Early Christmas Present to Me

 

I picked up the above lot of baseball menko off of Yahoo Auctions last week.  Its an early Christmas present for myself.  I haven't been posting much lately since work has been extremely busy, but thought I'd do at least one last post for 2020 before it finally comes to an end.

Most of these cards are from the 1947 JRM 22 set.  There are 16 cards in that set and this lot I bought contains 13 of them.  Adding those to the ones I already have, I now have that set completed!  Its the first hard to find 1940s menko set I've completed by hand so its a cool accomplishment (if I do say so myself).

One of the other three cards is this one, featuring Masumi Isegawa of the Kinsei Stars who had a long (1940 to 1957) if unspectacular career as a catcher for several teams.

The card is interesting because I think it is from an uncatalogued set and thus constitutes another new discovery.  I haven't seen any other sets with the number in blocks as it is on the left side of this card before, or with the team name written in Romaji in that style.  The Stars only went by the name "Kinsei" (which means "gold star") for two years, so this card was likely released in either 1947 or 1948.  

In case this does end up being my last post of the year, hope you all have a Merry Christmas and happy new year.  May 2021 be a better year than 2020!

Why so Glum?

 

I picked up this menko recently, it features Hall of Famers Shigeru Mizuhara and Kaoru Betto.  I don't know what set it is from, it might be an uncatalogued one (anyone out there know?)

What struck me about the card is just how glum and sad the artist made both players look.  They both seem to be frowning and have eyes that look like they are about to well up with tears.  

This seems odd to me.  This is not a photo, somebody deliberately drew them that way.  Why not put a smile on their faces?  Maybe the artist  was feeling a bit down and put a bit of himself into his work? Or maybe he was trying to give them a more stoic look and it just turned out looking sad and he didn't feel like doing it over again?

Anyway, has anybody out there ever done a card collection based on the emotions being displayed by the players depicted?  Happy faces, sad faces, bored faces, irritated faces - seems like there is a lot out there you could work with. 

New Menko Finds

 

I have a couple of recent menko pick ups which seem to be from an uncatalogued set (or sets).

The card on the left features Tigers star and HOFer Fumio Fujimura.  He is one of several Babe Ruth type players who was a star both on the mound and at the plate in his early career, then mainly at the plate later in his career.  As a pitcher he posted a career 34-11 record.  His best pitching season was in 1946 when he went 13-2 with a 2.44 ERA.  Four years later, in 1950, at the plate he set the single season hit record in Japan with 191 (in a 140 game season).  That record would last until 1994 when Ichiro Suzuki broke it.

The card on the right is Takehiko Bessho, another HOFer who I've written about before so won't repeat his biography.

I'm not sure if these cards belong to the same set or not.  The team names are written in katakana on both, which is unlike any set listed in Engel's catalogue.  The style of artwork is also similar, and the rock/paper/scissor symbol is the same.  But the player names are written in different styles as are the menko numbers, so these might be from different sets.  Bessho is pictured as a member of the Nankai Hawks who he played for between 1946 and 1948 so likely the set (or sets) dates to one of those years (Fujimura played his entire career for the Tigers so his card doesn't help with the date).

As you can see, neither of my cards is exactly what you would call high grade.  Anybody know how PSA treats massive vertical gouges across the entire length of a card that are so deep they nearly cut it in half?  I'm guessing they would ding me for that if I were to ever submit them. 

One of these cards is not like the others

 

There has been so little of note happening in the news over the past three days that I thought I'd distract you all with another blog post to help you deal with the unrelenting boredom of nothing of any interest or consequence whatsoever consuming everyone's attention day in and day out since Tuesday.  

So let me try to dazzle you out of your complete and utter state of boredom.  I have a little collection of cards from the 1947 set Engel catalogues as JRM 1a.  There are only 8 cards total in the set and I have 6, so I'm close to completing it, though mine are pretty low grade.  It contains several Hall of Famers from the early post war period like Tetsuharu Kawakami and Michio Nishizawa, both of which I have.

Interestingly though of the six cards I have featuring baseball players, one of them does not feature a baseball player. The card in the lower left is of Michitaro Mizushima, a very famous actor who, as far as I can tell, never played baseball (or at least never professionally).

I'm impressed with Engel's work in figuring out who that was, all he had to go on was the name "Mizushima" which is a fairly common one in Japan.  

During Mizushima's career, which began in 1925 and lasted into the 1990s (he passed away in 1999), he appeared in a lot of movies.  I've been trying to figure out where the image for this card came from but am drawing a blank.  He appeared in a few movies in the 1940s but none of them seem to have featured baseball (though on a lot there isn't much info available).  Later in his career he also appeared on TV, but in 1947 there weren't any TV shows to appear on.  

So it remains a bit of a mystery why he appears on this card in a baseball uniform.  

Sorry, that is all I got, and I may have oversold it by saying I would "dazzle" you, but I hope it has at least helped to distract you from the overwhelming boredom and tedium of nothing at all of interest being played out in agonizingly slow motion on every TV channel the world over for the past three days. 

How Did You Get Here? American Cards in Japanese Markets.

 

I don't post much about my collection of MLB cards on here (though I do have one).  I made an editorial decision a few years back to just stick to talking about Japanese cards.  But I'm going to make an exception with these.

Every once in a while I'll stumble across something on Yahoo Auctions and wonder to myself "How on Earth did you end up here?"  This was one of those things.  It is a complete set of 1967 Topps pin ups.  These were distributed in regular wax packs in 1967 and feature a boat load of big name Hall of Famers - Mantle, Clemente, Aaron, Mays, and so on.

Its really rare to find vintage American cards over here.  There is a significant segment of the Japanese hobby that is devoted to collecting American cards, but they are overwhelmingly only interested in modern cards.  Basically its just since Nomo and Ichiro went over to the US that Japanese collectors became aware of American cards, and they don't have much interest in stuff that came out before those guys went over.  There is a very niche market specifically for cards of American players who came to Japan so there are a few dealers that will stock pre 1990s US cards of  guys like Warren Cromartie or Willie Davis.  And occasionally a PSA graded card of some star from the 60s might pop up.  But its rare.  Nobody sells singles or lots from older sets.  And nobody sells complete sets.  

So I was really surprised to find this complete set from 1967 up for sale.  The guy selling it had no idea what it was.  The title just said "1960s Major league Bromides?  Cards?  32 of them."  The description further made clear that the guy had no idea what they were, stating (incorrectly) that he had heard they were given out with candy in the US back in the 60s.  No mention of Topps, or of the names of any of the players.

This wasn't surprising since the guy selling them isn't a card dealer.  About 80% of his listings are women's clothing (mainly kimonos), with a smattering of toys and used electronics.  No cards.  He just found these in a box that he had acquired and threw them up.

This turned out to be good for me, since he started them at 3,000 Yen and I ended up winning them for just 3,100 Yen (about $25 US) after outbidding the first bidder, who immediately lost interest and didn't contest me for them.  These aren't super valuable, but that is still way less than what they go for in the US.

I do wonder how these things in their 53 years of existence managed to cross the Pacific Ocean and wind up in a box in the hands of a kimono dealer  in Hiroshima who had no idea what they were.  Obviously at some point somebody put the set together.  Was it an American serviceman back in the 60s who was stationed here?  Or a Japanese person who lived in the US, collected them, and brought them back home?  Or someone more recent, an American English teacher who collected cards?  A Japanese collector who bought them off Ebay but then lost interest?  

There are a lot of ways these might have found their way here, but now they are in my hands and will likely stay there for quite some time!

Tatsunori Hara's first Calbee card is a Sadaharu Oh card.

 

I've been AWOL from the blog for the past few weeks.  October is kind of "hell month" for me at work so its been hard to squeeze time in for blogging.

Despite that, the flow of card purchases by me has continued more or less at its normal pace.  One card I picked up this month was the above, #354 from the 1981 Calbee set.  It is basically Sadaharu Oh's regular card.  His name is the one in pink lettering on the lower right of the photo, and the text on the back just gives some general biographical information about him, unconnected to the photo.

This card is really neat though.  From left to right you have Motoshi Fujita, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  Those three guys have three big things in common:

1) They were all star players for the Giants;

2) They all became managers of the Giants after their playing days (Hara is in fact their current manager)

3) They all ended up in the Hall of Fame.

I'm not sure but I think the photo was probably taken during the 1981 Japan Series, which the Giants won (Fujita was the manager, Oh was assistant manager that year and would take over as regular manager the following season).

A second, and more important, neat thing about it specifically relates to Tatsunori Hara, the guy on the right.  1981 was his first year in pro ball and he was THE hot rookie that year.  He was supposed to be the Giants' next Shigeo Nagashima or Sadaharu Oh. His playing career, which ended in 1995, didn't quite live up to that hype, though he did bang out 382 career home runs and was one of the better players in NPB throughout the 1980s.

The thing is though, Tatsunori Hara doesn't have a card of his own in the 1981 Calbee set.  His first "solo" appearance on a card came in the 1982 Calbee set, which is generally regarded as his rookie (he appears on a few cards in that set, my old Sports Card Magazine designates the first one, card #51, as his true "rookie card").  

His cameo appearance on my 1981 Calbee card though seems to be his first appearance in a Calbee set.  Which leads me to the question: what is this card?  I guess its not a "rookie card" since its not his card, its Sadaharu Oh's. But at the same time, Hara is pretty prominently featured on there so its a bit more than just a card of some other player where he coincidentally appears in the background or something, like Ryne Sandberg's cameo on Reggie Smith's 1983 Topps card:

Also, Sandberg of course had a card of his own in the 1983 Topps set, so the question of whether his appearance on the Smith meant something special didn't really come up.  

So this card falls into a weird limbo in terms of what the hobby might designate it as since I don't think there is a precedent for this.  Its definitely not a true rookie card, but also definitely not nothing either.  "Pre" rookie card?  No, thats not right.  I can't really decide what to call it.  Anyway, its neat.

Calbee's Awesome 1985 Art Contest for Kids

 

Here is a little pile of 1985 Calbees that I recently picked up.  I have about 200 cards from the 1985 Calbee set which puts me almost halfway to the 465 it has in total, but I'm not seriously chasing it since the vast majority of the remainder are from hyper rare series that are way out of my budget.  

One good thing about the 1985 set though is that there is a pretty big series in it, which also happens to be one of the easier (and thus more affordable) series, that has awesome artwork on the back.  

Calbee had a contest that year in which kids would send in pictures they had drawn of baseball players.  If they won, their picture (along with their name and home prefecture) would go on the back of the player's card.  These are the backs of the 16 cards featured above:

I think there are about 100 cards in the set which have this artwork, these are just a few examples.  

Boomer Wells is looking cheerful:

Kiyoshi Nakahata looks like he is trapped in a Picasso:

Jose Cruz looks like he is grinding his teeth:

Akinobu Mayumi is daringly rendered in profile without any features:

The late Nobuyuki Kagawa's legendary chubbiness is very well captured:

An interesting thing is that at the bottom of all these cards there is a comment from someone called "Yoshimura Sensei" about the artwork.  On Kagawa's for example he/she says "Kagawa is cute. This is a very pleasant picture."

I'm kind of curious about who Yoshimura Sensei was - probably an art teacher of some sort.

These cards are another aspect I like about older Japanese baseball cards in general -  I don't remember Topps or any other US maker having contests like this in 1985.  It must have been so thrilling for these kids to see their pictures on actual baseball cards.

Ron Woods: Who is this Guy?

 

I picked up card #71 from the monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set this week.  This is from the rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area and is thus a key addition to my set.  

This gives me 23 out of 36 cards in that series, more than halfway there!

The card depicts Ron Woods. He is kind of an intriguing player about which we know very little.  He played parts of several MLB seasons between 1969 and 1974, getting the most playing time with the Montreal Expos between 1971 and 1974.  He then went to Japan for two years with the Chunichi Dragons in 1975 and 1976.

Beyond the numbers: silence.  Nobody has bothered to write a biography of him on his Wikipedia page, or on his Baseball Reference Page, or on his SABR page.  

This is frustrating because there are two intriguing facts about the Ron Woods story that I've been able to glean just from 1) this card, and 2) Googling him, that suggest stories of human interest at work.

The first is from the back of this card.

Japanese baseball likes players who sacrifice everything for the game and their team.  A lot of these Calbee cards from the 70s have write ups on the back which extoll this virtue.  This card, titled "Big league Pride" tells us that Ron Woods is a player who forgets everything else in the world when playing.  To illustrate, it states that he recently got tragic news from his family back in America. While he made a short visit back to the US as a result, he was so serious about the game that (on getting the news) he considered waiting until the off season to go back.

So this tells us that Woods experienced a serious personal tragedy during his stay in Japan and faced a difficult decision about whether to go back home to deal with it or not.  This is a recurring theme that shows up in the stories of many American players here - Randy Bass was famously criticized for returning to the US during the season to be with his son who was having major surgery.  So Woods had one of those too, but we don't know anything about it.

The other interesting thing I learned from a Google search is that in September of 1975, probably shortly after this card was made, Woods was among four members of the Dragons who were injured in Hiroshima after being attacked by fans.  This was mentioned in a very brief article in the New York Times at the time, but I haven't been able to find any more info on what happened.

So anyway, it seems like Woods' two year stay in Japan featured some drama, yet we know very little about him.  

Some more 1997 Calbees

 

I picked up 15 singles from the 1997 Calbee set this week.  Nobody particularly exciting, the whole  lot only cost me about 4$, but they were all cards I needed for the set.  

These get me to 202 out of 237, just 35 to go.  Unfortunately 19 of those are from the rare high number series, but I'm very close to finished with the low numbers.  

Thus far my Calbee collection has been mainly focused on cards from the 70s and 80s, as well as the obligatory purchase of contemporary sets as they come out each year. This has left the 90s as the decade with the biggest holes in my collection.  I am pretty close to finished with the 1999 Calbee set, which is by far the easiest to complete.  I also have a decent start on the 1998 set, which is also fairly easy to do.  And the 1995 Choco Snack set I  was lucky enough to pick up as a set a year and a half ago ( in retrospect that was an incredible deal, prices on those have gone up a lot since then and there is no way I could replicate that find today).

But most of the other sets from that decade (particularly the 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 sets) I only have a smattering of cards each for.  Except for 1991 those are really hard sets to find cards for.  The  1994 and 1996 sets in particular have fewer than 100 listings each on Yahoo Auctions right now, indicating how rare they are.  Once I've finished the 1997s I might move on to one of them, but for now those years don't really exist in "set" form in my collection yet.  

Dogs Wearing Caps

 

This is one of the new key pieces of my collection.  Its an uncut sheet from the 1948 set Engel catalogues as JBR 118.  The set was issued in sheets like this, each featuring 10 cards from a team.  Mine features members of the Yomiuri Giants and has a few Hall of Famers like Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeru Chiba, Noburo Aota and manager Osamu Mihara.

Engel only lists the sheets for four teams (Braves, Flyers, Hawks and Giants) in the guide and states that only one copy of each is known to exist.  So my Giants sheet is either that one known copy, or it is a newly discovered second copy.  I'm leaning towards the second as being more likely, given that I bought it from an antique dealer located in Kobe who probably dug it up locally.  Either way, these are pretty hard cards to find.  

The backs of the cards have pictures of dogs wearing baseball caps in red.  Hence Engel gave this set the nickname "Dog Wearing Baseball Cap".  Which is pretty cool.  

I've Waited Years To Find This Card

 

My 1975-76 Calbee set made a massive jump towards completion yesterday with the addition of The Most Valuable Card In The Set (TMVCITS)!

This is card #630 featuring Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium during a night game from the 1976 season.  As I wrote in a post last year about a different card I got (#157 which coincidentally also features Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium)  this is basically the key card in the entire set.  It comes from the extremely rare "Red Helmet" series  which runs from card #609 to 644.  It was only released in limited numbers in the Hiroshima area and is very rare today.  I'm not sure exactly why, but of all the cards in that series, the one featuring the stadium has long been recognized as the most valuable by Japanese collectors.

I have been waiting for one of these to come up at auction for a long time and when this showed up (alongside two other cards from the same series that I need) I pounced.  I ended up winning it for 7500 Yen (about $70 US) which is more than I usually pay for a card (and way more than my 1000 Yen per card limit that I tried to impose on myself earlier this year but have failed miserably at adhering to).  But its the key card in the set, and this basically means that I now know that I won't have to pay more than that for any other card in the set.  The downside of the bidding getting that high was that I had to let the other two cards from the series up in the same auction go, and they sold for about half what this one did.

This is actually a really nice copy of the card, probably in ExMt condition or so with a tiny speck of fluff on two of the corners being the only blemish.  And that makes me happy since I had figured for this card I would have to accept a lower grade copy since higher grade ones would be way too hard to find.  But nope, the marquee card in my set is a looker!  Yee haw!

I'm still not close to finishing the whole set, I'm about 400 cards short right now (out of 1472 total), but this is another milestone crossed!

Fake Ichiros and Weird Bidders

 
There is a seller on Yahoo Auctions who I've been watching for a few years now.  A few years ago I bought one of the rare 1994 Calbee Ichiro cards off of him.  This was relatively early in my Japanese baseball card collecting days and I wasn't aware of how prevalent fakes of those cards (there are three of them) were.  Of course mine turned out to be a fake as I discovered later.  Fortunately I only paid about 25$ so it wasn't a huge write-off.

If you click on the guy's Yahoo Auctions page you'll see a huge list of naked lady cards (very NSFW, proceed with caution).  Those are his specialty.  But about once every month or so he'll put out a few baseball cards for sale.  And almost every time he does so, he has one copy of each of the three 1994 Calbee Ichiros.

Over the years I've been watching his auctions (er...just his baseball card auctions) he's probably put up dozens of those Ichiro cards.  Bear in mind that those cards are so rare that there are probably only a few dozen legit copies of them in existence in the first place.  So this should be a huge red flag screaming "FAKE" to anyone out there paying attention.

Yet every time he puts them out, people bid on them and buy them.  This post was inspired by me watching three more end last night, all getting multiple bids (the one in the picture at the top got 14 bids and sold for 4501 Yen, about $40).  

It really doesn't make much sense.  They always sell, but they also usually sell in that 30-50$ price range, which is about 1/10th of what a legit copy would probably be worth.  

Its kind of hard to figure out what is going on with the bidders.  If they think the things are real, they should be bidding them up to much higher prices than that.  If on the other hand they think the things are fake, they shouldn't be bidding at all.  Yet everytime they manage to bid it up to a price that is way too high for a fake and way too cheap for a real one.  What do these bidders think these cards are?

In my case when I bid I thought it was real and I put in a higher bid than what I ended up winning it for with that expectation in mind.  Other bidders pushed it up to about the 25$ level, then jumped ship.  Perhaps there are shill bidders, but looking at the one I linked to above it got bids from 4 separate bidders, two of whom have a ton of feedback and are likely legit bidders, and two of whom have less than 100 feedback and might be shill bidders.  It was won by one of the two with high feedback, and one of the two with low feedback placed the second highest bid, consistent with what you would expect if shill bidding was going on.  But at the same time the other "real" bidder came close to winning it and the "shill" bid only bumped it up a couple hundred Yen.  So even if the two suspect accounts hadn't bid, the card would have sold for almost the same price and therefore shill bidding alone can't account for this irrational pricing.

So I kind of wonder if these real bidders are just suckers like me being taken in?  You'd think they would have caught on by now though, this guy has been at it for years now (though he does have near perfect feedback).  On the other hand, maybe they know and don't care - perhaps they are planning to flip these fakes themselves? 

I don't know exactly what is going on but it sure does stink anyway you look at it.  

The 1977 Oh Series

 

One of the hardest Calbee sets from the 70s to find is the 96 card set dedicated entirely to Sadaharu Oh on the occasion of him passing Hank Aaron's 755 career home run total.  

I only have 2 cards from this set, number 38 and 42.  The card above (#42) features a photo taken at exactly 7:10 PM (and 7 seconds!) on September 3, 1977 as the text on the card front tells us.  It shows him high fiving Giants coach Akira Kunimatsu while rounding the bases after hitting #756.

The back of the card is kind of interesting.  It shows some stats on each of his milestone home runs over his career that you don't often see.  For each, in addition to the date, it also tells you how many other players had hit that many (at the time),  the pitcher he hit it off and the number of games it took to get there.  So we can see for example that when he hit his 100th career home run on July 28, 1963 off a Hiroshima pitcher named Ooishi there were only 32 other players in the NPB "100 home run club". When he hit #200 a mere 2 years later there were only 12 other players with as many.  Two years later he joined the 300 home run club, which only consisted of 3 players.  And when he clobbered #550  five years after that he was in a club all by himself.  There seems to be an error in the last two entries of the number of games played column, it seems highly unlikely that it took him 2318 career games to reach 715 home runs, but didn't reach #755 until career game 10,145 (which would take about 70 seasons).  

Card #39 is also pretty neat.  It shows him on August 31, 1977 being interviewed after tying Aaron with his 755th home run.

The back of this card is also pretty cool, it shows a side by side comparison of the careers of Oh and Aaron from 1954 to 1977. The first few years are blank for Oh since he didn't play his first game until 1959, while 1977 is blank for Aaron since he retired after the 1976 season.  Its actually quite impressive that Oh accomplished his feat in four fewer seasons than Aaron, especially given the shorter season in NPB.  

The most famous, and valuable, card from this set is #93, which features Oh with Hank Aaron on the front.  I don't have that card, its pretty expensive (Engel lists it for $750 and I think that is about right, there is a graded copy in EM condition with a BIN price of 78,000 Yen available right now).  Even the regular Oh cards like these two cost a fair bit. Engel lists them at $200 which also seems to be in the right ballpark for the cards in high grade.  Some seem to sell for more, card #29 (which just features Oh, no Aaron) is currently the subject of a bidding war on Yahoo Auctions which currently stands at 36,000 Yen (about $350 US) with 3 days to go.   As you can see from the scans, mine have some condition issues which made them affordable enough to be in my price range!

Missing Noses, Chins, Eyebrows and Foreheads: The Worst Baseball Card Photo Cropping in History

 

I recently added the above card, #177 from the 1975 NST set featuring Shigeo Nagashima, to my collection.  

Its notable for the fact that although it depicts Shigeo Nagashima it does not depict all of Shigeo Nagashima's nose.  Or his left eye.  Or his left eyebrow.  Or the top and back of his hair.

You can really see those beads of sweat running down his face though.

This is the 1970s Japanese baseball card paradox.  On the one hand they feature some of the best photography in baseball card history and completely blow away the boring posed spring training shots that appeared on most Topps cards in the US from that period.  They are loaded with interesting shots, some candid, some in action, almost all taken during the regular season during games in the player's home stadium.

On the other hand they also feature some of the worst photos ever, mostly due to really bad photo cropping like the one above.  For all its faults, I've never seen a Topps card which cut the tip of the depicted player's nose off.

I have a small type collection of these on the go now.  They include:

Card: 1977 Calbee #17

You wouldn't know it but this card features all time home run leader Sadaharu Oh and all time hit leader Isao Harimoto singing a victory song after winning the pennant.  You can't see the top half of Oh and Harimoto's head.  They cropped it out in order to create more space at the bottom of the card for.....the backs of some photographers.

Card: 1976 Calbee #646

This card features 1975 PL MVP award winner Hideji Kato.  All of him except the top of his head.

Card: 1987 Calbee Tatsuo Komatsu

Ever wondered what former Dragons' pitcher Tatsuo Komatsu's chin looks like?  To this day I still don't know.  

Are there any examples out there of American cards (or other Japanese cards) cropped this badly?

Billboards on Cards

 

One thing I like to see on older cards is billboards in the background.  They give cards a distinctive period look when they are fortunate enough to have them.  

Grass today looks the same as grass 60 years ago.  Blue sky today looks the same as blue sky 60 years ago.  Human faces today look the same as human faces 60 years ago (save for hair and moustache styles).  Even baseball uniforms today look very similar to baseball uniforms 60 years ago.  These elements that you often see on a baseball card don't change much over time.  But billboards do.  Since advertising is constantly evolving to develop new ways of grabbing our attention billboards likewise constantly evolve and don't look the same from one decade to the next.

This is especially the case in Japan.  This is not a land of peaceful Zen gardens and picturesque Shinto shrines.  It is a land of billboards.  They are one thing that really distinguishes Japanese cities from those in most other countries.  Its standard practice in central urban areas for commercial buildings with good lines of sight to have giant structures on top of them which are sold for advertising.  This is what the Nakasu area in Fukuoka, just up the road from where I used to live, looks like for example:

This is what it looks like after dark:

There is an American writer named Alex Kerr who wrote a couple of famous books about Japan back in the 90s.  Mainly these books lament the loss of Japan's physical and aesthetic cultural heritage -  you don't see much traditional architecture in Japan which is a real shame.  I agree with him on a lot of points, but he also devotes some time to slamming the dominance of billboards in the urban environment, which he finds tacky.  This is where our opinions diverge, I love the billboards.  Look at the above photos and imagine how dreary and grey that location would look without all the vibrant color provided by the billboards, both during the day and at night.  They are the only thing that give these cityscapes some life.  

The billboard aesthetic of Japan in general is copied in the confines of Japanese baseball stadiums, where pretty much every piece of wall space is covered with them. 

 I really like the look of billboards on old cards, especially menko.  The artists who worked on them basically just splashed whatever color they want on the backgrounds of black and white photos.  Some of them look pretty cool. 

Calbee cards from the 70s are also pretty awesome and display some good 70s billboards.  

That is one thing I've always disliked about American cards from the late 50s onwards.  Since the photos were almost always taken at spring training facilities you'd rarely get billboards and if you did they would be for hyper local stuff in small Florida or Arizona cities.  On Japanese cards though you get a lot of them, which is pretty cool.  

Green Menko are a Sight to Behold

 

One menko set that I've recently been taken with is the 1958 Doyusha borderless set (JCM 30a).  

The set is famous for having an accidental Jackie Robinson card that was supposed to feature Roberto Barbon.  I don't have that card and its not my favorite (nothing against Jackie or Barbon, its just that it has a kind of boring head and shoulders photo).  What I really like are the cards that have a bit of action in them. They really are quite beautiful.

There is something about the hand colorization they used in this set that really has a nice artistic quality to it.  They gave a uniform color to most of the background - green in the cards I've chosen to highlight in this post.  It does such a good job of framing the action in the foreground.

These three cards are my favorite.  They are all commons (featuring Kokutetsu catcher Iwasaki in the top card, Giants catcher Fujio and Nishitetsu batter Takakura in the second one, and Nankai pitcher Kimura in the lower one).  Tetsuro Iwasaki is a particularly interesting card, he never played a full season in NPB and in very limited playing time across 3 seasons he accumulated a grand total of one hit in his entire career (career batting average: .059).  Its odd to see someone with such limited playing time, and for a less popular team at that, in a menko set, where they usually reserved most cards for star players on popular teams like the Giants.    

But I like them mainly because of how they look.  That green in the background looks so nice with the action in the foreground.  It also helps that they lack a border, I'm very partial to the menko sets without one.  

New Betto and Kawakami Menkos

 

I got these two cards a couple of weeks ago.  They came in the same lot of round menkos as my Takashi Eda card that I posted about last week.  

They really jump out at you with those vibrant colors and vivid patterns in the background.  They remind me a bit of 1935 Diamond Stars, at least in the impression they leave.

On the left is Tetsuharu Kawakami and on the right is Kaoru Betto, both pretty big name Hall of Famers from the 40s and 50s.  

I've never seen cards from this set before and they don't appear in Engel so I think they count as "new discoveries".

The only identification mark they have is the kanji 天　("heaven") in a circle.  I'm not sure what the significance of that is (and would appreciate if anyone knows!).  It might be a maker's mark.  There is one card/toy company called Amada which uses that kanji in its name (天田) and these might have been put out by them, though I didn't know they made menko back then.  They put out a set of baseball cards in the 1980s featuring Giants players which Dave did a write up about a few years ago.  They are a bit more well known for non sports cards which they put out in the 80s and I think they were responsible for some Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System) related menko that were released that decade too. 

Another possibility is that it isn't a maker's mark, but some sort of game related symbol, though I don't know of any games that use that kanji for that purpose.  The cards don't have the usual paper/rock/scissors symbols or number associated with menko games either, which is a bit odd too.

Anyway, I like these cards a lot :)

Googly Eyes Jiro Noguchi

 

This is Jiro Noguchi's card from Series 2 of the 1950 Google Eyes set  (JRM 48b).  I like this set a lot.  As its title suggests the cards feature caricatures of players with google eyes.  Or actually I think "googly" eyes is the correct nomenclature but close enough.  

The artwork on these cards reminds me a lot of Mr. Sparkle and I kind of wonder if the Simpsons' animators had seen them.

The card of Noguchi is also interesting because of the back:

If you can read Japanese you'll note that it says "Pirates" at the top.  Japan briefly had a team called the Pirates.  They were one of the founding teams of the Central League in 1950 and played in Fukuoka at Heiwadai Stadium.  They finished last lace and merged with another team to form what would be the ancestor of today's Saitama Seibu Lions.

Noguchi never played for the Pirates though, the team names on the card backs are unrelated to the player pictured on the front.  He played for the Braves in 1950.  He has one of the most insane statistical careers a pitcher has ever put up.   He only pitched as a regular in 10 seasons (plus parts of 2 more), but managed to compile 237 wins in that short a timespan.  He one 40 games once, and added two 30 win seasons to that, so in just those seasons alone he compiled more than 100 wins.  He posted a 1.96 career ERA and in two seasons (1940 and 1941) in which he pitched as a regular starter he actually had ERAs under 1.00.  It was definitely a pitcher's game in the early years of NPB but even taking that into account, he was one of the all time greats. 

Stuff on Cards: Oden Shops and Wood Shoes

 

I've decided to make "Stuff on cards" a regular series on my blog, highlighting odd things that have appeared on Japanese baseball cards over the years.  Today's post: Oden shops.

This is card 55 from the 1975 NST set.  NST issued a few sets between 1975 and 1983.  Their sets were intended to be glued into albums (sold separately) so they are printed on thinner card stock than normal cards and the backs just have the card number and instructions on how to paste them into the albums, which contained more info about the player.  Dave has a good write up with more info about the sets here.

One thing I like about the NST sets is that they have a lot of  interesting photos.  Probably about 80% feature in game action, while the remainder feature random candid shots, often of players off the field in oddball situations which you almost never see in sets from the 70s (or other decades).  

This one featuring Shigeo Nagashima is one of my favorites.  He is just walking out of an oden shop.  If you've never been to Japan, this is what oden is (photo courtesy of the Wikipedia page for Oden):

I have  strong dislike for oden.  Everything in there just runs afoul of too many of my "I won't eat that" red lines - texture, taste, smell, appearance - nope, nope, nope and nope.  But its very popular here. 7-11s and other convenience stores in Japan don't have Slurpee machines, but they do have oden vats very similar to the one pictured above where you can scoop out whatever you want.

You can tell Nagashima is leaving an oden shop because the noren curtain he is emerging from says "Oden", as does the writing on the chalkboard to his left.  So I guess Shigeo Nagashima likes oden, which is not surprising since, as I said, its popular here.

Also though you have to kind of scratch your head about this photo - when was this taken?  They don't have oden shops like that in stadiums, this looks like a shop on some random street.  But he is in uniform and ready to play....except.... look at his feet!  He isn't wearing cleats, he is wearing geta (a traditional type of sandal that is made of wood)!  How is this allowed?  The manager of the Giants is not properly dressed in his uniform!

I mean, when he went into the oden shop he likely would have had to remove his shoes, but normally he'd just put them back on again when he left.  Geta are not something you have to wear to an oden shop or anything so its really odd.  Maybe he forgot his cleats, or a fan stole them and he had to borrow these?  Or there was some special event going on which for some reason involved both visiting an oden shop, wearing his uniform and wearing geta.  But I can't imagine what that would have been. This is just odd all around!

Previous Stuff On Cards:

Beer

Girls in Kimonos

Vintage Cars

American Professional Wrestlers

Another New Discovery

 

Another recent card I picked up is this round menko which (I think) features Takashi Eda, a pitcher who played for a variety of teams in the 1940s and 1950s.  It came in a lot of 11 different round menko from various sets, some common and others rare.

I couldn't find anything like this in the Engel catalogue so I think it is a "new discovery".  I really love the multicolored diamond pattern background.  It looks a bit like a stain glassed window.  The back of the card is blank, save for some numbers hand written on it.

In terms of date, Eda's cap with the "G" on it looks like that of the Goldstars, who Eda played for in 1946 so I guess it probably came out around then.  The Goldstars actually only played one year with that name, changing it to Kinsei the next year (which means "gold star" in Japanese, so really they were just translating the name back into Japanese).  

Eda had a pretty mediocre career, finishing with a 97-147 record, though he also played for bad teams which hurt him (he had a respectable 3.61 career ERA).  He had one brilliant season in 1950 in which he went 23-8 record with a 2.83 ERA.  That was the only season is his 15 year career that he managed a winning record!