Hanafuda

After leaving an East Coast desk job in 2018, Will Matsuda began making photographs that he describes as “imperfect translations” of his relationship to Japanese-American culture. The project also became, in his words, “a generative space for making something new, free from needing to be ‘correct.’”

Hanafuda, or “flower cards,” are a Japanese style of playing card developed from Portuguese decks imported in the seventeenth century. These Western cards were successively banned by the Japanese government, then redesigned and recirculated by enterprising gamblers. Matsuda encountered modern-day hanafuda during New Year’s gatherings in Hawaii with extended family. His paternal grandmother, Amy Matsuda, encouraged him to play. The cards are organized into twelve suits corresponding to the twelve months of the year; their imagery is simple and striking—landscapes, flora, and fauna printed primarily in black, red, and white.

Matsuda sometimes titles photographs after the plants that correspond to the hanafuda suits—susuki (“grass”), kiku (“chrysanthemum”), ume (“plum blossom”)—or after cards that bear fauna, such as the deer. Yet the cards’ calendrical structure never fully determines the content of Matsuda’s images, which are more loosely inspired by memories of family and questions related to place. The Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock tradition has also been an influence. Matsuda is drawn to the stylized flatness of ukiyo-e (literally “floating-world pictures”) as well as their virtuosic manipulation of colored ink.

According to photographer Rio Nagaoka, even Matsuda’s portraits “feel connected to the landscape”—human figures seem intimately mingled with, rather than set above or against, the natural world. In Matsuda’s photographs, landscape becomes not simply a setting, but a site of memory, ancestry, and belonging.

—Lucy Ives

Will Matsuda is a Japanese American photographer and writer from Portland, Oregon, whose work explores family, cultural inheritance, and the natural landscape. His photographs and writing have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The New Yorker, and a photograph from Hanafuda appeared on the cover of the Spring 2022 issue of Aperture. He lives in New York City.