Picking over the remains of a dying card shop gets: 1976 Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons Cards

 One of the big stores in Nagoya, Caps, is closing up shop and recently I've been taking advantage of their online liquidation sale to pick up some neat oddball items.  The best so far are these Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons circular menko which I am completely in love with.

I've seen various Pepsi Cola Dragons issues like these over the years, it seems they had some sort of promo deal with the team in the late 1970s.  Not all of them are circular, some were rectangular like these ones.

The lot of seven I bought has a pretty decent player selection - Yukitsura Matsumoto, T. Martin, Kenichi Yazawa, Hisato Aoyama, Hiroaki Inoue, Yasushi Tao and a gold embossed Dragons team logo one.  The colors are quite striking (especially Matsumoto's) and the gold embossing is quite cool for cards of this era.

The backs are cool, featuring the player's name, number and position, a trivia question about the rules of baseball and a rock-scissors-paper (janken) symbol.

Usefully they also tell us the player's age, which allows me to date them to 1976 since it says Yasushi Tao was a mere 22 years old when this came out!

I'm not sure what the checklist for these is (buying a copy of Engle is still on my to do list) but I might add them to my list of things I'm collecting.

I have a few more things I have picked up from Caps recently which I'll highlight in future posts. I have mixed feelings about their liquidation.  On the one hand I love getting bargains on neat stuff.  On the other seeing a card shop go out of business brings back memories of me and my dad's store closing down way back in 1993 and all the sad memories that accompany that!  So much effort into making a shop work that it kind of hurts to see it all getting broken apart, even if it isn't your store.