With a long history of popularity, and appearing as part of movie plots as in
The Red Peony (Hibotan bakuto: hanafuda shōbu or 緋牡丹博徒 花札勝負) and
Summer Wars, what exactly is hanafuda? Is it a game, the name for different games, or just the name for a certain kind of card deck?
The answer, awkwardly, is pretty much yes (though I think you have to say hanafuda cards or hanafuda deck to refer to... you know, the cards/deck).
Let's try and start with some history.
History
Hanafuda's history is distressingly full of different accounts (but I guess that's kinda the nature of history as a study). Here's a sort of gist I've tried to compile. I figure, if writers who are published by an official publishing company can give such strongly varying accounts, then I can cobble together my own version, right? Anway, to the history:
Hanfuda's beginnings either come from the Dutch towards the end of the 1500s or from a card game and/or playing cards called Hombre, brought by the Portuguese in 1549. There's also a version that says hanafuda came from both Portuguese (unsun karuta) and Dutch (tensho karuta) card games -- with the Dutch games coming first. Then again, it could be that hanafuda was simply a cross between Western cards and a shell matching game (kai awase) and Western cards.
To continue the Hombre version of history, from Hombre, cards known as
tensho karuta were created -- they show up in the Tensho period (that's from 1573 to 1591). From there, invention and variation happened, plus the usual government interference -- frequent bans on gambling, not to mention sakoku (the national isolation thing).
Then, for a while, people kept inventing card games, but gambling would always creep in or be there from the start. So, of course, once the general society thought of a particular game as a gambling game, the government would ban said game. Then people would invent more games... and the process would repeat.
Time passed, and sometime in the first 50 years of the 1800s (possibly in the Bunka era of 1804 to 1818) a card game was invented whose cards were first called nanafuda, but renamed hanafuda (ta-dah!) nanafuda/hanafuda's history with the government was like previously invented games, it got banninated. Around the beginning of the Meiji period cards were totally banned -- until the new government created new taxes concerning them. (Good grief, how often has this happened in history?)
(A different history has it that hanafuda was invented after the shogunate decided to be a bit more lenient on the whole gambling thing. Sigh and argh).
Card games were suffering from a downward trend until a man named Fusajiro Yamauchi came along and opened Nintendo Koppai (just known as Nintendo these days) in 1889 or Meiji 22. See, as some of you probably know (or at least read and then sort of forgot), Nintendo used to be a hanafuda card company. The cards produced by Nintendo were made from a mix of mulberry bark paste and some clay that once made got painted. (They switched to plastic in 1953). After Fusajiro started selling them, a hanafuda trend started, and then he got a A LOT of business from the yakuza. Why? Because people at their casinos liked to start every game with an unused deck.
Today, it's not as popular as it used to be, but people still play it. It's thought of more as a holiday game that families play. And it's only legal to play it for tiny amounts.
The Cards
Now that you've got some (hopefully accurate) facts on how hanafuda got started, let's get into the actual cards. A hanafuda deck has 49 cards with the diminuative dimensions of about 2.4 by 1.6 inches (or 6 cm by 4 cm), and are also thicker than playing cards over here in the West. They are split into 12 suits of 4 cards each. Why so many suits? Because each one is named after a month. Each of the four cards has a picture that represents their month's seasonal theme, with at least the seasonal plant depicted -- I've only seen one place (that I can think of at the moment) say that there's a whole theme in the cards, not just a seasonal plant. But it was an .edu so I'm going with it.
There's also supposed to be a card that's either blank or has a tengu (goblin) on it, which is a wildcard/joker. Which I haven't seen in the websites I've used, but have found a Web Archive version of someone's personal site that says one of the November's suit's cards (the "lightning card") is used as a wild card. I dunno.
But it's not just suits you have to think about. A hanafuda card is also classed as one of the following: slip or ribbon (a plain tanzaku or poem card), light, red poem (a red tanzaku with writing on it), dregs/plain, blue poem (same as red poem card but blue) and animal. Some of them make sense: the blue poem cards show a blue piece of poem paper with a poem on it front and center, and the red poem cards are the same. The slip cards show blank pieces of poem paper. But others are just plain confusing.
Here are descriptions of each month's cards below, based partly on what I saw looking at pictures of a hanafuda deck (I have no pictures, sorry!):
1st month (January): crane in pine (matsu ni tsuru 松に鶴). Two dreg/plain cards, one red poem card that says 'akayoroshi' and one light card (that also shows a crane with pines but for some reason is just a light card? Hm).
2nd month (February): nightingale in plum trees (ume ni uguisu 梅に鶯). Two dreg/plain cards, one red poem card that says "akayoroshi' and one animal card (bird in flowering tree).
3rd month (March): curtain in cherry blossoms (sakura ni tobari 桜に帳). Two dreg cards, one red poem card that says 'miyoshino' and one light card that also looks like it's classed as a flower card...)
4th month (April): cuckoo in wisteria (fuji ni hototogisu 藤に杜鵑). One animal card, one red slip card, and two dreg/plain cards.
5th month (May): zigzag bridge in irises (ayame ni yatsuhashi 菖蒲 に八つ橋-- Google Translate says the real word for zigzag bridge is yattsu-bashi. I picked that version of the word... I mean, type yatsuhashi into Google and you get a sort of Kyoto-style coyota). One animal card ( zigzag bridge with the irises... because bridges are alive?), one red slip card and two dreg cards.
6th month (June): peony and butterflies (botan ni chō 牡丹に蝶). One animal card (two butterflies), one blue slip card and two dreg/plain cards.
7th month (July): bush clover and wild boars (hagi ni inoshishi 萩に猪). One animal card, one red slip card and two dregs/plain cards.
8th month (August): moon in miscanthus/pampas grass -- wild geese (susuki ni tsuki -- kari 薄に月 -- 雁. Looks like 'kari' is used for birds that show up in Japan after a good chunk of fall has gone by). One light card (moon over a pampas covered hill), one animal card (geese flying over a miscanthus hill) and two dreg/plain cards.
9th month (September): cup among chrysanthemums (kiku ni sakazuki 菊に盃 or 杯. One animal card (the sakazuki or sake cup), one blue poem card and two dreg/plain cards.
10th month (October): deer in fall maple leaves (momiji ni shika 紅葉に鹿). One animal card (a deer next to a maple tree with leaves), one blue poem card, and two dreg/plain cards.
11th month (November): Frog in fields -- swallow in willows (ono michikaze - ni kaeru -- yanagi ni tsubame 小野道風 - に蛙-- 柳に燕.) Figuring out the transliterated Japanese in the first part before the two dashes is a bit difficult for me. Considering the pattern used with all the other months, it looks like frog in/at Ono Michikaze so that's the kana I picked. (Also called Ono no Tōfū or Yaseki Tōfū, Ono Michikaze was a Heian calligrapher who watched a frog and learned about perseverance).
Getting back to the cards, the 11th month suit has one light card (Ono with an umbrella looking at a frog near some willow branches), one animal card (swallow near some willow branches), one red slip card and one dreg/plain card which is also called the lightning (or oni) card -- it's common to use it as a wild card. (The lightning card has a red background with angular/squiggly lines running through it. In front is most of a grey rectangle and a smidge of another grey rectangle, both ordered in black with some kind of stylized scene (looks like there's a storm going on in the mostly-there rectangle.)
12th month (December): phoenix among paulownia (kiri ni hōō 桐に鳳凰). Three dreg cards (often used to put a company's info onto) and an animal card with some crazy Picasso-y dragon thing with four talon legs coming down to see the paulownia from the sky -- apparently that's the phoenix.
The pictures on regular cards come from Heian period poetry, except for 6th month/June -- peony didn't get to be a poetry thing until the Edo period. One book I looked at said that poppy was the flower for June, so I wonder if that's what it was before the Edo period.
Types of Hanafuda
Hanafuda looks like/is an umbrella term for a bunch of different games, some of which are supposed to be more complicated than others. A lot of the games' rules aren't that different from each other, which explains (at least you could argue) why people refer to them all as "hanafuda".
Now I don't know if this is all of them, but here's a list of hanafuda games: hachi-hachi, mushi (honeymoon hanafuda), koi koi (come on), isuri, hana-awase, sudaoshi, hachi, hiyoko, bakappana (fool flowers/matching flowers), poka, and tensho. Elsewhere, other countries have their own type of hanafuda games such as Palau (where it's called hanahuda) and Hawaii hanafuda (sakura). However, poking around the internet has revealed a distinct prominence of koi-koi.
As for the actual rules, here's
this page on the cross over rules, from a site preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. As for the specific rules, that same site (bless them!) has a menu for the games' rules
here. And just remember, I've looked at .edu sites and a bit of video tutorials for koi-koi rules, and the bits that I saw didn't always match. So no worries about playing exactly the 'right' way, right? Take your pick, mix 'n match and just have fun.
And by the way, if you want some old-timey rules for hanafuda,
here's a book published in 1895. It calls the game hana-awase, so I wonder how its rules compare to the archived site I just mentioned's hana-awase rules. (I haven't checked).
References:
So you can see where I'm coming from. ;) (Have I done that one already? Hm...)
hanafubuki.org: General Rules
"A Japanese-English Dictionary of Culture, Tourism and History of Japan"; Yamaguchi Momoo, Steven Bates; 2014
Indiana University IUCAT: 和英日本の文化・観光・歴史辞典 = A Japanese-English dictionary of culture, tourism and history of Japan
Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Konobu of the Yorozuya as Ono Michikaze, from the series Gion Festival Costume Parade (Gion mikoshi harai nerimono sugata)
"Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts"; Haruo Shirane; 2012
"A History of Body Suit Tattooing"; Mark Poysden, Marco Bratt; 2006
"Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World"; David Sheff; 1994
hanafubuki.org: The Cards
"Koi-Koi! : A Game of Hanafuda"; Kangni Hu; Jan 28 2014
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: David Barnhill: Major Nature Images By Season
"The Way to Play: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Games of the World"; Diagram Group; 1975
"Japan Encyclopedia"; Louis Frédéric; Käthe Rothe; 2002
University of Wisconsin - Madison: John Bent: Hanahuda, the Palaun flower game
