Written by Sam Frederick, Edited by Daien Ide and Linda Kawamoto Reid
These sets of Japanese playing cards are hanafuda, also known as flower cards. They belonged to Fukuyo Chiba (nee Kawamoto), who was born in Canada in 1912 to parents Sansuke Kawamoto and Koto Kawamoto (nee Tanaka).
While Fukuyo’s sets likely date from the 1930s, hanafuda has a history that dates back to the 1700s in Japan. The cards feature handcrafted designs and are quite small in size, only about 4 cm by 6 cm. The decks are made up of 48 cards with twelve suits. Each suit represents a month of the year and is paired with seasonal floral imagery, giving the cards their name. The cards pictured here include illustrations of peonies for July, plum blossoms for February, and paulownia for December. A complex game involving matching cards, players can play up to twelve rounds to represent a full year.
The owner of these cards, Fukuyo Chiba, was a dressmaker living in Vancouver, BC post-war. Her family ran a successful berry farm in Port Hammond, sponsoring workers from Japan to help out with the farm labour before the Second World War. Fukuyo’s sister Kimiko married Genzaburo Nakamura, both of whom contributed to the Nakamura family florist business on Powell Street, with Kimiko assisting with flower arrangements and Genzaburo as bookkeeper and delivery person. Some of the flowers depicted on the hanafuda sets, like the peonies, would have been sold in the Nakamura florist shop from 1925 to 1942.
In 1942, when the Canadian government ordered that Japanese Canadians be forcibly removed from the west coast, Fukuyo and her husband Koichi joined his parents in Okanagan Centre while her parents and many of her siblings went to the self-supporting camp in East Lillooet. Stricken with tuberculosis, Kimiko was moved from St. Joseph’s Oriental Hospital to Hastings Park Hospital until the New Denver sanatorium was opened. Later, she was reunited with her husband and daughter in New Denver. The families’ businesses were also forcibly sold by the government: Nakamura Florist was liquidated to the Office of the Custodian and the Kawamoto farmlands were sold to the Veterans’ Land Act Director. After the war, Fukuyo and her husband would settle in Kelowna with much of the Kawamoto family reuniting in Vernon, BC. A close-knit family, the Kawamoto clan would have played regular card games and hanafuda when they got together.
Fukuyo’s hanafuda sets are some of the objects from our collection that were photographed by artist Ken Mizokoshi for his project, Remains Nikkei. Ken uses the medium of photography to bring animated memories out of inanimate objects, particularly objects that were personal belongings of Japanese Canadians who were interned in Canada’s interior during the Second World War. Ken’s work, along with that of four other Nikkei artists, is currently on display as part of Umami: Savouring Artistic Nikkei Identity, Part 1, on until May 17, 2025. Part 2 will launch on May 27 and run until September 27, 2025.
Image: Hanafuda cards belonging to Fukuyo Chiba. Genzaburo and Kimiko Nakamura Family Collection. Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre 2012.10.2.7. circa 1930
