Those are karuta cards. Karuta is sort of a party game. Each player card is paired with a "reading card" that's got information on it. You mix up all the player cards on the table and players take turns reading the reading cards. After a card has been read, all the other players try to be the first to grab the corresponding player card. They would have originally been sold in a box as a complete set. The hiragana symbols on the cards don't have anything to do with the players' names, they just let you pair players cards with reading cards. But, the pictures are pretty good likenesses of the players, so it's not that hard to figure out who is who. (And, moreover, Engel already did the work for us.)
You have, in order:
Juzo Sekine (HOF), Hiroshi Oshita (HOF)
Michio Nishizawa (HOF), Makoto Kozuru (HOF)
Meiji Tezuka, Shissho Takesue
Hideo Fujimoto (HOF), Hiroshi Nakao (HOF)
Shigeru Mizuhara (HOF), Noboru Aota (HOF)
Tokuji Kawasaki, Shigeru Chiba (HOF)
Tetsuharu Kawakami (HOF)
Pretty good selection of players.
Also, in my last post I promised copies of the relevant pages from the UW Yearbook. Unfortunately this website doesn't let you post large files, so the legibility of the text below has been compromised. But you'll get the idea. I also think it's neat that the yearbook includes images of several postcards that were obviously produced together with the one that I posted above. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the yearbook, but the UW library has a nice digitized copy that you can read on-line.
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