Searching archives of Japanese auction sites, I did uncover a gem of a deck that is likely from the beginning of the 20th century. The store which printed and sold it, the Ginza Kamigata-ya, is in itself an incredibly interesting company. I could (and half intend to) write a book on it and it's incredibly multifaceted and interesting founder, Kihei Maeda. One of the first appearances of him in the historical records is when he and 17 others got arrested for selling smutty woodblock pictures. His name is widespread on the English Internet as a persistent stamp forger. His shop, the Kamigataya, was the first to sell hanafuda legally, through some clever machinations of Maeda involving petitioning the police to explicitly forbid his sales(!). Yet his son managed became a foreign diplomat and minister of government, and his grandson tutored a young Emperor Akihito in French, and his granddaughter, a psychiatrist, counselled the Empress, and was also the originator of "ikigai" as a buzzword.
But back to the deck. It's called Kokoro no Tomo which can be translated as "Companion of the Heart". I'm not 100% sure when it's from but based on the size and quality of the cards (and those fancy rounded corners), I would guess 1900s-1920s. It sold for only 2300 yen ($20 bucks!) on a Japanese auction site in April 2012. Here are the only pictures of it available:
So how do you actually read with this deck? Well, it's very easy and from the perspective of tarot, a little gimmicky. But to me, that only adds to its charm! It seems it came with 10 different "reading cards" for reading your fortune in a specific area, from "general luck" to more concrete things like "health" and "money". These cards have rectangular holes in them - so just hold it over one of the randomly drawn "text card" and read the text that appears through the hole. Ta-dah!
Dividing your fortune up in these different categories is very typical of Japanese fortune telling, which has in Japan never been associated with the occult. 99% of all medium-sized Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Japan happily sell o-mikuji, "fortune slips", which work exactly the same way. Or I mean, not exactly, there are no papers with holes in them, but the o-mikuji contains several different fortunes. "Travel: Wait and see.", "The person you're waiting for: Will show up", etc.
This deck a simple relic from the not-so-distant past, but to me, it's a very charming one!
