Before Mario: Nintendo’s Shady Past Selling Cards To Gamblers

On September 23, 1889, a Kyoto artisan named Fusajiro Yamauchi set up a tiny shop called Nintendo Koppai where he sold hanafuda, Japanese playing cards featuring flowers of the season. Since the Meiji government had lifted its ban on the production of these cards in 1885, this was a perfectly legal operation.

Hanafuda’s first cards were largely handcrafted. Workers punched out sheets of paper from mulberry and mitsumata bark, two common types of raw material used in Japanese papermaking, then painted each individual card by hand using woodblocks, stencils, and natural dyes. Each 48-card set, divided into 12 suits representing the months of the year and depicting seasonal flowers, required a huge amount of effort and manpower. This was not a very convenient process compared to the mass-production methods of modern-day presses.

Gambling for money is against the law in Japan, but that doesn’t stop some organized crime groups from running gambling parlors, and the yakuza were Nintendo’s best customers. To keep players from spotting worn or marked-up cards, parlors tossed them out after just one match and grabbed brand-new ones. Nintendo wasn’t running the gambling itself, just selling a legal product to customers who happened to use it illegally.

The name Nintendo (任天堂) translates to “leave luck to heaven” in English. There is no surviving written record from 1889, but descendants of the Yamauchi family have stated that the original intent of the name is unknown. The famous translation is a traditional, popular saying rather than a recorded company motto.

In 1901, a more luxurious version of hanafuda came out called Daitoryo (president), and the box showed Napoleon Bonaparte. The idea of Western objects being of better quality persisted in Meiji-era Japan, and a European ruler’s visage on the packaging made the cards more refined. There is no record of why Napoleon was used, but Western imagery was common for marketing Japanese products.

Fusajiro Yamauchi bought Western printing machines to make toranpu, 52-card playing cards in the Western style, as a cheaper alternative to importing them. Nintendo’s corporate history dates this to 1902, but printer records show some ambiguity over when exactly he purchased the equipment, and some historians doubt the cards were fully distributed until close to 1907. Either way, this would be Nintendo’s first venture outside of hanafuda.

In 1902, the imperial government of Japan passed a card tax law to raise funds for military expenditure. It levied a 20-sen tax on each deck, nearly doubling the retail price across the country, and over half of Japan’s small manufacturers of playing cards were driven out of business. Nintendo’s larger size and broader product line let it absorb the added tax. Since the law applied to all of Japan’s cardmakers and not just Nintendo, the company ended up even stronger than before.

With the 1902 tax driving smaller buyers away from premium cards, Nintendo released a less expensive line of playing cards called Tengu, named after a mythical creature in Japanese folklore, around 1912 to meet the needs of regional merchants and gambling houses that could not buy Nintendo’s premium decks. With both premium and affordable products on the market, Nintendo was able to keep customers at all levels.

In 1907, Fusajiro Yamauchi agreed to sell Nintendo’s playing cards through Japan’s government-owned tobacco and salt monopoly, which placed them on the counters of cigarette stores all over the country. Nintendo didn’t own any of those stores, but the arrangement gave it an immediate national retail presence much larger than it would have been able to establish by itself.

Fusajiro Yamauchi did not have a son, however, and so when he retired from his role in 1929, he turned the company over to one of his top managers, Sekiryo Kaneda, who had married Fusajiro’s daughter Tei. According to a long-standing tradition in Japan called muko-yoshi, Kaneda was adopted into the Yamauchi family, changing his name to Sekiryo Yamauchi, and was made the company’s second president. This decision would become important 20 years later.

Sekiryo Yamauchi reorganized the firm as a joint venture in 1933 and erected a multi-story Art Deco building for the company’s headquarters on Kyoto’s Kagiyacho street. There, he set up mechanized assembly lines and automated printing presses in place of the traditional hand-craft workshop. By the mid-1930s, Nintendo was the largest industrial producer of playing cards in Japan, a far cry from Fusajiro’s one-room shop.

Japan’s wartime government was strict about what goods civilians could manufacture and what materials they were allowed to buy, and a card-making company simply didn’t qualify. So Nintendo secured state contracts to produce Aikoku Hyakunin Isshu, patriotic poetry cards, replacing the usual classical court poems with military slogans. Nintendo distributed the cards to soldiers and public schools. This wasn’t an armaments industry pivot, but a government order that at least allowed the company to keep its presses working during the conflict.

After World War II, Japan’s economy was in ruins, and Nintendo’s distribution channels had to be established again. On November 20, 1947, Nintendo’s second president, Sekiryo Yamauchi, started a sales subsidiary called Marufuku Co., Ltd., whose logo was a circle around the Japanese character for “fortune.” Marufuku re-established Nintendo’s national coverage and eventually merged with the parent company to create one consolidated Nintendo.

Sekiryo Yamauchi, Nintendo’s then-president, suffered a debilitating stroke in September of 1949. His son-in-law, Shikanojo Yamauchi, had left the family in 1933, when his son Hiroshi Yamauchi was only five, so Shikanojo wasn’t a viable candidate for company president. Sixteen years after Shikanojo’s departure, 21-year-old Hiroshi Yamauchi left law school at Waseda University and became Nintendo’s third president on the condition that he be allowed full autonomy over the company.

Once in power, Hiroshi Yamauchi got rid of old-line managers and family members who questioned his authority and who had argued he was too young for the job. A strike at the company’s factory was another test of his authority. Yamauchi also began bringing in young university graduates to update operations, and in his first few years as president, he changed how Nintendo was led.

In 1951, Hiroshi Yamauchi combined Nintendo’s manufacturing side with Marufuku, the sales company started by his grandfather, Sekiryo, after the war, into a single company, Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd. Yamauchi opened new sales branches in Tokyo and Osaka for the first time, finally putting the scattered parts of the company under one roof.

The NAP, or Nintendo All Plastic, cards were washable and bend-proof playing cards considered the most advanced technology Nintendo had seen in decades. By 1953, Nintendo engineers had perfected their printing technique with synthetic resins, allowing them to begin mass-producing the NAP cards and finally putting an end to the paper and mulberry bark decks they had been making for over 60 years. With NAP cards, Nintendo was able to keep its position as the country’s largest playing card producer, while its new president began to consider what other products could be manufactured.

In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the young president of Nintendo, traveled to the United States to visit the U.S. Playing Card Company (USPCC), which was the largest playing card manufacturer in the world at the time. In Cincinnati, Ohio, Yamauchi saw how tiny the company was and realized that the playing card business as a whole was too small to support Nintendo’s ambitions.

In 1959, Hiroshi Yamauchi struck a deal with Walt Disney Productions, the US animation studio that produced Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to feature its characters on Nintendo playing cards. It was a deliberate move to focus on kids and families instead of adult gamblers, a target market that Yamauchi had pursued after his Cincinnati trip in 1956.

The new Disney card series also came with television commercials, aired at times when kids were sure to be tuned in, a pioneering example in Japan of child-focused marketing. More than 600,000 Disney decks were sold in one year, and the money was used to expand Nintendo’s business beyond cards. Long before Nintendo’s pivot to video games, the company was already looking for new growth opportunities.

This content was created with the help of AI.