About

A show-lecture at the Museum of Gambling Games on the history of Japanese gambling and specifically hanafuda — the traditional Japanese flower-card game. Covers the origins of the flower cards, their cultural significance, and the specific hunting-taxonomic conventions of the Japanese game (why boars are counted as fish, hares as birds). Also covers the specific historical trajectory that connects Nintendo — now a global games company — to underground gambling in early-20th-century Japan. In Russian; the visual material carries substance.