The court card is not distinguishable as anything much.
The joker is known as an onifuda ("demon card").
Japanese mame deck – komaru pattern. Ohishi-Tengudo, Kyoto, Japan. Regular deck, Japanese, 42 cards. Size: 31mm x 51mm.
Deck make-up:
Suit of coins: 1-9, jack (knight) (four copies of each; one copy of each of the 1, 3 and 4 has a different design).
Extras: onifuda joker, blank spare card.
During the mid-18th century, Japanese tastes in card games began to change from those which required suits that allowed for trumping (as per ombre and bridge) or matching, to those more along the baccarat line (where the object is to get a numeric total closest to nine). Decks with four suits were thus no longer deemed necessary and so the established mekuri patterns mutated into decks with four copies of the same suit (instead of one copy each of four different suits).
Two of the mekuri suits were borrowed for these new single-suited decks: coins formed patterns known as mame, and clubs / batons as kabu *.
(* Confusingly, "kabu" also sometimes functions as an overall designation for both of the single-suited mekuri derivatives, i.e. the clubs / batons suit and the coins (mame) suit. Here I use it to mean just the clubs / batons type, for clarity.)
Mame patterns – single-suited decks using the coins suit – have either 40 cards (i.e. ten ranks, with ranks 1-9 and one court card) or 48 cards (i.e. twelve ranks, with ranks 1-9 and three courts). There are four copies of each rank.
For what seems to be a long-lost reason, in just one of the four runs of the ranks, certain values are picked out for special alterations to their design. In mame decks, this always includes the 1, 3 and 4 (though one pattern, kudosan (aka kudoyama), gives this special status to all twelve cards in one run). The special 4s, for some reason, have design features pinched from the club / baton suit of mekuri decks (i.e. black bars instead of round pips).
An incomplete list of mame pattern names is (in alphabetical order): daini, komaru, kudosan / kudoyama, mameichiroku, mefuda. Various sample cards are given below to show the variation. As always, click for a bigger look.
Mame patterns died out around the middle of the 20th century. The only exceptions now are the remnants used in the guess-the-picked-card betting game tehonbiki (below) and a collector's deck issued by Ohishi-Tengudo.
Though once you could buy the components of this game separately, these days tehonbiki often comes as a kit containing all the bits and pieces needed to play the game. The kit includes wooden indicator blocks, dice, often a playing mat, and two different sets of cards.
The first set of cards included are used by the game's betting players (rather than the banker) and are of a pattern unique to this game. They are called harifuda and are medium in size (about the same size as most other pasteboard Japanese cards of this type). They consist of stylised representations of the Japanese numerals 1 through 6 (see table below) and there are a number of copies of each value – these cards are shown in the top part of the second picture below. The dice and wooden indicators included with the game show the same set of graphics.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 一 | 二 | 三 | 四 | 五 | 六 |
The second set of cards are smaller – these are the ones in the mame style as mentioned above and are referred to as hikifuda (or kurifuda or, unsurprisingly, mamefuda). These are used by the banker and again consist of values 1 through 6 but this time shown in "pip" style, again with multiple copies of each. These are the cards shown in the bottom part of the second picture below. The pattern used is called mameichiroku. (Note that some tehonbiki kits have this second set of cards with the same graphics as the first set rather than using the mame pattern as here. After all, apart from tradition, there is no real reason for the use of two ways of indicating the same values.)
As stated, the sole mame deck now being produced (apart from in tehonbiki, as discussed) is this collector's version of a pattern called komaru (which would appear to be named after either Castle Komaru or Mount Komaru or taken from the Japanese for "to be worried"). This is made by Ohishi-Tengudo, and is shown below.
Click on any card to explore the design.
(Comments or corrections, please e-mail: Click to see e-mail address.)
Card image size, below:
As is common in mame patterns, one copy (of the four) of the 1, the 3 and the 4 have a different style, as shown at the bottom; the 4 seems to use clubs / batons (instead of coins) and seems, stylistically, to have drifted over from the so-named suit of the mekuri or kabu patterns.
In this pattern at least, the court would seem to be a stylised knight (hence the legs of the horse) but that is just a guess. Meanwhile, the curves on the 1s maybe recall the dragons which featured on the Portuguese ancestors of this deck.
The joker here features a demon. Depending on pattern and manufacturer, the demon in this and similar Japanese decks can take various visual forms (including a Wicker Man-style colossus or a ghostly female figure).
The presentation box of this deck was supposed to be made of paulownia wood. According to the net, that's a hardwood. But this box was a very, very soft wood – something like balsa. Hmm.
