This amazing pair of sliding doors attests to the uncommon creativity with which the Japanese people approached and adapted things Western. The Spanish/Portuguese 48-card deck arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century, supposedly brought by Francis Xavier. It had 4 suits - cups, swords, coins, and clubs - said to represent the four classes of medieval Europe: priests, knights, merchants, and peasants. These four suits are pictured here, plus one that is unique to Japan. It will be noticed that the Japanese, not quite understanding the motif of the chalice, favoured picturing it upside down like a Buddhist jewel, with the stem sprouting from the top. At some point in their love affair with European playing cards, the Japanese added a fifth suit, marked by the ‘three jewels’, or tomoe, crest, symbolising bounty. Within these five suits we find the mounted horseman, the maiden, the dragon, a Chinese-looking high official, and figures from the Japanese Seven Lucky Gods (see Daikoku, his mallet, and his bale of rice symbolising plenty at the extreme right). The dragon motif, a feature of the original Iberian set long associated with Portugal, must have been particularly popular in Japan, even though the winged dragon suggests St. George - a Christian motif that surely would have displeased Japanese authorities.

It is possible that this eclectic amalgam of card-characters can be explained by the Japanese association of the Iberians with material bounty because of the rare and precious commodities they brought. The idea of a riches-bringing ship became conflated with the native notion of the takarabune [treasure ship], whose passengers are the Seven Lucky Gods - a common image in folklore. The message seems to be ‘good things come by sea’. The foreign notion of card games caught on like wildfire and was subject to constant regulation by the Tokugawa shogunate, which frowned on gambling. Decks went through various permutations to get around the proscriptions, including the revised pack called Unsum Karuta - a mix of European, Chinese, and Japanese motifs - which may be what is pictured here.

A view of one of these seventeen cards pasted on to a dark grey background shows that their reverse sides are blank. A comparable one-sided pack is found on the famous 17th-century Entertainments at a House of Pleasure screen in the Suntory Museum, Tokyo. The whimsical rendition of the various figures combines Japanese touches (like the native bit in the cavalier’s horse’s mouth) or the knight’s armour that resembles that of a samurai, and partially-understood motifs like the upside-down cups and the beautiful bundle staves interwoven like a bamboo fence.

Despite official disapproval, card playing in Japan came to be enjoyed by the majority of the Japanese. It is interesting to note that the game company Nintendo began as a card-manufacturing business in the late nineteenth century.