OMG!! This brings back fond memories of playing Hanafuda with my Mom!! I would love to take this up again, but finding a playing partner is difficult. Aloha from Hawaii!!!
I had what I now realise was a partial set of these when I was little - which is why I couldn’t work out how to play the game. I kept them for their beauty.
I do wonder if there's a special meaning to why those cards are bend like this. I am not dyslexic, but for some reason I always read it as 'kurata'. Yeah - try learning Japanese with this...
Listening to the machine in the background, you can hear that machine glued at least 14 cards in the time they showed him gluing one. There were also video cuts in the hand gluing sequence, artificially shortening it, making it likely it was more like 15-18 cards. They were also more uniformly glued, and the alignment was likely better than what any human could achieve. The hand gluing must be for some special production cards, or maybe only for the purposes of this video, to show a more traditional technique.
