The Most Insanely Colorful Set of All Time: 1975 Pepsi Dragons Menko

 Today I present some cards from the 1975 Pepsi Dragons set (JCM 71).  It is the most colorful set of cards....or anything for that matter...that I have ever seen.  I feel I should probably have put a disclaimer at the top of the post warning that these cards may induce photosensitive epileptic seizures in some readers.  They are that insanely colorful.  They make the 1972 and 1975 Topps sets look like 1948 Bowmans.

I fell in love with this set a couple of years ago when I saw the first images of it online, but I hadn't been able to get any actual cards from it until recently.  Its a fairly rare set (Engel rates it R2) and was probably only issued in the Nagoya area (it only features Chunichi Dragons players).  Every once in a while a beat up little pile of them would show up on Yahoo Auctions with a high BIN price, but never anything enticing enough for me to buy one.  I waited so long I was getting tempted to splurge on one of the beat up ones just to have a single from the set though.

Then it happened.  An antique dealer (love em!) put a huge pile of them up for auction last week with a low starting bid and I scooped up an amazing find of these.  72 of them, almost all in minty condition!  What a haul!

 When I received them, most of them were wrapped in bundles of 8 like this:

Its pretty flimsy but I suspect this is how they were originally distributed.  These were given out in selected stores one by one to the purchasers of Pepsi and other drinks put out by Pepsi Co like Mirinda (a Spanish drink that used to be sold in Japan but no longer is).  I assume they had stacks of these by the cash register and just handed them out. That must have been a pretty cool site.  I'm curious if they had any similarily colorful promotional ads for this campaign (posters, etc), as those would be neat.

I mentioned that "almost all" of the cards I got were minty.  One of these bundles had obviously been dropped by somebody as all the cards had the same dinged lower left corner, but otherwise the cards all looked like they had come straight from the factory.

The backs of the cards aren't quite as colorful as the fronts, but then nothing is:

Ah....colors!

 One of the things that surprised me (in addition to the colors of course) about the cards was how big they are.  Looking at them in photos omline I had assumed they were the same size as the tobacco sized menko, but these are actually much bigger, the dimensions are close to those of standard modern baseball cards (just slightly narrower).  And they are on insanely thick cardboard, even for menko, which makes them kind of neat to hold.

 The complete set has 20 cards and guess what? I was able to put together an entire set from the lot!  Here they are:

Its got a few Hall of Famers, the most notable being Wally Yonamine (manager) Morimichi Takagi (who would also later manager the Dragons), Senichi Hoshino and Kenichi Yazawa.  It also has two American players: Ron Woods and Gene Martin.

One enticing thing that eludes me though is that while I have a "complete set" I do not have a "complete master set".

There are quite a few major variations in the 20 cards in the set, basically the same card comes in multiple color schemes.  For example, here are two of the Wally Yonamine cards, same picture but radically different background color schemes (also one has silver embossing while the other doesn't):

According to Engel there are up to four different versions of each card, though it doesn't seem to actualy be known how many variations exist in total.  There could  be as many as 80 cards in the "master set" if each card comes in four different color variations.

Unfortunately my lot wasn't big enough to figure that out, but putting together a master set would definitely be a challenging goal to pursue and one that probably nobody has accomplished to date.  I also have to keep looking for cards from the 1976 Pepsi Menko set which I haven't been fortunate enough to find a major pile of yet.  I'll have to find another big lot to do that.

Just writing this post has made me want to drink a Pepsi, so I can say that they are a pretty effective marketing tool.  For some reason in recent years it has become difficult to find Pepsi in Japan though.  Pepsi Co still sells tons of drinks in Japan, but for some reason they don't seem to sell just regular Pepsi anymore (just crappy versions of it like Pepsi Next or whatever.....)  Its kind of unfortunate as Pepsi put out a lot of really cool baseball promotional items in Japan over the years, the most recent that I recall being in 2001 when they put little Ichiro figures onto bottles of Pepsi.  I have a set of those somewhere that I actually put together in 2001, I'll have to dig them out for another post!

Some Really old Uncut Sheets!

 This is another antique dealer find: 3 uncut sheets of baseball menko cards from 1949-1950 (the set Engel catalogues as JRM-8).

The set was issued in three sheets featuring cards that have diagonal red and green stripes as background, though they come in various sizes.  I bought them as one lot, and all of them came framed. The frames are falling apart but I am keeping them in for now since I don't have any better way of protecting them.

The sheets are massive (I almost immediately regretted buying them when they showed up at my very little and very crowded house).  Two of them are horizontally oriented.  One of them features relatively small (2 and 3/8 inch diameter) cards of stars like Noboru Aota, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Osamu Mihara.  There are only 8 cards in the set and this sheet has 120 cards on it, so there are a LOT of doubles:

Close up:

The second horizontal sheet features both really big and really small cards.  I think its my favorite of the three, the big cards really display nicely.  Some of the players are repeated from the previous sheet, but the big cards also feature Kaoru Betto and Takehiko Beshoo among the stars.  

The third sheet is vertically oriented and features small cards (slightly bigger than the ones on the 120 card sheet) of baseball players.  The frame on this one is really broken and the sheet doesn't sit very well in it:

This is the only sheet that also features some non sport menko, very small cards on the margins featuring Popeye, Mickey Mouse and some other characters. Engel notes this in his description of the set and my sheets certainly confirms it, the non sport menko are kind of cut off along the edge of the sheet, so finding fully intact ones must be near impossible:

A few of these sheets seem to have survived the years, a set of them sold at an REA auction last year and Prestige Collectibles had some at the National Convention a couple years ago too. Its not unusual for menko sheets to survive in general, but these are notable since they are quite a bit different from your standard menko sheets since they obviously weren't intended to be sold in uncut form like this (unlike some sets which were) - they are too huge and contain too many duplicate cards for that to have been practical.  These must have been factory leftovers or something like that.

Anyway, when I get wealthy enough to move into a large house, I'll buy better frames for these and find a nice piece of wall suitable for displaying them.  Until that happy day, they are going to be spending their existence in the back of the closet which they were photographed in front of for these pics!

Kaoru Betto 1951 Osato Gangu

In an earlier post I mentioned getting some cards from the hyper rare 1952 Osato Gangu set.  I also picked up a small lot of cards from the 1951 Osato Gangu set, which is almost identical except the pictures are in black and white instead of color. One of the cards in the lot was the above featuring Kaoru Betto.

Betto is a Hall of Famer who played for the Tigers and Orions in a relatively brief pro career that spanned from 1948 to 1957, the start of his playing career having been interrupted by the War (he was already 27 years old when he made his debut).  His best season was in 1950 when he led the league in most offensive categories, just missing the batting average title that would have won him the triple crown.

In the US he is probably best known by the fact that Jeff Bridges has a T-shirt of him that he kept wearing in movies back in the 1990s:

In Japan on the other hand his famous bespectacled look allowed him to transition after retirement into a cushy gig as the public face of Hoya, a major glasses maker.

In addition to featuring black and white rather than color images, the other big difference between the 1952 and 1951 Osato Gangu sets is rarity.  While less than 5 copies of each card from the 1952 set are known to exist, the 1951 set is more common.  Engel classifies it as R2, which means somewhere between 100 and 250 copies of each card are known to exist.  That makes cards from that set more affordable, hence my ability to acquire a hall of famer in this set while my 1952s are all commons.

Kind of weird that cards where less than 250 copies are out there are the "easy" version, but that is vintage Japanese cards for you.

Major Find! Hoard of 1940s Menko!

This is definitely the most satisfying purchase I think I've ever made.

I remember back in my teenage collecting days in the early 90s reading an interview with Al Rosen, "Mr. Mint", about some of his big finds in the 70s and 80s when the hobby was taking off.  He described once going to someone's house and the person bringing out stacks upon stacks of mint 1952 Topps cards, thousands of them, and piling them on a table in front of him.  Back then people still had these hoards lying around and sometimes didn't know what they were worth so guys like him could make a killing buying them up and then selling them to the collector's market.

These were kind of legendary tales by the early 90s since by then all those finds had dried up and everyone knew what cards were worth.  Get a call from somebody saying they had a hoard of old baseball cards to sell in 1992 and chances are you'd drive out to discover that they had a monster box full of 1988 Donruss commons that they thought were worth big bucks (I worked at a card store then, this happened all the time).  But oh what a legend it was to me reading that interview.....

Now almost 30 years later living in Japan, I'm discovering that you can still be the equivalent of a 1970s American collector gobbling up hoards of rare vintage stuff that people just don't seem to appreciate anywhere near as much as they should! In fact I made my own (very miniature) version of Al Rosen's 1952 find the other day.

An antique dealer put a hoard of 1940s round menko up for sale on Yahoo Auctions, broken up into several lots, a couple hundred or so in total.  Perhaps I shouldn't be giving away this secret, but antique dealers who don't specialize in baseball cards are the best dealers to follow on Yahoo Auctions for incredible baseball card finds.  The known card dealers all have established followings so when they put stuff up, everyone bids on it.  Antique dealers though are off of most collector's radars, so when they put incredible stuff up it can sometimes slip by without attracting the attention of other bidders, which I think is what happened here.

Sometimes, of course, antique dealers get junk.  In fact, probably most of the time they do.  But this wasn't one of those times.  I looked at the cards and all the ones pictured were rarities - stuff ranging from R1 (less than 1,000 copies known to exist) to R5 (less than 5 copies known to exist) in Engel.  Sometimes you will find old menko lots that have a lot of cards from sets like JRM 19, JRM 20 or JRM 26 which the market was flooded with a few years ago thanks to big finds of "dead stock" of those cards in mint condition.  But none of those were in it, these were all rare ones.  And most of them looked like they were in decent condition, another hard thing to find with menko of this era which were thrown around a lot back in the day.

So I bid high on all of the lots and ended up winning every last one of them. And oh what a joy were they to  receive!  A huge pile of unsorted beautiful, colorful vintage menko to go through!!

THIS is what makes a hobby fun!  Discovering something new and exciting (and being able to afford it because it isn't insanely expensive).

And you know what makes a hoard of 200 or so vintage menko even more fun?  Sorting them and putting them into binder pages!! Yay!!!

Just to add to my satisfaction level, I had a few dozen 12 pocket binder pages lying around.  I bought these a couple of months ago intending to put some of my 1980s Calbee cards in them but discovered they were too small for that (Ultra Pro 12 pocket pages are the right size, but these were from a different maker and designed for slightly smaller stickers of some sort).  But they were the perfect fit for round 1940s menko so I made my own album!

Sorting the cards proved to be a fun challenge since recognizing which set each belonged to took some getting used to (I had menko from about 20 different sets, including some uncatalogued ones).  Let me take you through some of the highlights of my new favorite baseball card album.

First up: 1947 JRM 22

This is a 16 card set featuring some of the top HOFers of the era like Kawakami and Ohshita.  The easiest way to identify them is the little math question along the bottom border.  I have 15 out of 16 cards from this set now (12 are pictured, the other 3 are on the next page of the album), so just 1 more to go for the complete set!  And look how colorful they are!

Next Up: 1950 JRM 21

This is a smaller set at only 8 cards, and features stars like Michio Nishizawa, Kaoru Betto and Takehiko Bessho.  As you can see, I have 7 of them, which was a bit disappointing.  I found those 7 really early in the sorting process and thought for sure I'd have a complete set in there, but unfortunately, like the JRM 22, I came up one short.  The cards are recognizable by the menko number contained in the diagonal box along the front of the card.

And then there was: 1949 JRM 7

This was one of the more distinctive sets thanks both to the strong contrast in the colors used on the fronts and the backs, which have a unique design (most of the others were blank backed).  The set commemorated the 1949 Seals tour of Japan and features both Japanese and Seals players.  It is a 16 card set and I only got 9 so I'm not as close to the set as with the other ones.  But I do have the key card: Lefty O'Doul!  In fact I got doubles of him!

And lets not forget about: 1947 JRM 24

This set is pretty cool too, its distinguishable by the math problem in the little circle (either red or yellow) on the card front.  I only got 9 out of the 24 cards but that included the key cards of Bozo Wakabayashi and Tetsuharu Kawakami so not bad!

And of course 1948 JRM 46

I only got one card from this set, of HOF pitcher Hideo Fujimoto (career 1.90 ERA, the all time NPB record).  This is notable though since it was the rarest card in the lot, that set is listed as R5 by Engel, so less than 5 copies of each are known to exist.  Engel only lists 5 cards in the set, but its one of those ones that is so rare that there may be some more undiscovered ones out there.

There were a few other sets in there where I now have 4-5 cards each of.  Some of these were uncatalogued, which is quite interesting.  Some more goodies:

These ones, which I think are uncatalogued, caught my eye.

The top pair are cards of Kaoru Betto, the bottom pair of Noboru Aota, both HOFers.  The cards use the same image, but seem to be from different sets - the ones on the left have numbers in the round red circle, while those on the right have letters.  Also the ones on the left have rock/paper/scissors symbols, while the ones on the right have X/O symbols.  Kind of neat!

The uncatalogued sets are still only semi-organized in my binder pages so that is sort of an ongoing project.  Hopefully when Engel puts out the new edition of the guide some of them might be in it!

Now that I have all of these sorted into binder pages I have a collector's problem. I am hugely motivated to collect more of these and finish off those sets.  But I can't buy any of them.  These cards are so rare that not a single one of them is available for sale on Yahoo Auctions or anywhere else that I can find.

Its kind of hard coming down from a major "find" high like this, but its nice to at least be able to experience highs like this, which is what I am loving about collecting old Japanese cards.  Now the wait begins for the next antique dealer to put some huge lot of old menko up.....

Crazy Rare Stuff and the Guy who Almost Broke up Gehrig's Streak (I think)

The above is card from the 1930 Big Six University menko set (JCM 144 in Engel).  It features Rikkyo University pitcher Takeshi Tsuji, a guy nobody has ever heard of but maybe should have, for reasons I'll lay out below.

Before I do, its worth mentioning a bit about Japanese baseball history here.  This card was made prior to the establishment of the first professional baseball league in Japan (the predecessor to today's NPB) in 1936.  Prior to that the Big Six University League (featuring Rikkyo, Waseda, Keio, Hosei, Todai and Meiji) was the highest level of organized baseball in Japan.  So the few baseball cards issued before the War usually feature Big 6 players.

I did a bit of online research about Tsuji, he graduated from Rikkyo in 1932 and would later manage the team in the 1950s.  I don't think he ever played in NPB.  But he seems to have a really huge claim to fame that I am a bit reluctant to state as the god's honest truth since I've only found one source saying this, but I'll put it out there anyway (with that caveat noted).

His claim to fame is that he is the guy who almost ended Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played streak!

In 1931 an American team did one of their barnstorming tours of Japan.  This tour is less well known than the famous 1934 tour, but did feature some big names, including Gehrig.  The American team played apanese teams from the Big 6 league and absolutely demolished them, winning all 17 games.

During one game in the tour (see this contemporary news account) Gehrig was hit by a pitch on the hand.  He was rushed to hospital and given treatment, but when he returned to the US in December his hand was still swollen and an X-ray revealed that it "wasn't by any means well."

In Gehrig's own words: "Two of those Jap(anese) pitchers were big fellows with a lot on the ball and American baseball methods.  I came up with the bases full and one of them dusted me off.  They play on skin diamonds and the ball is always roughed up. It didn't break anything but it was a bad bruise I guess."

By the time spring training came around, his hand had healed and so the incident didn't mess with his consecutive games streak and the panic died away.  Looking at English accounts I haven't been able to find anyone identifying the pitcher that plonked Gehrig, but according to this article (in Japanese) the culrpit was... Rikkyo pitcher Takeshi Tsuji!  The guy on my card!

I want to try to do a bit more research on this since its just the one source saying that, but its a pretty neat historical footnote to have dug up (and I don't have anything suggesting it isn't accurate)!

This card is crazy rare I should add.  Engel lists the set as R5, which means fewer than 5 copies of each card are known to exist.  And I got one! Holy crap, as I mentioned in an earlier post owning a card from a set this old with so few surviving copies does make you feel some pressure to not let anything happen to it!

This is what the back looks like.  The purple stamp is the kanji for the number 7, I'm not sure what that is but it isn't uncommon for old menko to have stamps like that on the back which usually meant they were redeemable for some sort of prize.  Given how rare these are mine might be the only surviving copy of this card with a 7 on the back, which is neat.

I can also point out a small error in Engel's description of this set.  He notes he isn't sure if these should be considered menko since they lack some of the indicia of menko, like paper/rock/scissors symbols.  But if you look at the back, this clearly does have a paper/rock scissors symbol on it, the hand making the "rock" sign just below the bats!

Was I Wrong?

Yesterday I was able to sneak a quick visit to one of our card shops in Nagoya, Bits.  I picked up some supplies (which I'll probably devote a post to later) and some more 1980s Calbee cards for the sets I'm working on.

I also had a chat with the owner which made me rethink some of the stuff I wrote in a post a few weeks ago where I asked why Japanese people don't seem to collect vintage cards much.  Actually I think the individual observations I made in that post still stand, but the entire premise might not: maybe people in Japan are more into vintage than I thought.

This chat emerged out of my request to see the box of 1980s Calbees that he keeps behind the counter.  I knew it was there because he had let me browse through it on my previous visit with Dave.  I didn't have my 1983 and 1984 checklists with me on that previous visit so I had been meaning to peruse that box again with those in hand.

When I asked to see it the guy was almost apologetic, "I haven't added any to it since your last visit so its the same ones you saw last time"  he told me.  I explained the reason for my wanting to see it nonetheless and he handed it to me.  Then he started telling me why he has so few older cards.

"Until about a decade ago I used to buy older cards all the time" he said.  "People were just constantly bringing them in and I was constantly buying them."

Then, one day, people just stopped bringing them in.  Supply, rather than demand, had disappeared.

When I wrote my previous post I had kind of been under the impression that the reason card shops here don't stock vintage stuff is because nobody is interested in it.  But actually the opposite is true: they don't stock it because so many people are interested in it it has become hard to get (at least at prices that would make economic sense for a card shop).

Yahoo Auctions seems to have played the biggest role according to him.  Once people realized they could sell their old cards there, everyone stopped bringing them into shops to sell.  I suppose the same thing must have happened in the US years ago with the advent of Ebay (my card collecting days in North American pre-dated Ebay....and the internet....so I missed out on that transition).  Just cut out the middle man, it makes perfect sense.

This kind of jives with another fact that I've been noticing in the 6 years since I started this blog: prices realized for vintage cards have definitely been creeping upwards on Yahoo Auctions while supplies seem to be going downwards.  This is especially evident with 1970s Calbee cards that are selling for sky high sums, but I've also noticed it with my recent interest with menko.  The listings for menko a few years ago seemed to be a lot more robust than they are now, it definitely seems it is harder to find good stuff. And I constantly feel a sense of "I wish I had bought more while it was still available" when thinking of the stuff that I used to routinely find.

So anyway, while the market for vintage cards is definitely way smaller and less well developed than it is in the US, I'm starting to think I was over-stating the lack of interest.  Perhaps vintage is in!

Another Beautiful Calbee Card from the 1970s

I don't own the above card but saw it up for auction just now and fell in love with it.  Its a 1973 Calbee card featuring Dragons catcher  Tatsuhiko Kimata. I just love the composition of the card, the scoreboard provides the perfect backdrop to that posed swing.

Unfortunately I'm unlikely to ever own this card as its from one of the short printed series in 1973 Calbee which prices have been going through the roof on lately.  The series this one is in (which runs from cards 210 to 236) was only issued in Nagoya and is one of the hardest Calbee series from the 70s to find.  Current bidding is at 15,500 Yen (about $150 US) and counting with three days left, and that is for a copy of the card of a common player with dinged corners.

But oh what a card!  It really reinforces the value of taking card photos in actual big league stadiums rather than spring training facilities like Topps did back then.

Uncatalogued Die Cut Menko

Following up on the theme of my previous post, I have a few more "discoveries" to post about here.  This time the subject are previously unknown (or at least uncatalogued) die cut menko.

Die cut menko are some of the most interesting Japanese cards around due to their unique shapes and brilliant colors.  The Engel guide lists a couple of sets of them from 1930, but the vast majority were issued in the late 1940s and none (at least none of the catalogued ones) came out later than 1950.

They are interesting from a historical perspective since their 1947-1950 heyday occurred entirely during the occupation period when Japan was going through a period of famine and extreme poverty due to the destruction of its economy during the war.  Yet that period of impoverishment produced arguably the most interesting and attractive baseball card sets, with designs in some ways far superior to ones issued in later decades when Japan was a much wealthier nation.

I suspect part of the reason for this is that in the late 1940s these were the only toys that were available to kids.  Other materials like metal or wood would have been devoted to more pressing objectives than kid's toys at that time, so that left the kids with stuff made from paper or cardboard to play with.  So they had to make them fun and exciting. Cards made in the late 50s and 60s didn't have that pressure on them since by then the country had recovered and kids had a lot of other things to play with.

I picked up these five cards above a couple years ago and am only now getting around to actually posting about them.  They aren't from any of the sets listed in Engel and, from the differing back designs, seem to come from three different sets.

The backs also make clear that these are not NPB players, but rather amateurs.  The kanji on the back of all of them are the names of schools (Tokushima Shogyo, Gifu Shogyo and Kokura Ko are the three whose names I recognize, the other two I can't read the kanji off the top of my head but are also school names).  All three of those have fielded teams in the famous Koshien summer tournament and likely these sets fetaured teams from the tournament (all three that I identified appeared in the 1949 tournament, so likely the sets are from that year).

I do like the attempts at action shots in them, like the player depicted sliding into a base (the Tokushima card).  I also love the catcher flashing the "V" sign that everybody in Japan instinctively does when a camera is pointed at them - I guess that was a thing even back in the 1940s!

New Discoveries! Adding some info to the catalogue...

 One of the things I love about collecting Japanese cards is that its still possible to discover stuff that the hobby as a whole doesn't know about.  You can't really do that with American cards anymore, everything has been catalogued and discovered decades ago.

In Japan though there are a lot of cards out there that nobody knows exists, or at least aren't catalogued yet.  Its sort of like the US hobby is represented by the contemporary world, where every square inch has been mapped by satellites and we know everything about it.  The Japanese hobby on the other hand is the 15th century world where European explorers know so little about it they don't even know that the Pacific Ocean exists.

The above picture is one of my newest pick ups and it contains some discoveries in it!

It is an unopened box of round menko issued by Mitsuya in 1976.  I bought a different unopened box of 1976 Mitsuya round menko a couple of weeks ago and it looks nothing like this one. Which is neat.

There are actually cards from two different sets in this one, the set that Engel catalogues as JRM 10 (which was also contained in the other box I bought) and JRM 16 (which wasn't).  These are radically different sets in terms of size and rarity.  JRM 10 is a small menko 2 1/4 inches in diameter.  JRM 16 on the other hand are huge, as this picture of one with a 1979 Topps Dave Cash card I had lying around illustrates:

 So anyway, there is a reason there are two sets in the box.  It contains 60 packs of cards, all of which contain three JRM 10 cards.  52 of those are "normal" JRM 10 cards, and 8 are "Atari" cards (winner cards) which entitle whoever finds one to a prize.  That prize is one of the 8 big JRM 16 cards which also came with the box, hence the two sets in one box.

When you open the box, the JRM 16 cards are on top as in the above photo.  Take them out and underneath are the JRM 10 packs, with 8 of them set aside in a plastic baggy so the store owner would know which ones were the Atari cards before putting them out for sale (presumably they would have taken them out and mixed them up with the non-winner packs)

The packs themselves are actually pretty ugly, they look like little garbage bags, (or condom packages due to the unfortunate fact that JRM 10 cards are round and about the same size....oh dear):

I mentioned that cards from the JRM 10 set were also in the other box I got, but these cards are actually from a different series of that set, so the cards are all different.  But like that stupid other box, all 3 cards in all of these packs feature the same 3 cards of the same 3 players.  So Mitsuya was consistent in the application of that "all doubles" pack concept.

The real treasure in this box though weren't the JRM 10 cards, but the 8 big JRM 16 cards that came with it.  They are things of true beauty:

 The backs all have facsimile signatures of the players.

 The really interesting thing to me though was the "discovery" in the box.  The Engel guide lists 13 different cards in this set (with a little + to denote that there may be more).  6 of the cards I got were in the catalogue but 2 were not!

 I found two new cards that the hobby was unaware of!!!!

The first featured Yakult Swallows pitcher Hiromu Matsuoka.  He is kind of a Hall of Very Gooder, having compiled an almost even 191-190 win loss record, falling just 9 wins short of admission to the Meikyukai.

 The other features Hiroshima Carp second basemen Tsuyoshi Oshita, who had led the league in stolen bases the previous season.

So there you go, we can now say that the JRM 16 set has at least 15 cards in it now!

Also, I'm not sure if this is a discovery or not, but the Engel guide makes no mention of the fact that the JRM 16 set was a prize item for people who pulled atari cards in packs of JRM 10 (specifically the packs that came in this box, the ones in the other box I got didn't have any prize cards).  At any rate, I'm putting that info out there now!

The Lonely Collector and Takara Game Sets

I took a trip to visit my parents in Canada earlier this year and one of the things I found while going through boxes of my old stuff was the above:  a 1990 Takara Hanshin Tigers game set.

These were actually the first Japanese cards I ever owned, I bought them at a card show in Kingston in 1991, years before I ever set foot in Japan or really had any interest in the country.  There was a dealer who had a huge pile of Takara game sets of various teams in a bin for $1 each.  Nobody, not even the dealer, knew anything about them, they were just novelty items that he had stumbled onto somehow (I'm curious what the back story was there) and was trying to get rid of.

I was 15 and I thought they looked neat, so I chose a Hanshin Tigers one and paid the man his dollar.  I chose the Tigers because I had read somewhere that Cecil Fielder had played for a team called the Tigers in Japan in 1989 and was hoping maybe they had stuck a card of him into the set even though it was from 1990.  They didn't, and I had no idea who the other players were or how to read any of it!

But my interest in the game didn't die there.  I brought it with me to the card shop my dad and I had co-founded and at which my best friend Mike also worked.  It just sat there for a few months.  Then one slow weekend Mike and I were bored and we noticed the game sitting there.  We had no idea how to read anything, but it came with dice and a fold out playing field and we could kind of intuitively figure out how it was meant to be played just by looking everything over.

So we decided to create an MLB version of it. We got regular baseball cards of all the star players in 1992 and, based on their statistics from the previous year, created a pretty complex schematic for awarding hits, home runs, etc to players based on combinations of dice rolls. We then tried playing our new game.  And it sucked at first, but after a few iterations we were able to have it make a bit more sense.  We played it a few times during slow times over the course of the year, but our enthusiasm waned after a while.  Making the game seemed a lot more fun that actually playing it was.

Since we never used the cards, they are still in mint condition.  The dice are lost to the ages, as are the original instructions, though the fold out field was still with it.  The thing I really would have loved to find, but didn't, were our hand written schematics for each player that we had drawn up.

Anyway, fast forward to 2019 and I was strolling through Yahoo Auctions looking for deals and stumbled on a 1997 Takara Yakult Swallows team game which was very cheap and I decided to pull the trigger on it for old time's sake.

It's basically the same stuff as my 1990 Tigers set was: cards, dice, fold out playing field and instructions.

 The playing field is pretty cool and exactly the same as the 1990 one. This brings me back.

 I've never really been into Takara cards as cards since the design is kind of blah, but there are a lot of them.

 The backs of each gives you the schematic for the rolls of the dice for that player (each is unique).

The big difference between 1991 me and 2019 me is that the latter can read Japanese!  So 28 years after buying my first one of these things I've finally gotten around to reading the instructions and figuring out how this thing is played! And it looks pretty fun, very similar to how Mike and I imagined it (Dave put up an English translation of the basics here).

But the problem is that I now live in Japan and Mike now lives in Seattle and I haven't seen him in person in over a decade.  So....shit, I can't play it with him.

(Sad face).

Fortunately though as a father I have in my care two small human beings who I created and who may someday be interested in playing this game with me.  They are a bit too young and a bit too not able to sit still for more than 3 seconds and also a bit too not really knowing how to play baseball to make good opponents right now, but in a few years I think they will be.  When the time is right I'm going to whip this out and make them play it with me!

Its fun to have small things to look forward to.