Hanafuda

Will Matsuda

2024 — USA

About this series

When I was a child, my grandmother taught me how to play Hanafuda, a 200-year-old Japanese card game, on a slow afternoon in Honolulu. Hanafuda, which translates to “flower cards,” is the inspiration for this series of images.
I began making photographs that reinterpreted these cards during a residency in Woodstock, New York, in 2018. After living in New York for four years, I returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2019, where I began working on the series again.
I’m interested in the ways that Japanese history and culture gets filtered and shifted across oceans and centuries. I use my body and my home in this series because I want to embody a connection with this history. But rather than simple recreations of the cards, I want to make something new.
In 2022, I went to hang out with 97-year-old grandma in Honolulu following the death of her husband, my grandfather. She made tea and we played Hanafuda for hours. The small cards clacked against the table as she beat me hand after hand. As I was leaving, I gave her a print of one of my Hanafuda photos. She closed her eyes and held it close to her chest.

Photographer: Will Matsuda
Nationality: Japanese / American
Based in: Portland OR, USA
Website: www.willmatsuda.com
Instagram: @willfujiomatsuda

Will Matsuda (b. 1993) is a Japanese American photographer and writer focusing on his culture, his family, and the environment. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, and National Public Radio, among many other publications. His works have been exhibited internationally by Aperture Foundation and Yancey Richardson Gallery. He has published two books: The Becomes The Pot, published by TIS Books and The Book of Answers, published by Pomegranate Press. He is based in Portland, Oregon, where he was born and raised.