Before Mario, Nintendo Made Cards for Japan’s Gambling Dens

You can still buy the deck today: forty-eight cards, no numbers printed anywhere, no suits in the Western sense. Instead it is divided into twelve sets of four, one set for each month of the year, each marked by a flower or plant — pine for January, plum for February, cherry blossom for March, on through the chrysanthemums of autumn and the paulownia of December. To an inspector it could pass for a calendar or a set of seasonal illustrations. To a gambler the months and flowers were just a code for the values underneath. They are called hanafuda — “flower cards” — and every choice in their design is a fingerprint of the thing they were built to survive.

What they survived was three centuries of prohibition. The deck’s ancestor arrived from the sea. In 1543, a storm-blown ship carrying Portuguese traders — the first Europeans ever to reach Japan — ran aground on the island of Tanegashima, off the country’s southern tip, and in the trade that opened up behind them, Portuguese sailors brought their forty-eight-card decks ashore. The Japanese had nothing like them. They called the cards karuta, a straight borrowing of the Portuguese carta, and within a generation gamblers across the country were betting on hands of them.

That was the problem. Cards were small, portable, and ideal for wagering, and the authorities who would soon seal Japan off from the outside world did not like games of chance spreading through the ports. When the Tokugawa shogunate closed the country in the 1630s under the policy of sakoku, the decks the Portuguese had inspired were banned — condemned as gambling tools and as carriers of foreign influence — and the Portuguese themselves were expelled.

A Deck Designed to Be Invisible

What followed was not the end of card games but a long, slow contest between the people who made them and the officials trying to stamp them out. The shogunate would ban a card design. Manufacturers would invent a new one. The new one would catch on among gamblers, the authorities would ban that, and the cycle would begin again. Each banned deck pushed the next one further from anything that looked like the original Portuguese cards — away from numbers, away from the four suits, away from any sign of foreign origin at all.

The hanafuda deck is the endpoint of that long retreat. It keeps forty-eight cards, the same count as the Portuguese original, but hides the structure completely. The abstraction was the whole point. By stripping out every legible number, the flower cards made it possible to keep playing the same betting games the shogunate kept outlawing, because there was no longer any obvious thing to outlaw. The cards looked like art.

A Word for a Worthless Hand

How thoroughly these cards belonged to the gambling world shows up in the language. One of the games played with a related deck was oicho-kabu, a counting game close to baccarat: players draw cards and try to land on a total that ends in nine, since only the last digit of the sum matters. A hand of eight, nine, and three adds up to twenty — a final digit of zero, the worst possible score, completely worthless.

Eight, nine, and three, spoken in the old gambling slang, are ya, ku, za. The card sharks took that dead hand as a name for themselves — the good-for-nothings, the men society had no use for. Yakuza. The Japanese word for the country’s organized crime syndicates comes straight off a losing hand of cards.

Leave Luck to Heaven

The ban finally eased in 1885, when the Meiji government — prodded by complaints from foreign officials — lifted the old prohibition on Western playing cards, and the flower cards followed through the gap. Card-makers who had operated in the shadows could now sell in the open. On September 23, 1889, a Kyoto craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi started a small business doing exactly that, hand-crafting hanafuda decks and selling them from a shop in the city.

He called it Nintendo Koppai. The name Nintendo is usually translated “leave luck to heaven” — a fitting motto for a gambling-card maker, though no historical record confirms what Yamauchi meant by it. The cards were made the slow way, layers of paper pasted together and stiffened so that a player could snap one down on a tatami mat with a sharp, satisfying clack. They sold well enough that Yamauchi had to hire assistants to keep up.

Respectability was another matter. Even legal, hanafuda carried the smell of the gambling den, and the den was where the money was. Nintendo’s surest customers were the very people the cards had been designed to serve: the professional gamblers and the syndicates that ran the games. A fresh deck was bought, used for a single session so no one could mark it, and thrown away. The yakuza went through cards by the box. Nintendo’s top brand caught the contradiction perfectly: it was called Daitoryo — “the President” — yet the box was stamped not with a president but with the face of Napoleon Bonaparte, an emperor. Yamauchi pushed his cards out through tobacco shops across the country, and the steady trade in flower cards became the financial bedrock the company stood on for the better part of a century.

The Inheritance

Yamauchi had no son, so he did what Japanese merchant families did: he adopted his son-in-law into the family, who took the Yamauchi name and the company with it. In 1949, after the second-generation president suffered a stroke, the firm fell to his grandson, a twenty-one-year-old named Hiroshi Yamauchi, who left university to run it. He agreed only on the condition that no other relative work alongside him.

Hiroshi inherited a card company. In 1959 he struck a deal with Disney to print Mickey Mouse and his friends on Western-style playing cards, dragging Nintendo’s product out of the gambling dens and into ordinary family homes. Sold alongside booklets explaining the games a family could play, the Disney decks were a sensation — at least 600,000 packs in a single year — and the success helped carry the company onto the Osaka and Kyoto stock exchanges. From there Hiroshi spent decades hunting for something larger than cards — toys, a taxi service, instant rice — before the company found its way into electronic games and, eventually, into Mario, the Game Boy, and the living rooms of the world.

The card business never stopped. The deck on sale in Japan now — forty-eight flowers laid out across twelve months, printed by the company that made it famous — is the same one that opened this story: the disguise drawn up centuries ago to outwit a shogun’s inspectors, carried all the way to the company that made Mario, and never quite left behind.