Shonen Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Golden Age of Menko

A Vintage Round Menko Card from Shonen Tokugawa Ieyasu

From Dagashi-Ya to Collection: What Menko Cards Are

Menko is a traditional Japanese card game with origins in the Edo period, and it reached its widest popularity during the postwar decades — roughly the 1950s through the 1970s. Children picked up menko cards at dagashi-ya, the small neighbourhood sweet-and-toy shops that were a fixture of Japanese childhood. The basic game is physical and competitive: you slam your card against the ground, and if the air pressure or impact flips your opponent’s card, you win it. A full stack could grow or vanish in an afternoon.

This card is a maru-menko — the round format that gained traction from the 1950s onward, as distinct from the older rectangular ban-menko style. Its face carries a coloured anime illustration of two samurai figures: a younger character holding two swords on the right, and an older figure with a single blade on the left. Also printed on the card are a hand symbol representing “guu” — the fist in rock-paper-scissors — alongside the character “tetsu,” both of which fed into the challenge and scoring mechanics that players layered onto the basic game.

The Anime and Its Historical Hero

The copyright mark on this card reads ©NET, pointing to NET — Nihon Educational Television — the broadcaster that launched in 1959 and was officially renamed TV Asahi in 1977. Because the card carries the NET name rather than TV Asahi, its manufacture predates 1977 with certainty. The anime Shonen Tokugawa Ieyasu is estimated to date from the mid-1960s, though an exact broadcast year and full production details have not been independently confirmed from available sources.

The series follows a format common in 1960s Japanese animation: take a celebrated historical figure, reimagine him as a young protagonist, and build an adventure series around that character. The real Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) is among the most recognisable names in Japanese history — the founder of the Edo shogunate and its first shogun. His early life had all the material a storyteller could want: born with the childhood name Takechiyo, he spent years as a hostage held between rival clans, the Imagawa and the Oda, before eventually rising to become the country’s most powerful figure. That early, precarious chapter — shonen means “boy” or “youth” — is precisely the dramatic territory this kind of anime was designed to explore.

Where Toy Culture and Early Anime Intersect

By the mid-1960s, Japan’s television anime industry and its dagashi-ya toy trade had become tightly linked. Broadcasters like NET were producing historical and adventure anime aimed at children, and character merchandise — menko among it — spread through the same distribution channels that sold candy. The menko format is distinctly Japanese in feel: unlike Western trading cards, which are typically handled and stored flat, menko were made to be thrown against the ground and won in open competition. The round format adds its own weight and texture to that experience.

For those interested in anime history, the NET era represents the industry’s earliest television years, long before it found audiences beyond Japan. Surviving merchandise from this period is limited — these cards were consumable goods, not keepsakes, and many were worn out through play or simply discarded. Tokugawa Ieyasu’s profile as a historical figure extends well beyond Japan: his role in shaping the Edo period, and the samurai culture that period represents, has been explored in novels, films, and games around the world for decades. A menko card that joins his historical identity to Japan’s foundational anime era sits at an unusual intersection of two very different kinds of cultural memory.