We'd all probably love to have a job at Nintendo these days, but back in the 1950s - when Ninty was a manufacturer of playing cards (specifically, a popular Japanese game called 'hanafuda') - things were a little different. Decades before its move towards video games, the firm was going through some internal struggles, which led to its third president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, transforming the company with a raft of new reforms.
Those reforms, which were brought to light in a recent article by Kotaku (and expanded upon in the book The History of Nintendo: 1889-1980), saw Yamauchi close some factories down in an attempt to centralise Nintendo's output. The company's labour union wasn't happy about this upheaval, eventually leading to it to go on hunger strike in protest. Yamauchi refused to back down, and eventually the protest fizzled out.
It's a odd little piece of Nintendo history, but it shows you just how much the company has changed over the years. But what do you make of it? And has anyone actually played 'hanafuda', because now we're intrigued...
[source kotaku.com]
Comments 16
Is it just me or does anyone else find old black and white photographs haunting?
Well obviously Hanafuda was not the future (or at least the potential) of the company and Hiroshi knew it. A stern visionary.
I can feel the pain and suffers from Japan after World War 2 & after Nagasaki + Hiroshima bombed.
@Anti-Matter I can feel the extended pain and suffering of the Allied nations and the Dutch citizens being starved to death in Japanese concentration camps had the war drawn on for months or years thanks to Hirohito's refusal to surrender.
Interesting
Hooray! This is the 63th anniversary of the hunger strike at Nintendo!
@dizzy_boy That's so unimaginably bad it's almost good....
@NinChocolate Please tell the Intelligent Systems team responsible for Color Splash about that. They apparently have yet to get the memo.
@FragRed Not just you. Photographers are well aware of the power of B&W which is why it's still not dead as an art form and is in fact quite expensive in processing given the choices of papers and their subtle effects on toning. Something about B&W captures the "soul" of the subject in a way color cant, I believe by reducing it to it's pure tonalities and setting a harsh contrast, and forcing the brain to see the subject purely without distraction AND almost create it's own reconstruction of it in the brain to color it in and rebuild the scene as it was. That personalized reconstruction tends to make that moment in time much more "real" and tangible than simply looking at a full color representation because a part of your brain is seeing it first-hand in reality. "High-art" photography remains predominantly B&W. (Plus it has the benefit of segmenting it from commercial art and commodity photography since it's all but dead there )
Are people really trying to reignite the world war 2 argument in here
@Anti-Matter That has nothing to do with this article.
Some of their promo playing cards from the 60's...
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/162839103004?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
'News'
There is no other video game company with history like this.
Interesting how policy has changed in time - Iwata took a salary cut to avoid firing people when the company’s results weren’t as they expected.
These little tidbits of history are always fun!
@JHDK Lets just agree war is bad for humanity.
I got some hanafuda cards for Christmas too. It’s a deck of small, thick, slick cards that each have a different picture of flowers on them. It’s time to party like it’s 1889!
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