The First Cards to Arrive Were Not Tarot
In the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese traders arrived in Japan carrying, among other things, decks of playing cards — stiff paper cards the Portuguese called carta. The Japanese adopted both the cards and the word, which became karuta. These were not tarot cards. They were ordinary European playing cards of the period: four suits — cups, coins, clubs, and swords — numbered one through nine with three face cards each, forty-eight cards in total. The suit of swords, incidentally, is one that tarot decks share — both trace back to the same broader family of European card traditions, but they are cousins, not the same thing.
What happened to these cards in Japan over the following centuries is its own story, almost entirely disconnected from anything resembling divination. Japanese card-makers began producing local versions of the Portuguese decks, adapting the designs while keeping the structure. These adapted decks — eventually known by names like Tenshō karuta, after the era in which they were first produced — became popular enough that, by the early nineteenth century, regional authorities were issuing decrees against them. An 1807 imperial decree from what is now Yamagata Prefecture explicitly named “Hana-karuta” as a New Year’s gambling problem, noting that the cards were also played by children but had become associated with wagering serious enough to warrant official notice. Similar restrictions appeared in Kyoto in the 1840s, targeting card games played for amusement that had become vehicles for gambling.
The response to these repeated restrictions was, in a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who’s watched prohibition reshape rather than eliminate a practice, adaptation. Card designs changed to evade specific bans — the suits and numbers that had made a deck recognizable as gambling equipment were redesigned into something that looked, on its surface, like something else. This is part of the lineage that produced hanafuda — “flower cards” — decks with no numbers or recognizable European suits at all, just seasonal flower and plant imagery across twelve suits of four cards each, one suit per month. Hanafuda remains widely played in Japan today, and its descendant card games spread internationally through Nintendo, which began as a hanafuda card manufacturer in 1889 — a detail that connects nineteenth-century Japanese card-law evasion to one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, through a lineage that has nothing to do with tarot at all.
By the time actual tarot cards arrived in Japan, in other words, Japan already had a centuries-deep, repeatedly-regulated, thoroughly indigenized relationship with European playing cards — one that had evolved entirely around gambling, seasonal imagery, and children’s games, with no divinatory dimension whatsoever.
A Separate Arrival, Decades Later
Tarot cards specifically — the seventy-eight-card structure with its major and minor arcana, carrying the symbolic and divinatory associations that had developed in European occultism from the eighteenth century onward — appear to have reached Japan in the 1930s, as a far more marginal presence than the karuta tradition that had preceded it by nearly four centuries. There’s little indication that tarot found any significant audience in this initial period; Japan in the 1930s was moving toward war, and Western occultism was not a major cultural import during the years that followed.
The moment that actually mattered for tarot’s presence in Japan came decades later, and had almost nothing to do with cards at all. In 1973, a Japanese translation of Colin Wilson’s 1971 book The Occult was published, and it triggered what the Japanese media at the time named the “Occult Boom” (okaruto būmu) — a surge of public interest in topics including Nostradamus’s prophecies, psychic phenomena, and a broad category of esoteric and supernatural subject matter that tarot fell within.
The timing of this boom is worth dwelling on. 1973 was also the year of the first oil shock — the Arab oil embargo that ended Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” and triggered the country’s first postwar GDP decline the following year. Scholars studying this period have connected the occult boom to the anxieties of that economic rupture: a sense that the unprecedented growth of the postwar decades had been built on something unstable, combined with growing public concern about industrial pollution and the human costs of rapid development. The “Occult Boom” wasn’t simply imported Western content landing in a receptive market by coincidence — it arrived at a moment when a significant portion of the public was already primed to question the materialist, progress-oriented narrative that had organized Japanese society for a generation.
Tarot’s entry into Japanese popular culture, then, rode in on a wave that had nothing to do with cards, gambling, games, or any of the centuries of karuta history that had preceded it. It arrived as part of a category — “the occult,” translated wholesale from a Western framework, packaged for a Japanese audience experiencing its own specific cultural moment.
Two Histories That Never Merged
What’s notable, looking at this from the present, is how little the karuta tradition and the tarot tradition have to do with each other even now, despite both being, in the broadest sense, “cards in Japan.”
Karuta and its descendants — hanafuda, the poetry-card game Ogura Hyakunin Isshu used in competitive karuta, the alphabet-learning iroha karuta — occupy a cultural space defined by games, competition, children’s education, and New Year’s tradition. They are, broadly, secular. Tarot in Japan occupies an entirely different space: the world of uranai (fortune-telling), a substantial and commercially significant category of Japanese popular culture that spans everything from convenience-store magazine horoscope columns to dedicated fortune-telling cafés where customers receive readings from professional practitioners.
Academic work on tarot’s role in contemporary Japan has noted a distinctly gendered pattern to its consumption — tarot and similar oracle-card practices are disproportionately associated with female consumers, and the commercial ecosystem around them reflects this: elaborately designed decks marketed for their aesthetic appeal as much as their divinatory function, and — in a detail that would have been unimaginable to the European occultists who first systematized tarot’s symbolic associations — tarot decks built around anime and manga properties. Decks themed around franchises including Sailor Moon, Hello Kitty, and Evangelion exist as commercial products, integrating tarot’s symbolic structure (seventy-eight cards, major and minor arcana, the same underlying framework Éliphas Lévi connected to Hebrew letters and the four elements in the nineteenth century) into Japan’s character-driven consumer culture.
This is, in its own way, as significant a transformation as anything that happened to the Portuguese carta on its journey to becoming hanafuda — just compressed into a few decades rather than a few centuries, and operating in a completely separate cultural lane.
What the Two Journeys Have in Common
Despite running on entirely separate tracks, the karuta and tarot stories in Japan share a structural similarity worth naming: in both cases, an imported card system was substantially reshaped by the cultural context that received it, to the point where the result bears only a loose relationship to its origin.
Hanafuda’s seasonal flower imagery has essentially nothing in common, visually or thematically, with the Portuguese suits of cups, coins, clubs, and swords that started the lineage — the transformation was so complete that most people who play hanafuda today have no idea it descends from a sixteenth-century European import. Tarot’s journey in Japan has been less complete, but the direction is similar: a system developed within a specific European esoteric tradition — Hermeticism, Kabbalah, nineteenth-century occult societies — has been substantially repackaged within a Japanese commercial and aesthetic framework (uranai culture, kawaii design, character licensing) that has little connection to, and arguably little interest in, the symbolic architecture that produced the cards in the first place.
Neither transformation is a corruption of an original. They’re what happens to symbolic systems when they cross cultural boundaries and keep being used — the use continues, the meaning attached to it reorganizes around whatever cultural context the system has landed in. The seventy-eight cards that arrived in Japan in the twentieth century carry centuries of European occult history. What most people in Japan encountering a Hello Kitty tarot deck are engaging with is something considerably more local than that history would suggest — and something that, structurally, isn’t so different from what happened to a deck of Portuguese gambling cards four hundred years earlier.
The cards changed continents. What they meant changed with them. Twice.