery to fit either culture. Also made for western audiences are decks which fuse hanafuda with Toranpu (トランプ, "Trumps" a.k.a. the standard 52-card deck). These decks have indices on all their cards, and introduce a 13th suit which varies considerably by manufacturer (jokers, flowers, objects from japanese imagery, left blank or used as a "snow" suit, left as western Kings, etc.).
There are 48 cards total, divided into twelve suits, representing months of the year. Each suit is designated by a flower and has four cards. An extra blank card may be included to serve as a replacement. In Korean hwatu decks, several joker cards (조커패) award various bonuses.
The standard categorizations and point values for each card are as follows. Note that some games change the point values or categorizations of the cards. For example, in the game Hachi-Hachi, all of the November cards count as kasu, and in the game Sakura, the values of the cards are different.
* In the Korean hwatu version, the November and December suits are swapped.
A few cards in hanafuda contain Japanese text. Early hanafuda had poems in order to disguise themselves as Uta-garuta, but the text had since been simplified in modern times. In addition to the examples below, the December kasu cards typically display the manufacturer's name and marks, similar to the Ace of spades in western playing cards.
In Unicode, a symbol to represent hanafuda is available at U+1F3B4 🎴 FLOWER PLAYING CARDS in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block. This character is typically rendered as the Full Moon with Red Sky card. It was added as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Unicode Emoji 1.0 in 2015.