Ya–ku–za (8-9-3). The Worst Hand in Cards That Gave a Name to the Nameless Under the Shogunate

Three best cards, zero points — living on the margins of Edo

Three cards from a hanafuda deck. The first — a full moon over pampas grasses, August, one of the most beautiful cards in the entire set. The second — a chrysanthemum with a cup of sake, September, because chrysanthemums bloom during the autumn festival drunk with courtly grace. The third — cherry blossoms, sakura, March. In one game, these three cards form combinations so valuable they have their own names: moon-viewing with sake, flower-viewing with sake. In another game — oicho-kabu — these same three cards add up to twenty. And in oicho-kabu, only the last digit counts. Twenty is zero. The worst possible hand. Eight, nine, three — in the gambling slang of Edo: ya, ku, za. Full moon, chrysanthemum, sakura — beautiful, but worthless.

Worthless — like the people who sat down at those cards. Yakuza is a word that came from a losing card hand and became the name of Japan’s most powerful criminal organization. Itinerant gamblers whom the shōgunate itself created — local bosses hired them to pitch gaming tents at construction sites and take back the wages just paid to laborers. The authorities publicly condemned gambling while quietly living off it, recovering labor costs the very same day. And the people whom the system left no place for — rōnin, bankrupt artisans, descendants of the outcast burakumin caste — took on the worst name from the gambling den and made it their identity. There is something deeply psychological in this gesture. Punk reclaimed the insult, bohemia reclaimed the margins. Yakuza reclaimed zero — and built an empire on it.

But to understand where this name and this game came from, we must go much further back — to the Portuguese sailors who brought the first playing cards to Japan in the sixteenth century, and to the Tokugawa shōgunate, which for the next two hundred years feverishly tried to ban them. Each time — unsuccessfully. Because each time, the Japanese designed a new type of card, more cleverly disguised, more thoroughly Japanese. The history of oicho-kabu is a history of cat and mouse between power and players — and a history of nameless people to whom this game literally gave a name.

Ya-ku-za. Eight, nine, three — the worst hand in the Japanese card game oicho-kabu. Zero points, no value. Yet this losing combination gave its name to Japan's most powerful criminal organization. A story of Portuguese cards, shogunate bans, and the nameless people of Edo who turned zero into an identity.

April Rain Over Mishima

Dark, rain-heavy clouds hung low over the highway, blurring the outlines of the lanterns before Mishima station. It was April, but the evening had brought a chill. Beyond the post station, a hundred paces from the road where shōgunate officials checked travelers’ passes, stood a bamboo tent — a bakuchiba (博打場). From the outside, it looked like a tool shed. From the inside, it reeked of lamp oil, sweat, and something that might best be called determination.

The oya (親, literally “parent,” in practice the dealer) — a man in his forties, his arms covered in black ink — sat in seiza on a tatami mat, shuffling a deck of kabufuda (株札, lit. “wagering cards” — from the Portuguese cavo, a wager). Forty small, stiff cards, each thicker than its Western counterpart — multilayered paper glued with clay. They had no suits, no faces of kings. Just the numbers one through ten, repeated four times. Pure arithmetic, dressed in a form that the dōshin (同心 — patrol officers, Edo’s version of “police”) had not yet noticed in this corner.

Five men sat at the mat. Two in the clothes of construction laborers — they had just finished the season irrigating rice paddies in the valley. One in a faded haori that must once have belonged to someone wealthier. Another — silent, with a scar on his cheek — looked like someone who had once carried a sword and then lost the right to that privilege. The fifth was the youngest and the loudest.

The oya laid out four cards on the mat, one after another, from right to left. The young one placed twenty mon (as much as he had set aside for dinner) on the second from the right. The rōnin placed five on the far left. The oya, devoid of any expression, revealed the cards — under the second lay a three, under the fourth a nine. He added second cards face-down. The young one demanded a third. The oya drew a card from the top of the deck and placed it — a five. Three plus five, eight. A good hand. The young one smiled. But the oya turned over his own cards: six and three. Nine. A perfect result, the best possible. The young one lost twenty mon and would go to bed hungry tonight. The dealer collected the coins stone-faced and reshuffled the deck.

Outside — silence, rain dripping from bamboo stalks, the distant sound of horses. The world of legal Japan was a hundred paces away. But in this tent, different rules applied.

The History of Cards in Japan

Playing cards arrived in Japan with Portuguese sailors sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, when trading ships from Lisbon called at the ports of Kyūshū — first Tanegashima (種子島, from which the Japanese later named their arquebuses), then Nagasaki, opened to foreigners in 1571. The sailors brought with them decks modeled on the Iberian standard: four suits — swords, cups, coins, and clubs — twelve cards in each, forty-eight in total. The same cards played with in the portside taverns of Lisbon and Goa. The Japanese — from aristocrats to artisans — took an interest immediately. And almost as quickly began to modify them.

The first Japanese-made decks, known today as Tenshō karuta (天正カルタ) — named after the Tenshō era (1573–1592) — were produced in the small town of Miike in Chikugo Province on Kyūshū. They were faithful copies of the Portuguese originals: the same suits, the same ranks, similar iconography — though slightly smaller and distinctly Japanese in craftsmanship, painted by hand in black, red, and gold. From that era, literally one single card has survived to the present day — a king of clubs, preserved in the card museum in Ōmuta (大牟田). Just one, because the rest fell victim to what the card game scholar Ebashi Takashi at the Ōmuta museum called “the longest and most creative conflict between authority and entertainment in the history of Japan.”

The problem with Tenshō karuta (天正カルタ) was twofold. First, they were associated with gambling, and gambling threatened public order. Second, they were associated with European culture and religion. The suit of cups bore a dangerous resemblance to the Holy Grail, and Christianity had been banned in Japan under penalty of death since 1602. Possessing a deck could bring suspicion of belonging to the forbidden faith upon its owner. In 1633, with the inauguration of the sakoku isolation policy, the Tokugawa shōgunate banned Portuguese cards. And here began a game that would last over two hundred years.

Because the Japanese did not stop playing. Each time the authorities banned a particular card design, artisans designed a new one — more abstract, further removed from the foreign original. From Tenshō karuta (天正カルタ) evolved mekuri karuta (めくりかるた) — cards in which the faces of knights and kings were replaced with geometric patterns, severed from their Portuguese roots with surgical precision.

When those too were banned — around 1790 — kabufuda (株札) appeared: a radically simplified deck, one suit repeated four times, forty cards, nothing foreign, nothing suspicious. And finally — the ultimate answer to repression — hanafuda (花札 — lit. “flower cards”): twelve suits corresponding to the months of the Japanese year, with motifs of cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, maples, and pines. No foreign symbols, no numbers, no faces. So cleverly designed that officials deemed them an innocent parlor game. The history of cards in Tokugawa Japan is a history of repression that fueled creativity. Every ban was a catalyst. Every confiscation gave birth to a new design.

Oicho-kabu

The game of oicho-kabu (おいちょかぶ — written in hiragana, not kanji: oicho is from Portuguese oito, meaning eight) is as simple as the cut of a sword — and equally irreversible. It is played with a kabufuda (株札) deck — forty cards numbered one through ten — or a hanafuda (花札) deck with the last two months removed. The oya lays out four cards on the mat. Players bet on whichever ones they choose. Then second cards are added, and in some cases, thirds. The goal is simple: a hand total as close to nine as possible. If it exceeds ten, only the last digit counts — a modulo ten system, identical to baccarat. Fifteen is five. Twelve is two. And, most importantly for us today: twenty is zero. The player compares their hand against the oya’s. The higher value wins. A tie goes to the oya.

The game’s name comes from Portuguese — “oito-cabo,” meaning “eight-end” — an echo of older rules in which the eight was the boundary card. It is one of the last words Portugal left behind in Japanese gambling before isolation sealed that exchange for over two centuries.

But the true genius of oicho-kabu lies not in its rules but in the symbolism of its special hands. Each name is a coded omen. Some examples?

Kuppin (クッピン) — nine and one — is the oya’s unconditional win. Why? Because nine read as ku (苦) means “suffering,” while one is pin (ピン) — from Portuguese pinta, a point. The point of suffering: the oya wins, the player loses.

Shippin (シッピン), on the other hand — four and one — is the player’s unconditional win. Four read as shi (死) means “death.” The point of death: winning is death, so the oya “decides” to lose.

There is also arashi (アラシ) — three of the same card — which means “storm” and pays triple. And shiroku no nige (シロクの逃げ) — four and six, “the escape of four and six” — a hand that allows the player to withdraw from the round without loss, save the stake, save face. Suffering, death, storm, escape — these cards speak the language of people who were accustomed to playing for more than money.

And here we come to the most interesting hand of all — the worst: eight, nine, three. Sum of twenty, result of zero. In standard Japanese, eight is hachi (八), nine is kyū (九), three is san (三). But the gamblers of Edo spoke their own language — a slang that mixed different systems of reading numbers. They read eight as ya — from the native Japanese yattsu (八つ), the kun’yomi reading. They read nine as ku — from the Sino-Japanese on’yomi, which also exists in standard speech but yields to kyū in everyday use. And they shortened three to za — a clipped, gambler’s san. Ya-ku-za.

This same phenomenon — making words from the sounds of numbers — the Japanese call goroawase (語呂合わせ, more about it in modern Japan here: 428: let’s meet in Shibuya. Goroawase, or how the Japanese speak in numbers.). It works like a phonetic rebus: 4649 read as yo-ro-shi-ku means “pleased to meet you,” 1564 as hi-go-ro-shi means “murder.” Except in the gambling dens of Edo, no one was composing pleasantries — they were composing losses. Ya-ku-za. Eight, nine, three. Twenty. Zero. The worst hand. Worthless.

There is yet another, deeper paradox in this — and it lies in the very material of the cards, as we touched on in our “scene” at Mishima station. When oicho-kabu is played with a hanafuda deck, eight means August: the card of the full moon over pampas grasses — susuki ni tsuki (芒に月) — considered one of the most beautiful in the entire deck, a silver glow over swaying susuki. Nine is September: chrysanthemum with a cup of sake — kiku (菊) — because chrysanthemums bloom during the chōyō festival, when sake was drunk with flower petals floating at the bottom of the cup. Three is March: sakura (桜), cherry blossoms. In the game koi-koi, August and September form tsukimi-zake — moon-viewing with sake — while March and September yield hanami-zake — flower-viewing with sake. Beautiful, prized, coveted combinations, highly scored. But in oicho-kabu? Those same three cards add up to twenty. Full moon, chrysanthemum, sakura — together they are worth nothing. Scholar Okawa Gohei called hanafuda “a portable gallery of poetry,” rooted in the courtly aesthetics of the Heian era. But a gallery of poetry at a gambling table loses its luster. Moon, flowers, and sake — worthless.

The cards themselves — kabufuda and hanafuda — had their own physicality, unlike anything Europe knew. Smaller than Western decks, stiffer, glued from multiple layers of paper and clay. The sound they made when slapped against tatami was dull, hard, categorical — like the knock of a wooden mallet. Not the elegance of a casino, but a raw, bodily game. The dealers — tsubofuri (壺振り) — played bare-chested. Officially, to prove they were not hiding cards in the folds of their clothing. Unofficially — to display their irezumi, full-body tattoos that served simultaneously as proof of belonging and as a warning (about horishi and irezumi read more here: The work of Japan’s tattoo masters, the horishi – where the gaze of the shogunate did not reach).

The Backstreets of Osaka

A small workshop on a side street in Osaka, the second year of the Kansei era (寛政二年, i.e. 1790). It smelled of wet paper, ink, and soot from the lamp. A man in his fifties — Tōbei, a card-maker in the third generation — was carving a pattern on a new wooden printing block. A new pattern. Yet another new pattern. Because the previous one — six months of printing, a decent profit, a reputation among gamblers across all of Kansai — had been banned by decree of the bugyō just a week ago.

His wife guarded the door. Their fourteen-year-old son was laying sheets of paper on the drying rack, soaking them in a solution of clay. The cards had to be ready before dawn. A merchant from Kyoto was waiting — he had people along the Tōkaidō highway who would pay double for a design the authorities did not yet know.

— They changed the law again? — asked the wife, not turning from the door.

— They did — replied Tōbei, not lifting his chisel from the wood. — Fools think people will stop playing.

He knew that getting caught meant a fine, prison, or in the worst case, a public flogging. But he also knew that this race had been going on for over a hundred and fifty years, and the gamblers had not lost once. From Portuguese copies they had made abstractions. From abstractions — single-suited cards. From single-suited cards — floral compositions so beautiful and so Japanese that the officials themselves had started playing with them over evening sake. Tōbei was one of hundreds of anonymous artisans, scattered from Osaka to Nagasaki, who for two centuries had been beating the shōgunate’s censors with a single set of tools: paper, wood, and ink.

Bakuto

Bakuto (博徒 — lit. “people of gambling,” or more precisely “members of a gambling group”) — the itinerant gamblers of Tokugawa Japan — appeared on the boundary where city order ended and the road began. Historians date their origins to the early Edo period, shortly after the Tokugawa shōgunate stabilized the country following the generations-long Sengoku wars. Peace meant that thousands of samurai lost their livelihood — from warriors they became rōnin, masterless men without purpose or function. They were joined by bankrupt artisans, disgraced merchants, expelled sumō wrestlers, and petty urban criminals. People for whom the rigid four-tiered hierarchy — samurai, peasants, artisans, merchants — had not provided any place.

And here a paradox emerges, so typically Japanese it almost hurts. The shōgunate itself created the bakuto. Local bosses and corrupt officials hired gamblers to pitch tents at construction sites — irrigation channels, roads, bridges — and win back the wages just paid to workers. The mechanism was cynical and elegant: the state paid for labor, the gamblers reclaimed the pay through games and returned a percentage to their patrons. The money flowed back to the coffers. The laborers went back to their shovels. The authorities publicly condemned gambling — and quietly lived off it. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, authors of the seminal work “Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld” (University of California Press, 2003), state plainly: bakuto existed from the very beginning at the intersection of crime and state function.

They operated primarily along the great highways — the Tōkaidō between Edo and Kyoto and the Nakasendō through the mountains — at post stations, in roadside towns, wherever travelers’ money flowed. Their tents — bakuchiba (博打場) — were makeshift, easy to fold and carry when a patrol drew near. Bamboo frames, cloth, tatami thrown on the ground. They played oicho-kabu, but equally popular was chōhan bakuchi — a dice game in which two cubes were shaken in a bamboo cup and bets placed on even (chō, 丁) or odd (han, 半). The tsubofuri for chōhan sat on tatami bare-chested — just like the oya in oicho-kabu — to display his tattoos and prove he was hiding nothing up his sleeves.

Within bakuto groups, an iron hierarchy prevailed. At the top stood the oyabun (親分 — the same as in modern yakuza) — the “father,” the patron. Beneath him — kobun (子分), the “children,” the dependents. Admission to the group took place through a ritual exchange of sake cups — a ceremony of almost religious significance, performed before a Shintō altar. The amount of sake in the cup depended on rank: equal portions for brothers, six-tenths for the elder brother and four-tenths for the younger.

For serious offenses, yubitsume (指詰め) was enforced — the severing of the top joint of the little finger. The punishment was brilliant in its logic: a weakened finger meant a weaker grip on the sword, and a weaker grip meant greater dependence on the boss’s protection. Peter B.E. Hill, author of “The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State” (Oxford University Press, 2003), notes that as recently as 1993, forty-five percent of yakuza members had at least the last joint of their little finger severed, and fifteen percent had undergone the ritual at least twice.

Alongside the bakuto, a second great group from the margins existed — the tekiya (的屋 — lit. “target-shop man”), itinerant traders who dominated fairs and markets (where they ran games like dart-throwing at targets — hence the name). Tekiya held a slightly better position — their activities were quasi-legal, and between 1735 and 1740 the Tokugawa government granted some tekiya bosses the right to a surname and to carry two swords, a privilege approaching samurai status. Bakuto — always lower, always in the shadows. These two groups — gamblers and traders — form the two pillars of what in the Meiji period would transform into the organization the world would come to know as yakuza (8-9-3: ヤクザ).

Jirochō

October 1868. The port of Shimizu (清水港). The water in Suruga Bay (駿河湾) was gray as lead, and the wind carried the smell of salt and something worse. Bodies bobbed on the surface. Soldiers of the shōgunate’s army, killed in a naval skirmish with the imperial fleet. Nobody wanted them — for the new government they were traitors, for the old — men fallen in a lost cause. Touching their bodies meant political suicide.

On the wharf stood a man in a dark kimono — broad-shouldered, his face furrowed with wrinkles that could have come from the sun, but equally from thirty years of brawls, trials, and nights in gambling dens. Shimizu Jirochō — bakuto boss, lord of the Tōkaidō highway between Edo and Kyoto, commander of hundreds of men. He watched the drifting bodies and said nothing.

— Pull them out — he said at last.

His men — bald, tattooed, some with severed fingers — exchanged glances. One of them, known as Ōmasa, spoke quietly: — Those are the shōgun’s men. The Emperor won’t mourn them.

Jirochō did not turn his eyes from the water. — In death, all become Buddhas. There is no longer any government army or any rebels. — He paid for the funeral out of his own pocket.

死んだら仏だ。官軍も賊軍もない。

Shindara hotoke da. Kangun mo zokugun mo nai.

“He who has died is a Buddha. There is no longer a government army nor rebels.”

That sentence passed into history. Though, as historian Takahashi Satoshi honestly notes in his monograph “Shimizu no Jirochō: Bakumatsu ishin to bakuto no sekai” (Iwanami Shoten, 2010), it is hard to say whether Jirochō actually said it, or whether the quote was crafted by his adopted son, who in 1884 published a popular biography and turned a crime boss into a folk hero. The line between fact and legend is blurred here — just as it was in Jirochō’s life itself.

Shimizu Jirochō (清水次郎長) was born on February 14, 1820, in Shimizu, the son of a river ferryman. Placed in the care of an uncle — a rice merchant — he could have taken the path of a trader. But after his uncle’s death in 1835 and the family’s bankruptcy, he chose cards and dice. Twenty years later, he was the greatest bakuto boss on the Tōkaidō, controlled the port of Shimizu and both great highways, and commanded at least five hundred men. His war with the rival Kurokoma clan lasted years and claimed, by various accounts, many lives.

And then — the bakumatsu period, the twilight of the shōgunate — and Jirochō bet on the Emperor. He organized funerals for the fallen on both sides, ensured the port’s security, mediated between the old and the new authorities. The new Meiji government turned a blind eye to his criminal past. Late in life, Jirochō founded an English-language school in Shimizu — he himself could not read, but he believed the port needed people who knew the language of trade. He founded a shipping company, supported tea exports. He died in 1893, at the age of seventy-three.

Japan loves such figures — bandits who turn out to be noble, criminals who save what the state will not. Kunisada Chūji — another legendary bakuto boss, publicly executed in 1850 — became “Japan’s Robin Hood.” The film series from Tōei Studios, 1964–1971 — “Bakuto” starring Kōji Tsuruta — turned itinerant gamblers into cinema heroes. And the series “Hibotan Bakuto” (“The Red Peony Gambler”) with Junko Fuji gave them a female face. The blind masseur Zatoichi, playing chōhan by touching the dice to sense the result, is perhaps the best-known fictional character to have emerged from this world. The romanticism surrounding the bakuto is a genre unto itself in the Japanese imagination — like the Western romanticization of gunslingers, except here, instead of a Colt, there are cards.

three Cards

Let us return to the three cards on the mat. Eight, nine, three. 八九三. In the gambling slang of Edo: ya-ku-za. Sum: twenty. Result: zero. The worst hand in the game. The word became slang for “worthless,” “no good,” “loser.” And then — for the people who called themselves that. Useless. Outcasts. Those whom the system classified as zero.

Because the social composition of what came to be called yakuza was a mirror image of Japan’s margins. According to a prominent — and controversial — 2006 speech by Mitsuhiro Suganuma, a former officer of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, approximately sixty percent of yakuza members come from burakumin (部落民, more about them here: Songs from the Eta-mura – The Lives of the “Non-Humans” Erased from the Maps of Shogunate Japan) — descendants of the feudal pariah caste, people in occupations tied to death and impurity: butchers, tanners, gravediggers, executioners. Approximately thirty percent were Koreans born in Japan — zainichi (在日) — people without full citizenship rights, locked in an economic ghetto. The rest — outcasts from various strata, people without land, without names, without a place. Precisely those for whom Japan had never provided a dignified place — like the 8-9-3 hand, which under no variant of the rules is worth a single point.

There is something deeply psychological in this gesture — in seizing the worst possible name and making it an identity. It is a strategy known across many cultures: punk reclaimed the insult, bohemia reclaimed the margins, queer reclaimed the slur. Yakuza reclaimed “zero” — and built an empire on it. Suganuma touched in his speech on a subject Japanese society prefers not to confront: yakuza did not come from nowhere. It came from systemic discrimination — from the burakumin, from the segregation of Koreans, from the gaps left behind by the Tokugawa class structure. Nobody is born yakuza. Someone simply gets dealt the 8-9-3 hand before they even sit down at the table.

In the present day, the yakuza is shrinking and aging at a pace that is itself a story. At its peak — in 1963 — the organization counted one hundred and eighty-four thousand members. In 2024 — according to the Japanese police — 18,800 remained: 9,900 members and 8,900 quasi-members. The average age at the end of 2022 was fifty-four. Only five percent were under thirty. More than half had passed fifty. What will the average age be twenty years from now?

Three cards, three of the most beautiful images that Japanese artisans ever sealed into paper cards to hide them from the eyes of censors. Prized, coveted, highly scored. In oicho-kabu — zero.

In 1889, Fusajirō Yamauchi opened a small workshop in Kyoto and began producing hanafuda cards. His clientele were mainly bakuto and yakuza, because who else was buying decks for games that a respectable person preferred not to speak of aloud?

The company was called Nintendo.

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