Influence of the West, returns to the East: Hanafuda Cards and Hwatu Cards

Case : 019, 020

In 1549, a missionary Francis Xavier landed in Japan with a set of 48 Portuguese Hombre playing cards from Europe, and eventually card games became popular, along with their use for gambling. When Japan subsequently closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned. Many new cards were created with different designs to avoid the restriction. However, the government began to realize that some form of card games would always be played by the populace, and began to relax their laws against gambling. The eventual result of all this was a game called Hanafuda, which combined traditional Japanese games with Western-style playing cards. In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted Hanafuda cards painted on mulberry tree bark. In South Korea, the cards called Hwatu ( 화투, Battle of flowers).