The Hanabi-shi Oracle has been fully funded!
The Hanabi-shi Oracle was fully funded in under a week, featured by Kickstarter as a "Project We Love," and ended up finishing with 258% funding!
Purchase the Hanabi-shi Oracle
Once the Kickstarter rewards are fulfilled, the decks will be available for general sale through my Etsy shop.
About the Oracle Decks
The Hanabi-shi Oracle is created entirely from public domain Japanese fireworks catalogues from the 1880s. When I first came across these images on the wonderful website, the Public Domain Review, I instantly fell in love with them. The mystical night fireworks and the whimsical daytime fireworks seemed like readymade oracle cards. For who hasn't searched the skies for meaning during a fireworks show? Today, few would try to capture the complexity of a firework without a camera, but these images ask the viewer to use their imagination to transform symbols into flowers of fire.
The catalogues were for Hirayama Fireworks and marketed to an international American and British audience. The founder of the company, Jinta Hirayama, was a fireworks innovator and greatly expanded the range of firework colors and designs available. He was one of the very first Japanese people to file for a US patent. That patent was for “daylight fireworks,” which included illustrated paper lantern balloons that released colorful toys and powders to create their effects.
In Japanese, hanabi means fireworks and hanabi-shi means a fireworks master. I hope that this deck helps share the fascinating history of Japanese fireworks with a larger audience.
The Hanabi-shi Oracle comes in two versions - Night & Day. The Night version features colorful abstract fireworks on a black background while the Day version mixes abstract designs with dynamic animal illustrations on a light blue background. Both decks have the same card backs so they can easily be shuffled together to create one larger deck that combines the two themes. Each deck comes with 49 cards, a pamphlet that describes the deck history and card meanings, and a colorful tuck box.
The Hanabi-shi Oracle was fully funded in under a week, featured by Kickstarter as a "Project We Love," and ended up finishing with 258% funding!
Purchase the Hanabi-shi Oracle
Once the Kickstarter rewards are fulfilled, the decks will be available for general sale through my Etsy shop.
About the Oracle Decks
The Hanabi-shi Oracle is created entirely from public domain Japanese fireworks catalogues from the 1880s. When I first came across these images on the wonderful website, the Public Domain Review, I instantly fell in love with them. The mystical night fireworks and the whimsical daytime fireworks seemed like readymade oracle cards. For who hasn't searched the skies for meaning during a fireworks show? Today, few would try to capture the complexity of a firework without a camera, but these images ask the viewer to use their imagination to transform symbols into flowers of fire.
The catalogues were for Hirayama Fireworks and marketed to an international American and British audience. The founder of the company, Jinta Hirayama, was a fireworks innovator and greatly expanded the range of firework colors and designs available. He was one of the very first Japanese people to file for a US patent. That patent was for “daylight fireworks,” which included illustrated paper lantern balloons that released colorful toys and powders to create their effects.
In Japanese, hanabi means fireworks and hanabi-shi means a fireworks master. I hope that this deck helps share the fascinating history of Japanese fireworks with a larger audience.
The Hanabi-shi Oracle comes in two versions - Night & Day. The Night version features colorful abstract fireworks on a black background while the Day version mixes abstract designs with dynamic animal illustrations on a light blue background. Both decks have the same card backs so they can easily be shuffled together to create one larger deck that combines the two themes. Each deck comes with 49 cards, a pamphlet that describes the deck history and card meanings, and a colorful tuck box.
Sources
I first learned about these beautiful images from The Public Domain Review. You can see more images, learn more about their history, and purchase prints of some of the images at: tinyurl.com/nvhhxa43
You can download the full catalogs and learn more about Hirayama’s patent history from the Yokohama City Library: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kn74s
The catalogs that I selected images from are:
“Illustrated catalog of night bomb shells.”
“Illustrated catalog of day light bomb shells.”
“J. Hirayama’s Night Fireworks”
“Illustrated catalog of garden & lawn pieces of The Hirayama Fireworks”
Cultural Appreciation
I don’t want to obscure the fact that I am a white American creating this oracle deck. Before deciding to create the deck, I put a lot of thought into whether it would be appropriate for me to do so. Ultimately I decided that I felt confident in being able to take the steps necessary to make sure the project came down on the side of appreciation rather than appropriation. The images I used to create the deck are all in the public domain and I am including attribution and information about their original context. I hope that this project can also help teach a wider audience about this fascinating slice of history.
I first learned about these beautiful images from The Public Domain Review. You can see more images, learn more about their history, and purchase prints of some of the images at: tinyurl.com/nvhhxa43
You can download the full catalogs and learn more about Hirayama’s patent history from the Yokohama City Library: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kn74s
The catalogs that I selected images from are:
“Illustrated catalog of night bomb shells.”
“Illustrated catalog of day light bomb shells.”
“J. Hirayama’s Night Fireworks”
“Illustrated catalog of garden & lawn pieces of The Hirayama Fireworks”
Cultural Appreciation
I don’t want to obscure the fact that I am a white American creating this oracle deck. Before deciding to create the deck, I put a lot of thought into whether it would be appropriate for me to do so. Ultimately I decided that I felt confident in being able to take the steps necessary to make sure the project came down on the side of appreciation rather than appropriation. The images I used to create the deck are all in the public domain and I am including attribution and information about their original context. I hope that this project can also help teach a wider audience about this fascinating slice of history.
Images of the Decks:
Process
I edited the images for white balance, contrast, and saturation to make sure the images looked beautiful in print. I changed very little from the essense of the original source material, but it was at times necessary to edit the edges of the images since some of the original pages curve into the spine of the catalogs. The biggest change I made was in renumbering the images. The original images had numbers in the catalogues, but I renumbered them to be sequential in the order I arranged them.
Images below of the decks in progress:
I edited the images for white balance, contrast, and saturation to make sure the images looked beautiful in print. I changed very little from the essense of the original source material, but it was at times necessary to edit the edges of the images since some of the original pages curve into the spine of the catalogs. The biggest change I made was in renumbering the images. The original images had numbers in the catalogues, but I renumbered them to be sequential in the order I arranged them.
Images below of the decks in progress: