Pokémon Karuta Best Wishes

A dated collector article labels the exact orange-floral cover as the 2012 Best Wishes issue. Two complete-set listings—Yahoo/PayPay and Mercari—show that cover with the card rows used below. The Showa Note product record confirms the JAN, contents, three play modes and physical dimensions. That JAN, 4901772668220, is kept here as a cited record and is not used to tell the printings apart: Showa Note reused one barcode across its 3-bai-asoberu karuta line, and the same thirteen digits are printed on the 2007 Diamond and Pearl box and on the XY box. The per-product identifier is the nine-digit Showa Note item code printed beside the barcode, which reads 668 3700 02 on the box side photographed in the Yahoo/PayPay listing above.

Loose individual cards may confirm a kana-to-character pairing somewhere in the Best Wishes era, but they are not used to assign a card to this exact 2012 box. Marketplace photographs were used only for identification and were not copied into Hidden Temple. No row is filled from character popularity, box art or another printing.

The 31 positions that were open have since been read from photographs of a single 2012 deck broken into individual cards, where each picture card carrying its kana stands beside its own reading card. A Best Wishes reading card opens its verse with the card kana and names the Pokémon in hiragana, so a legible reading card is catalogue-grade evidence for that pairing. The deck is tied to this printing because its あ, か, さ, た, な, は, ま, や and ら reading cards match, character for character, the same cards photographed lying beside the 2012 orange-floral box, and because it agrees with every already-verified 2012 identity it covers.

A negative control keeps the printings apart. The same seller separately broke a non-2012 Best Wishes deck in which あ is Zekrom and Reshiram, や is Iris and は is Reshiram, contradicting the 2012 box on nearly every shared kana. Nothing from that deck, from the 2010 box or from the October 2011 box was used here, and a third series dated 2011 by its own seller was rejected for the same reason.

Three identities already published on this page were corrected against those 2012 photographs. か is Archen rather than Archeops, and that reading is legible on the 2012 box photograph itself. ぬ is Purrloin, because the 2012 deck places Liepard at す. よ is Scolipede, and Druddigon appears nowhere in the 2012 deck. The earlier readings came from fanned picture-card photographs in which overlapping cards make kana attribution unreliable. Each correction is recorded here rather than silently overwritten.