Hanafuda

[3] On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, tanzaku (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects.

The back side is usually plain, without a pattern or design of any kind, and traditionally colored either red or black.

In Korea, hanafuda are known as hwatu (Korean: 화투, Hanja: 花鬪, 'flower battle') and made of plastic with a textured back side.

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).

[14] Through the Meiwa, An'ei, and Tenmei eras (roughly 1764–1789), a game called Mekuri took the place of Yomi.

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 majority of hanafuda games are descended from Mekuri although Yomi adaptations for the flower cards survived until the 20th century.

In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted hanafuda.

[17] 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.

[9] Since then, companies and individuals in Korea and Hawaii have produced their own hanafuda, sometimes adapting the original Japanese imagery to fit either culture.

Early hanafuda had poems in order to disguise themselves as Uta-garuta, but the text had since been simplified in modern times.