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WAY MORE STUFF THAN YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HANAFUDA (GO-STOP) CARDS AND DECKS

Where to get hanafuda decks? You can often find them for auction at eBay, and I know a lovely little shop in Los Angeles' "Little Tokyo" district, and a spectacular shop in "big" Tokyo. If you ever go to Tokyo, you can click here to find great places to shop for games. Now that I've discovered Korean GO-STOP, I've found that decks are available at Korean supermarkets here in L.A. We have a big Koreatown here in L.A. - I've yet to explore all the supermarkets here. Watch this site for further developments.

You should check Bun-ka Do if you want to buy some hanafuda decks. They also have Japanese mah-jongg sets for sale.

You might still be able to get hanafuda at Kinokuniya bookstore in Little Tokyo Upstairs in Weller Court, near the Space Shuttle monument.

You can also check the shops in Japanese Village Plaza in the heart of Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. One store I used to have listed here no longer exists, but it's fun to walk around and check out the shops. The street is short, so it doesn't take long to shop it thoroughly.

If you want Korean cards (they're plastic instead of paper, and they come with extra joker cards), you can go to Koreatown and ask in any big grocery store. I'm serious. Korean grocery stores often carry hwa-tu. You might have to say "go-stope" (or "go-stoap" - put a long O sound in "stop").

Click here to post a hanafuda question on the Maj Exchange bulletin board. It would be great to get hanafuda questions on that board.

The Shogundo Playingcard Company is one publisher of hanafuda decks. Their decks come in different boxes (as shown below).

I suppose these pictures from the side of Shogundo packages may also indicate other available package designs:

As was mentioned before, another manufacturer of hanafuda decks is Nintendo, the videogame manufacturer. Nintendo offers hanafuda decks in three different boxes, which look like this:

The different wrappers denote different qualities (materials) of cards. The Napoleon wrappers contain the highest-quality (most expensive) cards. The Tengu (red-faced, big-nosed guy) wrappers contain the medium-quality cards. A word of warning: if you buy a deck of Nintendo cards with one of those three designs on the outside, you may need to make certain that the cards inside truly are hanafuda cards -- because, you see, Nintendo also offers two other kinds of cards, the same size as hanafuda. And they package those other cards in packages practically identical to the hanafuda packages!

The six cards shown above are called "Harifuda," and represent the numbers One through Six (left to right). There are seven of each card. I learned only a little about the game played with these cards (it's a much less interesting game than the hanafuda games, at least that's my opinion).

And here (below) is another type of cards. These are called Kabufuda.

(This photo is from the Nintendo website. If someone from Nintendo objects to my use of this image, I'll take my own photo of my own kabufuda deck and apologize.)

Koi-koi and other hanafuda games cannot be played with Harifuda or Kabufuda cards. You will probably only encounter these other styles of cards if you are hanafuda-shopping in Japan. If in doubt, you can always just point to the box and say to the store clerk, "Hanafuda?" If the clerk doesn't know, you can check on the box for these kanji characters:

The characters on the left are from a hanafuda deck. The characters on the right are from a harifuda deck. Make sure you're getting the right thing! Ask.

Another type of fun little cards available in Japan is "Irohakaruta."

The name Irohakaruta comes from "I Ro Ha," which is analogous to our "A B C." At the upper left of the picture you can see picture cards - one for each of the 48 letters of the Japanese alphabet. There are also 48 phrase cards (lower right) - each phrase begins with a letter of the alphabet. There are also 4 extra cards (making for a total of 100 cards in all). The cards are small, measuring 1-1/4" x 7/8". At the right is the box they come in; the big characters say (guess what): "Irohakaruta."

If you are enjoying these different kinds of cards, why not check out Mah-Jongg FAQ 7i, all about mah-jongg cards and kards.

But I digress - we were talking about hanafuda. For the sake of going into nauseating detail, here are a couple more pictures of the wrapper from a Nintendo hanafuda deck:

Here's a picture of a hanafuda deck entitled "Kwa-do":

I first learned of this deck (and got the pictures of it) from a newsgroup posting. The cards are not the standard Japanese size - they are instead standard Western playing-card size. The cards contain some printing indicating that they were made by Diamond.

Anyway, five of the Kwa-Do cards have a special symbol on them. This is the Chinese character for "Bright" - these are the twenty-point cards after all. Two cards have a Diamond logo on them. This is so that these cards can be used as jokers, a Korean practice. Two more things worth noting about this deck -- there are two copies of the Rain & Lightning card (one with Diamond logo, and one without - for when the card is or is not used as a gaji or joker - or as a "double-junk" card - see Korean Go-Stop. And there are two extra cards -- one with the Diamond logo and one with a big spade design. "Kwa-Do" (or is it "Hwa-Do" with a weird font) is available in the USA through US Game Systems, 179 Ludlow Street, Stamford CT 06902.

More about Kwa-Do, from the Maj Exchange Q&A bulletin board....

---

Name: benjamin
Email: jojinyoung©aol,com
Date: 04 Oct 2003


Comments

Hi Tom, I was looking at your Go-Stop page. I was interested to see your deck of Kwa-do cards. When I lived in Korea, I bought myself a deck of hanafuda. I pulled it out and was looking all over your page. It is like the more traditional japanese style decks. I will try to send some pics sometime. But I was going to try and find out some more about Kwa-do. It is the Diamond Brand, in fact, that is what it says in korean, di-ya-mon-du. The name kwa-do has something to do with the chinese charactor kwang or bright. Kind of like a bright knife or (?)fruit knife. But as you probably know already, the do of kwa do has several meanings. knife, martial art, or the way or path. So how about a poetic meaning? the path of brightness perhaps? The two cards that show the manufacturer's name in chinese charactors say ,"samwonsanupsah" or the Sam Won company. Take care, you have the best websites on the web.

Benjamin

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More about Go-Stop, from the Game Design Q&A bulletin board....

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Name: Hyun-Seok Kim
Email: lonelypeanut©hanmail:net
Age-Ed-Occ: 29, Self imployed.
Date: 05 Oct 2003


Comments

Oh I almost forgot, about Hanafuda, Korean's call it Go-Stop. It's Korean versen of Hanafuda games in Japan. The rules and points are little different from what you explained on Hanfuda Zone. It could be played with four people and one get to sell cards with chinese character for light on it for certain amount. So the actural game play is done by three or two people. For three people, you win if you get 3 points and for two people, you win if you get 5 points. When you win, you could say stop to collect money or go for more points.

It's a game of umm... highly... adictive and umm strong ummm... inclination to gambling, but almost all Korean people play Go-Stop. :)

---

Since Hyun-Seok wrote me, I've been to Korea and seen this for myself! I've since written about Korean Go-Stop.

Korean hwa-tu (hanafuda cards) can be used to play Japanese mah-jongg, but Koreans use extra cards not included in Japanese decks. The following is about Japanese hanafuda (written before I'd learned so much about Korean cards).

Pictured below are the 49th ("blank") cards from two different Japanese hanafuda decks. The one on the left comes from a Nintendo deck. It's clearly stamped with the date of manufacture (1973, a decade before Nintendo started making electronic games) -- and an incomplete stamp of what appears to be the name of the inspector who checked the deck before it was wrapped for sale. It appears that the inspector's name is Takegawa (Bamboo River). Inspector Takegawa did fine by me -- I'm happy with the quality of my deck!

As for the characters on the card on the right, I don't know what it says, and I haven't tried to find out. I guess the word "blank" doesn't quite apply, though, huh? (~_^)

You may have noticed that the cards pictured here sometimes have a brown border and sometimes black. Japanese hanafuda decks come in two colors: brown or black. Players normally keep two decks. This way, the brown deck can be shuffling while the black deck is in play.

Here are some more examples of the writing that can be seen on the One Paulownia cards in various decks. Here (above) you can see the One Paulownias from the Shogundo Playingcard Company's deck. The 8-petaled motif on the yellow one is Shogundo's symbol. And below: the same cards, from a different Japanese deck.

You can see that only one of the cards has writing on it (its writing is identical to the writing on one of the Nintendo cards (below) -- and in comparison with the corresponding card in the Shogundo deck above, the first character is different (the last three characters are the same).

Each manufacturer of cards does something a little different. Don't get too worried about trying to determine what is special about any particular cards, if you are uncertain -- just play with them any way that you find fun.

A HANAFUDA "ROSETTA STONE"

Hanafuda cards come from Japan. Many people play several varieties of different hanafuda games, having learned them by word of mouth or from translated rules. Each translator uses different terms, and so as you encounter different hanafuda information, you are likely to be confused by the disparity in terminology. This grid may just confuse you, or it may help you decipher other info you come across:

Month	Flower	Mark's terms (1)	Kwa-Do's terms	Also	Japanese terms
January	Pine	Cactus	Pine tree		Matsu
February	Plum	Cherry blossom (2)	Plum tree		Ume
March	Cherry blossom	Sakura	Cherry tree		Sakura
April	Wisteria	Purple Fern	Bushclover (3)	Black Beans	Fuji or Kuromame
May	Iris	Lily	Iris	Grass (4)	Ayame or Kusa
June	Peony	Rose	Peony		Botan
July	Bush clover	Red Fern	Colored bushclover (3)	Red Beans	Hagi or Akamame
August	Pampas	Moon	Moon	Grass (4) or Bald Head	Susuki or Bozu
September	Chrysanthemum	Chrysanthemum	Chrysanthemum		Kiku
October	Maple	Stars (shaped)	Maple	Deer	Momiji or Shika
November	Willow	Grass (4)	Empress tree	Rain (5)	Yanagi or Ame
December	Paulownia	Taro-Leaf	Rain (5)	Chicken	Kiri
Card value	Dave's terms	Hawaiian terms (6)	Sakura Taisen	Also	Japanese
1-point cards	Junk	Zero point cards	Junk		Kasu
5-point cards	Flags	Ten point cards	Tan		Tanzaku
10-point cards	Animals	Five point cards	Tane
20-point cards	Biggies	20 point cards	Light	Coins or Bright	Kwang (Korean)
Card descrip.	Japan Pubs.	Mark's terms	Other terms	Also	Japanese
Purple ribbon	Blue tanzaku		Blue tan		Aoi tan
Poetry ribbon	Red tanzaku		Signed red tan		Akai tan
Plain red ribbon	Tanzaku				Tanzaku
Sak�E cup	Wine cup		Shield	Bowl
Phoenix		Chicken
Rainman	Poet	Grass man	Rain
Yellow December		Yellow taro-leaf
Crane			Sun

Footnotes:

1. Mark Hashimoto has programmed a small hanafuda game (it's not Koi-koi, it's the Hawaiian game of Higo Bana); his game comes on two floppies and costs $5. See http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/4525/

2. "Sakura" means "Cherry blossom" so it is obviously incorrect to have both a "cherry blossom" suit and a "sakura" suit.

3. The April and July flowers are not similar -- they are not both ferns, and they are not both clovers. They're not really "beans" either, but that's beside the point. Observe that the Wisteria branches hang down whereas the Bush Clover branches stick up.

4. Note that three different suits are referred to as "grass" by various sources. If you play against someone who learned the game elsewhere, just recognize that the two of you may use differing terminologies (and different rules too, of course). Don't fight about the terminology -- get over it, and play!

5. Here's another conflicting term. Other sources consistently refer to November (not December) as "rain," due to the umbrella held by the poet in the November twenty -- and you'll recall that the November Junk card is called "rain and lightning."

6. Under the rules of the Hawaiian game of "Higo Bana," the cards have different point values -- the fives and tens are swapped in value.

From: eric.rubli©alumni,uottawa,ca
Subject: Nintendo and Hanafuda
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 03:53:07 EST5EDT
>
>Dear Tom:
>
> Just some information I found that you may or may not know since in some areas of the page you say you do not know and the wording in other areas somewhat imply that you know. Anyways, it appears that Nintendo still makes Hanafuda cards as can be seen on this page from their Japanese Web-site:
>
>http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n09/hana-kabu_items/index.html
>
>They also appear to supply rules for playing on their web-site:
>
>http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n09/hana-kabu_games/index.html
>
>I don't know any Japanese so it is only an assumption that they still make these cards, but from the page layout I believe it is a safe assumption.
>
>~Eric
>R.

Hey thanks for the links, Eric. You might want to try using Eigo-Navi. It's a great tool that not only puts English right into the Japanese-language web page you're looking at, but also lets you follow links on the translated page, and it'll translate those too.

The site is http://eigo-navi.com/. Put any URL into the URL box. The box to the right of that is set (by default) to translate from English to Japanese. So you have to click the down-arrow to change the setting. The 2nd one from top is Japanese>English.

I kind of suspected that Nintendo might still be making hanafuda (since their decks are often still available in stores, even here in L.A.)...

Thanks to you, I have now modified the "More about Hanafuda" page to remove any past-tense references to Nintendo's making of hanafuda decks. There may well be others I didn't find and root out... (^_^) http://www.sloperama.com/hanafuda.html.

Yoroshiku!
Tom
Tom Sloper
Los Angeles, CA
Date: June 19, 2004

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Can you point me to information about fortune telling with hwa-tu / hanafuda flower cards?

>From: E. H
>Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 11:51 PM
>Subject: go-stop fortune telling?
>Howdy,
>i just rediscovered my go-stop cards and remember someone in Korea teaching me the game.
>I also remember a Korean woman teaching me how to tell fortunes with the cards while we were in college in Boston.
>Can you point me to the directions/rules for fortune telling with the Korean/Japanese cards?
>-Erik

Hi Erik,
If I knew of such information, I'd've linked to it in my hanafuda Links page (http://www.sloperama.com/hanafuda/links.htm).

But hey, how's your Hangul? I went on Babelfish and typed in "fortune-telling" and got 운 말. And the Hangul for go-stop is 고스톱. So if you go on Google.co.kr and search for 고스톱 운 말 you might find some information. Probably more likely to find it in Korean than English. Good luck!

Tom Sloper
Author of "The Red Dragon & The West Wind," the definitive book on mah-jongg East & West.
トム·スローパー   /   湯姆 斯洛珀  /  탐 슬로퍼
Los Angeles, CA (USA)
September 7, 2008

---

We pickandrack, part 2

>From: Wendy O
>Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 10:22 AM
>Subject: Re: Mah-Jongg Q+A
>Thx for the quick reply. Understand that 98% of the time we discard and name a tile simultaneously, do the gap doesn’t exist. But we are old. Occasionally our thoughts may lag a tad. No matter. Mostly we just put the tile back if someone calls. This was unusual. My call was a little late. He rack a little early. Bottom line, it’s the audible that makes the tile available and the premature racking before the audible is out of line. Correct?

Hi, Wendy! You wrote:

it’s the audible that makes the tile available and the premature racking before the audible is out of line. Correct?
That is my opinion, yes. But I am not the authority on NMJL rules. If you want the official rule, you should send a snailmail letter to the NMJL. Their address is on the card. See http://sloperama.com/mjfaq/mjfaq19.html#bnFAQ 19-BN.

May the tiles be with you.
Tom Sloper

Creator of the weekly Mah-Jongg column and the Mah-Jongg FAQs -- donations appreciated!
Author of "The Red Dragon & The West Wind," the definitive book on Mah-Jongg East & West.
Los Angeles, California, USA
October 19, 2018 7:20 PM

---

Hanafuda in Seattle

>From: Pete S
>Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 9:26 AM
>Subject: Hanafuda in Seattle
>Hi Tom,
>I have something for you to add to your Hanafuda FAQ. The cards are are
>available at the Daiso chain of stores. We have two here in Seattle. The
>deck will set you back $1.50 ($1.65 with tax). It is made for Daiso by a
>Korean company. The deck comes with 6 blank cards and are made from PVC
>so they are very stiff and the package recommends "Do not throw cards to
>person. It might cause hurt." They come in a plastic storage box. I am
>very happy with them and they are so inexpensive I bought two decks and
>marked one with months and points to help learn/teach the game to newbies.
>Later
>-Pete-

Great, Pete! I'll add that to the More About Hanafuda/Go-Stop page. Thank you!
May the tiles be with you (and not flung at another person).
Tom Sloper

Creator of the weekly Mah-Jongg column and the Mah-Jongg FAQs -- donations appreciated!
Author of "The Red Dragon & The West Wind," the definitive book on Mah-Jongg East & West.
Los Angeles, California, USA
October 19, 2018 7:20 PM

If you are enjoying these hanafuda cards, why not check out Mah-Jongg FAQ 7i, all about mah-jongg cards and kards.

Click to go to the next page: Hanafuda Links

Copyright 2000-2018 Tom Sloper. All rights reserved. May not be re-published without written permission of the author. The Nintendo name is a trademark of Nintendo Co. Ltd.