Tanjiro’s hanafuda earrings and their legacy

There are few objects in Demon Slayer that set off as many events as these two little cards hanging from a boy’s ears. The first demon crosses paths with a charcoal seller in an Asakusa street, sees this pattern, and drops what he was doing to send two demons after him.

What the Kamado family wear is not a decorative piece of jewellery. It is an amulet made by a Sengoku-era mother, passed from hand to hand for four centuries, and the sign of recognition of the only man who ever made Muzan retreat. This article traces this chain back, from the card game that gives the pattern its name to what the object tells about the character. Our page about the hero of Demon Slayer in full opens this branch.

What are these earrings?

The word hanafuda refers to a Japanese card game with flower and season patterns, which appeared in the eighteenth century. The cards are small and thick, and the best known show a moon or a sun set on a coloured background.

The earrings in Demon Slayer reproduce this card shape. Two rectangles of identical size, a red disc at the top, rays descending over a pale background, and a simple fastening.

Tanjiro wears them in both ears, and they follow him in every fight in the story. They never leave him from the first chapter to the last, while his swords break one after another.

You can also wear the pattern outside the story, with the shop’s earrings and the section of all the jewellery from the series.

Hanafuda, the card game behind the pattern

The pattern exists in reality outside Demon Slayer, and it is worth explaining. A hanafuda deck has forty-eight cards divided into twelve suits of four, one suit for each month of the year, each represented by a seasonal plant.

January has the pine, February the plum tree, March the cherry tree, August the pampas grass, November the willow. In each suit, one card is worth more than the others, and these are the cards that carry the well-known images: the crane, the festival curtain, the full moon.

Two of these cards show a red or pale disc set on a coloured background, read as a sun in one suit and as a moon in another. It is this composition that the series’ earrings reproduce, with rays added around the disc.

The cards are small, thick and made of card, and fit in one hand. They are used for combination games, the best known being koi-koi, in which two players assemble suits to score points.

The game is still sold in Japan, and the company that popularised it in the nineteenth century now makes video game consoles. So the author’s choice of this pattern places the hero in ordinary popular culture, not in a symbolism invented for the occasion.

Akeno Tsugikuni, the woman who made them

The earrings’ origin goes back long before the Demon Slayer story, to a Sengoku-era mother. Akeno Tsugikuni gives birth to two sons, Michikatsu and Yoriichi, and the second does not speak.

The family considers him deaf. His father treats him as a child of little worth, his mother worries, and she makes two amulets in the shape of hanafuda cards which she hangs on his ears, praying to the sun god to restore his hearing.

The boy could hear. He had simply never spoken, and he opens his mouth for the first time at seven, in front of his older brother, who is left astonished. He later apologises to his mother for the worry his ears caused her.

Akeno was a woman of deep faith, who prayed every day for violence to leave the world, in an era of permanent war. She dies of an illness that takes her body piece by piece, and her son, who could see this illness with the Transparent World, supported her on her left side without saying a word.

This detail has consequences for the whole series. The older brother first takes this gesture for that of a child clinging to his mother, discovers the truth in Akeno’s diary, and his pity turns into a jealousy that ends up making him a demon. Our article on Kokushibo, Upper Moon One tells of this turning point.

From Yoriichi to Sumiyoshi, the handover

Yoriichi Tsugikuni wears these earrings all his life, including the evening he cuts Muzan to pieces and almost kills him. He ends up expelled from the Corps, and finds a charcoal seller named Sumiyoshi again, whom he had saved from a demon along with his wife Suyako.

Their last meeting takes up just a few pages in Demon Slayer, and it is one of the most important in the manga. The swordsman tells the story of his life, says it was all for nothing, then performs his forms at Suyako’s request, before the eyes of the household’s children.

Sumiyoshi tells him the opposite, and promises to keep his movements and his earrings in his descendants. Yoriichi hands him his mother’s amulets, thanks him, smiles, and never comes back.

The promise is kept to the letter for four centuries, by people who no longer know why. Our article on Yoriichi Tsugikuni and his elder brother details the life of the first wearer, and our article on the Dance of the Fire God and its twelve forms follows the other half of the legacy.

The first wearer has his own section in the shop, the complete Yoriichi Tsugikuni collection.

The Kamado family’s rite of passage

In the Kamado family of Demon Slayer, the earrings are not worn at just any time. They pass from father to eldest son, along with the dance, like a rite marking the moment the boy becomes head of the household.

Tanjuro Kamado wore them in his lifetime, in his ears, exactly as his son does later. The two men look so alike that readers confuse the two figures in the flashbacks.

On his father’s death, Tanjiro inherits the lot: the earrings, the dance, the charcoal trade and six people to feed. He is still a child. Our article on the Kamado family and its seven members comes back to this household.

The heart-wrenching detail comes later. No one in the line knew what they were passing on: for the Kamado family, these two cards were a family good-luck charm, nothing more.

You can also wear the card around your neck, among the shop’s necklaces, and the complete Tanjiro Kamado collection brings together the rest of his outfit, cosplay outfits from the series included.

What does Muzan see in Asakusa?

The object’s most important scene in Demon Slayer takes place in an illuminated street. Tanjiro arrives in Asakusa, picks up a demon’s scent in the crowd, and comes across an elegant man out walking with a woman and a little girl.

Muzan Kibutsuji sees him, and his gaze stops on the boy’s ear. The story shows a tremor, a second of panic in a being who has feared nothing for a thousand years.

The reason lies in his past. The wounds Yoriichi left on him never closed and still burn four centuries later, and this card pattern is the only sign in the world that heralds that swordsman.

His reaction is immediate. He turns a passer-by into a demon to create a diversion, disappears, and sets two demons with Blood Demon Arts on the boy’s trail, as told in our article on Susamaru and Yahaba, the Asakusa demons.

The boy, for his part, understands nothing of what is happening. He recognises the smell that hung in his house on the day of the massacre, grabs the man by the shoulder in the middle of the crowd, and freezes in front of the woman and child with him. He will only learn the role of his earrings in Demon Slayer dozens of fights later.

The whole rest of the story follows from that second. Our article on Muzan Kibutsuji, the first demon details this obsession, and our page about the demons of the series and their hierarchy presents those he sends.

The pattern altered in some broadcasts

One point concerns the anime’s production rather than the story. The rising sun pattern on the earrings was redrawn for several Asian broadcasts of the series, with the disc and its rays giving way to a neutral design.

The reason was the resemblance between this pattern and a historical Japanese military flag, poorly received in some neighbouring countries. The versions concerned therefore show earrings without rays.

The original version keeps the rays, and it is the one reproduced on Demon Slayer merchandise in most countries. Both variants are in circulation, which explains the differences between two items sold for the same character.

The original manga has not been retouched, and the volumes sold in France show the complete pattern. The difference only concerns some animated versions, which creates discrepancies between two screenshots of the same scene depending on the country of broadcast.

The point remains discreet in the story, since no dialogue refers to it. It does explain, however, why Demon Slayer promotional visuals do not always show the same earrings.

What the object says about the character

The earrings serve as a thread in Demon Slayer, just like the hero’s sense of smell. They signal a legacy Tanjiro is unaware of, link him to the only threat Muzan has ever known, and get him hunted even before his first fight.

They also tell of a continuity of gestures rather than of blood. The mother who prays, the son who hears, the charcoal seller who promises, generations of fathers who pass on without understanding, and a fifteen-year-old boy who finishes the job.

The contrast with the rest of the series’ equipment is clear. Demon slayers wear a uniform, a sword forged for them and sometimes a mask, all made by the institution that employs them. Tanjiro also wears two objects that do not come from it.

This private provenance matters in the last third of the story. When the boy receives his ancestor’s memories, he recognises Yoriichi’s face thanks to what hangs from his earlobe, and understands that his family has kept for four centuries what the entire Corps had lost.

The rest of the character’s gear follows the same principle, such as the colour of his blade, detailed in our article on the black colour of Tanjiro’s sword, or the Corps’ weapons presented on our page about Nichirin swords and their colours.