Summer Wars and Hanafuda: The Flower Cards That Built Nintendo Before Video Games

A hundred and twenty years before anyone played a video game, the company that would make them was already selling a deck of cards with no numbers on it.

That deck is hanafuda, and it sits on the table in one of the most-watched Japanese animated films about family. Summer Wars (2009, directed by Mamoru Hosoda) gathers an enormous rural clan in Nagano for a great-grandmother's ninetieth birthday, and it puts a set of small, stiff flower cards in their hands. Overseas viewers usually register it as picturesque set dressing. It is something considerably stranger: a deck designed to survive a ban.

Spoiler-Free Cultural Analysis

This article covers the real history behind the cards seen in Summer Wars and the company that made them, with no plot revelations. Nothing here goes beyond the film's official premise.

Key Takeaways

• Hanafuda carry no numerals and no suit symbols because Japanese card makers spent nearly two centuries designing around gambling prohibitions, replacing readable rank with pictures of plants that only a player could score.
• Nintendo's own corporate history begins in 1889 with Fusajiro Yamauchi manufacturing hanafuda in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto, eighty-six years before the company sold anything electronic.
• The deck's twelve suits are the twelve months, which makes hanafuda one of the few card games in the world where knowing the seasonal calendar is the same as knowing the rules.

Key Terms Explained

花札 (Hanafuda) / Flower Cards — a Japanese deck of 48 small, thick cards, each showing plants, animals, birds, paper strips or objects instead of numbers.

かるた (Karuta) / Cards — the general Japanese word for playing cards, borrowed from the Portuguese carta in the sixteenth century, and still audible as a loanword four hundred years later.

こいこい (Koi-Koi) / "Come On, Come On" — the two-player hanafuda game most people mean when they say they play hanafuda, named for the call a player makes to keep a round going instead of collecting.

短冊 (Tanzaku) / Paper Strips — the narrow slips of paper, familiar from Tanabata, that appear as a scoring category inside the deck itself.

花合わせ (Hana Awase) / Flower Matching — the older matching game whose card sets, painted around 1700, are the direct ancestors of the modern deck.

The Tin of Cards in the Adachi Cupboard

We had a tin of hanafuda in the house in Adachi, in the same cupboard as the New Year things. It came out perhaps twice a year, and mostly it stayed shut.

What I remember is not the games. It is the physical wrongness of the cards themselves. They were small enough to vanish in an adult's palm, and far too thick, so a stack of them made a sound like a domino falling rather than the soft riffle of a Western deck. You could not shuffle them properly. You pushed them around on the tatami instead.

And they had nothing written on them. I could read by then, and every other game in the house told you what you were holding. Here there was a pine branch. A crane. A curtain. A boar. My grandparents' generation looked at those pictures and saw values, sets and running totals. I looked at them and saw plants.

It took me until adulthood, and a long stretch of living outside Japan, to understand that the illegibility was the design. Long after I had absorbed other cultures and other ways of thinking, the sense that objects carry their own history stayed with me, and hanafuda turned out to be an object whose whole shape is an argument with the law.

Two Centuries of Designing Around a Ban

The Portuguese arrival, and the first prohibition

Playing cards reached Japan with Portuguese traders in the middle of the sixteenth century. Their deck held 48 cards in four suits of twelve ranks, and the Japanese word for cards, karuta, comes straight from the Portuguese carta.

Japanese makers copied it quickly. The decks produced during the Tenshō period, between 1573 and 1592, are called Tenshō Karuta, and the main game played with them sat somewhere between the European games Triunfo and Ombre. Then the country closed. After Japan cut off contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned, and in 1648 the Tokugawa shogunate banned Tenshō Karuta as well.

What followed is the part that shapes the deck you see in Summer Wars. Prohibition did not end card playing. It started a long argument between makers and authorities, conducted in graphic design.

Removing the numbers

Each time a deck was outlawed, makers produced one that did not look like the banned object. Numerals came off. Suit symbols came off. What remained were pictures.

The surviving intermediate step is hana awase, flower matching. A set painted around 1700 by Tosa Mitsunari, who lived from 1646 to 1710, contained a hundred suits of four cards each, and already carried images a modern player would recognise instantly: pine with crane and rising sun, maple with deer, willow with an umbrella and a yōkai. Trim that hundred down to twelve, and you have hanafuda.

The result is a deck that cannot be read by an outsider. There is no rank printed anywhere. A pine card is worth what it is worth because players agree it is, and an official glancing at a table sees people looking at flowers. Whether that was ever a successful defence in practice is another question. As a piece of design under pressure, it is remarkable.

Twelve months, four cards each

The finished deck holds 48 cards divided into twelve suits, one per month of the year, each suit designated by a flower and containing four cards. The cards themselves are about 5.4 by 3.2 centimetres, smaller than a Western card and noticeably thicker and stiffer.

That structure is why the deck feels so specifically Japanese. The suits are January's pine, February's plum, March's cherry, and onward through the year. Learning hanafuda means learning which plant belongs to which month, which is the same knowledge that governs poetry, food and clothing here. The calendar is not decoration on the cards. The calendar is the suit system.

By the Meiji period, playing cards had become tolerated by the authorities. The deck built to evade a ban outlived the ban entirely.

The Kyoto Workshop That Became Nintendo

Nintendo's own company history opens with a single line for 1889: Fusajiro Yamauchi began manufacturing and selling hanafuda in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto. The cards were made by hand, and demand across the Kyoto region eventually forced Yamauchi to train apprentices simply to keep up.

The next entries are almost comically slow by the standards of a modern technology company. In 1902, the firm started manufacturing and selling the first Western-style playing cards made in Japan. In 1947, Marufuku Co., Ltd. was established, the direct predecessor of today's Nintendo Co., Ltd. Only in the 1970s did video games become the focus.

The cards never stopped. Nintendo still produces hanafuda in Japan, including sets themed on Mario, Pokémon and Kirby, and it put Koi-Koi into Clubhouse Games in 2006. A company known worldwide for consoles has been selling the same 48 flower cards for more than a century and a third.

That is the layer Summer Wars quietly rests on. A film about a family whose oldest member holds the household together, gathered around a game that predates every screen in the story, made in a country where the biggest name in screens started by making that game.

What the Deck Looks Like From Outside

Living abroad for a long time changes which parts of home look ordinary.

Hanafuda used to seem to me like the least interesting thing in the New Year cupboard, precisely because it was silent. No instructions, no numbers, no words. Seen from a distance, that silence reads differently. Most card games in the world tell you what you are holding. This one refuses, and it refuses for a reason that took two hundred years of legal pressure to produce.

There is also something in the pairing that Summer Wars gets right without explaining. The film sets a vast, glowing, networked world against a wooden house full of relatives, and it does not treat the old thing as merely charming. The cards in that house are not a relic of a gentler era. They are the product of people working around a prohibition, patiently, for generations, until the workaround became the tradition.

I did not learn to play properly as a child. Watching the film as an adult, I understood for the first time that the reason I could not read those cards was that nobody was supposed to be able to.

FAQ

Q: Do I need to know hanafuda rules to enjoy Summer Wars? A: No. The film stages the game so that the emotional stakes are legible without the scoring rules, in the same way a chess scene works for viewers who cannot play chess. Knowing that the deck has twelve monthly suits and no printed values does add a layer, because it explains why the cards look so unlike anything a Western viewer has handled.

Q: Why does the word karuta sound European? A: Because it is. Portuguese traders brought playing cards to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century, and the Portuguese word carta entered Japanese as karuta. The word survived every subsequent ban on the objects it named, which is a small irony worth noticing.

Q: Does Nintendo still make hanafuda? A: Yes. Card production never stopped when the company moved into video games, and Nintendo continues to sell hanafuda in Japan, including decks themed on its own characters. Koi-Koi was also included in Clubhouse Games in 2006, which means a company founded on flower cards eventually shipped those same cards as software.

Key Insights to Remember

• Constraint produced the aesthetic. The reason hanafuda is beautiful — twelve months of plants, no text, no numbers — is not that someone set out to make a beautiful deck. It is that readable rank was legally dangerous, so makers pushed all the information into imagery. What now reads as refined Japanese taste began as a workaround, and that is true of more traditions than we usually admit.

• The calendar is the rule set. In most card games, suits are arbitrary tokens. In hanafuda, they are the months, which means the deck encodes the same seasonal knowledge that runs through Japanese poetry, cooking and dress. Anyone who has learned which flower belongs to which month has already learned half the game without touching a card.

• Continuity looks like discontinuity from far away. Nintendo appears to have leapt from hand-painted cards to home consoles, but the company's own history is a slow line of dates: hanafuda in 1889, Western-style cards in 1902, a new corporate entity in 1947, video games in the 1970s. Summer Wars places an old family and a networked world in the same frame, and the joke buried underneath is that they were never separate industries at all.

Sources

• Corporate Information: Company History — Nintendo Co., Ltd.
• Hanafuda — Wikipedia
• History of Nintendo — Wikipedia
• Fusajiro Yamauchi — Wikipedia