Hanafuda

This holds my favorite paradox on this map. When the Kansei Reforms (from 1789) tightened the crackdown on card gambling, Gisuke Yamaguchiya of Kyoto dropped the numbers. In their place he put pine and crane, cherry blossom and curtain, pampas grass and moon — the flowers, birds, wind, and moon of the four seasons. He named the product Musashino. It was a disguise, meant to make the cards look like anything but gambling tools. Some makers slipped classical poems onto plain cards to pass them off as uta-garuta, poem cards. Every time the cards were banned, the designs changed, the names changed, and the cards survived. That is how those beautiful flower cards came to be. The crackdowns raised the design. One date worth setting straight: in 1886 (Meiji 19), Kihei Maeda began selling hanafuda in Tokyo, and the government looked the other way — a de facto lifting of the ban. Then in 1902 (Meiji 35), the Playing Card Tax Law made hanafuda a taxed, legal good. From something to be banned to something to be taxed. That same year, a small hanafuda shop in Kyoto began making Japan's first Western-style playing cards — the next node.