Hanafuda's 48 cards come in 12 suits, one flower for each month. They grew out of Portuguese cards in Edo-period Japan, redrawn to slip past bans on card games, and Nintendo began in 1889 in Kyoto by making them.
📍 Huddersfield, England
Rugby league was born on 29 August 1895 at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, when 22 northern English clubs broke away so they could pay players for wages lost to Saturday matches.
📍 Helsinki, Finland
Pesäpallo was created by Finnish athlete Lauri 'Tahko' Pihkala, who mixed an old Finnish bat-and-ball game with American baseball. The first match was played in Helsinki in 1920, and the pitcher throws the ball straight up.
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📍 London, England
The first rubber balloons were made in London in 1824 by the scientist Michael Faraday, who pressed two sheets of raw rubber together to hold hydrogen for his experiments. A year later Thomas Hancock was selling them as do-it-yourself toy kits.
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📍 Ojiya & Yamakoshi, Niigata, Japan
Koi were first bred about 200 years ago by farmers in the mountain villages of Niigata, Japan, who raised plain black carp for food. The colourful new fish were a sensation when they were shown at a 1914 exhibition in Tokyo.
📍 Eastern China (Shanghai–Wuhan)
Gung ho is Chinese gōnghé, short for 'industrial cooperative', the name of a 1930s movement in China. US Marine officer Evans Carlson took it to mean 'work together' and made it his battalion's motto.
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📍 Northern China (Gansu to Luoyang)
The oldest paper scraps, from the 2nd century BC, were found in China, and Han court official Cai Lun refined papermaking around 105 AD. Egypt's papyrus was a different material.