Finance History | Shimogyo, Kyoto — Hanafuda Capital Before the Osaka Listing

People treat Nintendo as a Minami-ku campus that later sold consoles.

The books begin with cards.

On 23 September 1889 Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a shop in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto, to make and sell hanafuda.

The official company history gives that month and that ward as the start of manufacture.

Western-style playing cards followed in 1902.

Marufuku Co., Ltd., the corporate predecessor of Nintendo Co., Ltd., was established in November 1947 in Higashiyama-ku.

The name became Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd. in 1951 and Nintendo Co., Ltd. in 1963.

Stock listed on the Second Section of the Osaka Securities Exchange and on the Kyoto Stock Exchange in 1962.

It moved to the First Section of Osaka in 1970 and to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in July 1983.

The present headquarters at 11-1 Hokotate-cho, Kamitoba, is a later building. The 1889 shop does not survive as a public interior.

The mechanism is a family card works that sold equity while it still made paper decks.

A Kyoto hanafuda shop became a listed company two years before it took its present name, then a Nikkei 225 constituent whose first rooms were in Shimogyo.

Photo: Haiko Honten Co., public domain, the 1889 premises, via Wikimedia Commons.