Nintendo cards catalogue from the mid 1930s

Some time ago, I posted about a Nintendo company report from 1970, which provided an interesting view inside the company at a time when they were expanding into an allround toy company and just starting out in the field of electronics.

Today we will travel even further back in time, to the mid 1930s, when Nintendo was still fully and solely focussed on their original product: playing cards. At the time Nintendo was the largest manufacturer of playing cards in Japan and under management of its second president Sekiryo Yamauchi, who in 1929 had succeeded his father in law, company founder Fusajiro Yamauchi.

Front (left) and back cover of the mid 1930s Nintendo catalogue

We take our trip through time using a recently surfaced Nintendo product catalogue that is more than eighty years old. The exact publishing date is not known, but based on the content, it is believed to be from between 1933 and 1937.

The catalogue measures 19.2 by 8.6 centimeters when closed. It contains 16 pages that fold out to double that width. It is printed double-sided in four colours: black, red, green and blue. Different to Western catalogues and modern day Japanese ones, the pages of the catalogue open on the left. The Japanese writing is top-to-bottom and right-to-left, as was also common at the time.

Although the catalogue contains some information in English, it is aimed at a Japanse speaking audience, with all sales information in Japanese only.

The catalogue contains four pages with information about the company, four pages with general marketing information about their playing cards, and eight pages with tables listing all products and their sales prices.

Rare photos of Nintendo's playing card factory in the 1960s

In the previous post about my recent get together with Isao Yamazaki in Tokyo, I mentioned that Isao showed me some vintage photos taken at Nintendo's playing card factory. In this post we will take a closer look at these special glimpses into Nintendo's past.

Although I am not sure about the exact date these pictures were taken, I believe they are from the late 1960s, as they also appear in a company overview from 1970.

The first three pictures below show the various steps of the production of Hanafuda cards. Hanafuda are the traditional Japanese playing cards that Nintendo started producing as their first product in 1889.

Since those early days, when the cards were made completely by hand in a small workshop, the production process has come a long way. At the time these pictures were taken, the cards were mass produced in a semi-automated factory, with machines supporting the multiple manual steps carried out by a large army of women and a handful of men operating the larger machines.

Nintendo Trump and Hanafuda cards key-rings (トランプと花札カードキーリング, ca1965)

The image below shows two standard-size vintage Nintendo playing card sets. At least, that's what they look like at first glance. The style of the plastic case and sleeve dates them around the first half of the 1960s.

But when we remove the sleeves, we see that there is actually more to this; these are no standard packs of cards at all.

Each of the cases contains a gold-coloured metal key-ring, presented in a purple velvet bed.