Tokyo in Better Times

 It looks like things are about to get bad in Tokyo.  We've been lucky so far in Japan, despite being one of the first countries outside of China to get the virus we haven't seen the kind of disaster that's happening in Italy, Spain, Iran or the US yet.  But cases have started to spike in Tokyo (suspiciously mere hours after they announced the postponement of the Olympics, leading everyone to suspect the government was massaging the numbers until then) and it looks like our luck might be running out.  And as Tokyo goes so goes the entire country

I picked up a really neat set of cards featuring scenes from around that city ("Famous scenes of Tokyo") the other day which I thought I'd share.

The set comes in a cute little matchbox with a color photo of the Imperial palace.  Open it up and a bunch of black and white photo cards (roughly the size of 1951 Bowman cards) spill out.

 Its got a lot of great vintage images of the city, including Korakuen Stadium!

For train buffs like  me its also cool that it has cards of Tokyo Station, Ueno Station and the Tokyo Subway.

This card here allows me to date the set as having been released sometime between 1953 and 1958.

This is not Tokyo Tower, but its predecessor "Television Tower".  This is kind of an interesting inclusion in the set because hardly anybody in Tokyo would know what this is today.  It was Tokyo's first TV tower built after the war, completed in 1953, and was a very famous landmark in the city for a very short time.  It had an elevator to a viewing platform at 154 metres high, the highest in the city.  In 1958 however the much taller and more famous Tokyo Tower, which still exists, was completed and replaced this one.  Based on this, the set must have been released somewhere in that 1953-1958 period.

The backs of the cards have little write ups (in Japanese) about each of the places on the front.  Its been kind of nice flipping through them and looking at Tokyo in the 50s, happier times!

Menko lots are fun.

I picked up the above lot of vintage menko for a whopping 500 Yen (about 5$ US) a couple of days ago.  These are almost all cards from the early 50s, though the one on the lower right corner might be pre-war (it is uncatalogued, featuring a generic player from Meiji University).

The condition on most of these is pretty low, which is not unusual for old menko.  But its great to be able to sort through stuff like this.

My purchase of the lot was mainly driven by the below card featuring Futoshi Nakanishifrom the 1960 JRM 53 set.  Just three weeks ago I had written about how I just needed this card to finish this baby off and here it is!   This is no small feat since there are only about 10 copies of this card known to exist in the hobby and its not the sort of thing you would expect to find in a lot where you paid about 30 cents per card.

 I love it when I can complete a set on the cheap!

More Morinagas! With Ghosts.

Fortunately my recent decision to put a 1000 Yen cap on my baseball card purchases has not actually prevented me from buying stuff.  Yesterday's mail included two cards from the 1964 Morinaga Top Star set which, it seems, I have decided to try to complete.

Its a 12 card set and I already had two of them, so now I'm up to four!  These set me back 500 Yen each, so combined they just squeaked under my self-imposed spending limit!

And the card on the left is Shigeo Nagashima , an A-list Hall of Famer if there ever was one, so it was a good purchase even though both are in a bit lower condition than my previous two.  The one on the right is Isao Shibata.

One odd thing I noticed is that the cards are slightly different color, the Nagashima card is a lot darker than the Shibata.  This is noticable on the border on the card fronts and especially on the card backs.  This isn't the result of anything getting spilled on the Nagashima, I think they've just aged differently.

A much weirder and spookier thing I noticed is that if you look in the background of the Shibata card, there seems to be a ghost sitting in the stands:

I'm pretty sure this was an actual person sitting there which for some reason Morinaga decided to obscure.  They chose a very odd way of doing so, the dots they use really do make it look like a ghostly apparition, or some sort of alien super hero.

The Nagashima card also has a couple of spots that look like this, but its not as pronounced. I'm going to give my other Morinagas a check to see if they have ghosts too.

While the addition of Nagashima to the cards of Sadaharu Oh and Katsuya Nomura which I already had gives me most of the key stars in the set, according to Engel there are two short printed cards (Shigeru Mizuhara and Yasumitsu Toyoda) which are way harder to find than the rest and way more expensive (like 300$ expensive).  So for the time being I might satisfy myself with trying to complete the 10 cards of the set that weren't short printed!

Baseball Card Collecting in the Age of the Coronavirus

So I picked up my first bag of 2020 Calbee chips yesterday.  Normally this is my favorite time of the year: the first bags of Calbee chips signify the start of spring and the new baseball season.

This year.....yeah, they are coming out in the middle of a global pandemic that is screwing the world over in ways we couldn't have imagined just a couple months back.  So its a bit of a downer this year.

But life goes on and I am quite lucky that I'm safe and healthy and haven't lost my job (knock on wood).  

I've been thinking a bit about how this pandemic is going to affect the hobby.  It could be either beneficial or disastrous for it, or a bit of both depending on your perspective.  

On the one hand, a lot of people are  under some form of lockdown and most of those who aren't are (I hope) at least doing their best to maintain social distance from others.  Fortunately neither of these are incompatible with our hobby.  Its not like competitive arm wrestling where we really have to stop what we are doing right now.  In fact, people having a lot of time at home is a positive boon to hobbies like ours since "time alone to sort cards" is an essential element of it.  

There is of course also a social element to it, but that doesn't necessarily require being in the same room with people.

So the hobby is good to go.

But then there is the other thing.  The scary virus and the chaos that it is raining down on the global economy and shutting down businesses left right and center.  

This is either going to expose our hobby's Achilles Heel and destroy it, or it is going to save it from the problems that currently plague it and make it even better than before (once the big scary virus has passed, of course).

Cards cost money.  People are going to have way less of that this summer than they did last.  People are losing jobs or having hours cut, and their retirement funds are being decimated by the stock market collapse.  Cards are also not toilet paper that people will irrationally throw what money the have remaining at because, apparently, in times of crisis we quite literally prioritize our own asses above everything else.

So a lot of collectors aren't going to have money to spend in the near future, which will likely lead to a sharp drop in demand.  At the same time, people are going to need more cash and those who have collections are going to be very tempted (or perhaps forced) to sell them, which may lead to an increase in supply.  If this happens I don't see any way that such a situation will not lead to a drastic decline in card values.  

From my own perspective, I'm putting a halt to all card purchases over 1000 Yen (about 8$) for the foreseeable future.  I'm by no means a big spender, but I do tend to buy cards in lots that usually sell for more than that, so this means I'll be doing way less card shopping.  And, like I said, I still have a job and am not in dire straits right now.  But the uncertainty surrounding all of this and the possibility that I might end up in that situation down the road is forcing me to re-arrange priorities rapidly, with card spending going way to the bottom of the list.  I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat right now.

If I'm right on that it means the hobby is going to be starved of cash in the very near future, something likely exacerbated by the fact that the baseball seasons (both MLB and NPB) are likely to be cancelled, which can only further dampen interest.

Is this a bad thing though?  I mean, if you've got a lot of money invested in cards then yeah I guess it would look like a really bad thing.  I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I do have a few valuable cards around that I'm realizing are probably going to be worth a fraction of what they are worth now in a few months.  And that is kind of a bummer.  And if you make a living selling cards this has to be extremely worrying and I really have a lot of sympathy for those who do right now.

But one could also argue, and a lot of people have been arguing for years, that the money has ruined the hobby in so many ways that scaring it off isn't a bad idea.

Card trimmers no longer able to make a living out of scamming people?  Nobody caring about the difference between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 anymore?  Maybe even PSA going bankrupt?  The schadenfreude associated with seeing millionaires selling off their vanity collections and only getting a fraction of what they paid for them?  There are definitely a lot of people out there who would welcome these types of things.

This isn't necessarily to say those would be entirely good outcomes.  Nobody would miss the card trimmers, but they are really only a few bad eggs out there and a lot of good people would be hurt in the process.  And PSA for all its faults (of which there are many) also has a useful function to play.  

We are in interesting times now and nobody has a crystal ball that allows them to see into the future, but I haven't seen any convincing arguments put forth to tell me that card values aren't about to collapse, barring some miracle cure coming around soon.  The only ones I've seen are those on Net54 watching current auction prices which don't seem to have been affected yet.  Which is interesting, but it only tells us where the hobby is at now, not where it is going to be at when the macro economic consequences of this crisis start hitting home in the next couple of months.

Anyway....oh shit, look at that.  This was supposed to be a post about my new bag of Calbee potato chips cards but it got sidetracked a bit there into a big discussion about the Coronavirus.  Anyway, returning to my bag of potato chip cards, I got these two

So basically the 2020 Calbee baseball cards look exactly the same as every set they've issued for the past twenty years, no surprises.  The card on the right is from a "The Record" subset and thus deviates from the stupid Calbee photography rules by giving us a picture of Seichi Uchikawa fielding rather than batting.  Looking at the regular card of Hisayoshi Chono on the left though it seems like the stupid rules are still in effect for them!

I might actually try to buy a few bags of these this year and return to the simple roots of collecting a set pack by pack.

Isao Harimoto Got This

 Well that escalated quickly.  Looks like MLB is postponing its season too along with every other major sport.  This virus is everywhere now.  Its dangerous and it sucks.

In the face of such trying times, we need an inspiring story.  And I think Isao Harimoto is the guy to deliver it.

I've read a lot of stories about athletes overcoming hardship to achieve greatness, but none of them - and I mean ZERO of them - come close to matching Harimoto's.  He really deserves to be mentioned a lot more in lists of "greatest baseball players of all time" than he does (which now is basically never).

Just to cover the basics of his career, he is Japan's all time hit leader with 3,085, the only member of the 3,000 hit club here (not counting Ichiro who got most of his in MLB).  He was an 18 time all star, a seven time batting champion, a Pacific League MVP.  He set the single season record for batting average with a .383 mark in 1970 (later broken by Randy Bass).

Insanely, in addition to being #1 on the hits leaders board, he is also #7 in career home runs with 504.  At the time he retired in 1981 he ranked #3.

Oh and he also stole over 300 bases.

Its a bit like having Pete Rose and Willie Mays combined into one player. And then some.

But none of that is what makes Isao Harimoto impressive. Its what he went through to get there that is.  The guy’s story is a narrative of survival in the face of adversity that would have literally killed most mortals.  


Harimoto’s story begins, at least for the purposes of this post, when he was four years old.  He was sitting on a riverbank with friends one day roasting sweet potatoes over a fire when suddenly a truck backed into him, forcing his hand into the fire.  The driver drove off and the police refused to investigate because he was Korean (his parents had moved to Japan in 1940, the year he was born).  It severely burned his fingers and left his right hand permanently disfigured, little more than a claw that he would never be able to use again.


So that is why he became a lefty.


Bad as that was, it wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to him before his sixth birthday.  


The following August when he was five years old he was sitting at home one afternoon when suddenly there was a huge flash of light and a loud roar.  Before he knew it his mother, covered in blood and broken glass, was using her body to shield him and his little sister.  


The flash and roar were caused by the world’s first wartime use of an atomic bomb.  Harimoto was living in Hiroshima, about 2.3 km from the hypocenter of the blast.


He survived.  But his 12 year old sister was in another part of town when it struck.  As Harimoto later recalled:


My older brother and others went to look for her and they carried her back on a stretcher. She was suffering terrible burns, on her face, too. I was shocked to see a human being, the sister I so admired, transformed into such a state. I remember bringing charred grapes to her mouth. I have no idea how many days passed after that, but one day I heard my mother crying and I knew my sister was dead.


A week later the war was over.  The Harimoto family was homeless, living under a bridge, thanks to the bomb.  His father returned to Korea to look for work and died shortly thereafter, Harimoto never saw him again.  His mother wanted to take the family back to her family in Korea, but the ship that would have taken them sank.


So there he was.  Homeless, with a crippled hand and his father and sister dead.  He was just 5 years old.


His mother set up a food stand and worked every hour of the day to feed her three surviving children and get them into a one room apartment that he would grow up in, impoverished.  


He started elementary school. He was a wild kid, but insanely tough.  In the fifth grade an older boy invited him to play baseball, despite his crippled hand.  In his words:


I loved it and I begged him to keep letting me play. Although I had had surgery on my right hand, I still didn’t have complete control over my fingers and so I couldn’t throw the ball so far. But I practiced throwing against a wall and I was able to completely alter myself into a left-handed pitcher and hitter.


Damn.


He dreamed of playing in the high school baseball tournament, but he always got into trouble.  He got into a high school with a strong team that actually made the tournament, but he was prevented from playing after getting into a fight, something which he seems to have done a lot of in his youth.

He was by that time one of the best high school players in the country and, despite his wildness he signed his first professional contract right out of high school with the Toei Flyers, who he joined in 1959. He gave half of his earnings in his first season to his brother to build a house for their mother. He played until 1981, making him one of the few players who played in four different decades.

Through his entire pro career he had to deal with numerous fears that only he knew.  He had to constantly hold and swing a bat to prevent his disabled hand from ending his career, something he did every day for his 23 years in NPB.  He also registered as a Hibakusha (A-bomb survivor) and lived with the fear that every one of them lived with: that cancer would take them.  Fortunately it didn’t, he is still with us today.


Harimoto is the only professional baseball player in history to have survived an atomic bomb blast.  After his sister died, his mother destroyed all photos of her since the memory was to painful. In 2014 a classmate of hers found a photo of her and gave it to Harimoto, the first time in 69 years he was able to see her face.  He keeps it in his room next to a photo of their mother who died in 1985, the two facing each other. 

So anyway, that is Isao Harimoto.  Let that story put into perspective today's events, if that crippled, homeless, fatherless five year old kid who literally had an atomic bomb dropped on him could overcome all that to become arguably the greatest baseball player of all time, we can get through this.

Stay safe!

Baseball Cards Worthy of a Book Cover

This is a complete set of 1949 JCM 111 menko baseball cards in uncut sheet form that I picked up a little while ago.

When I saw them in the auction listing I had this feeling that I had seen them before, but couldn't put my finger on it.  Then I realized the Betto and Oshita cards were featured on the cover of Sayonara Home Run, one of the few (only?) books out there about Japanese baseball cards.

I don't have a copy of the book (not on sale in Japanese bookstores and I don't have an Amazon account) but the subject matter is of obvious interest to me.  Anybody out there read it and recommend it?

It must have been tough to chose cards to put on the cover since there are so many really cool menko out there which would have worked.  I can't disagree with their decision though, these cards check all the right boxes in terms of what make baseball menko look good: bold colors, cool design, etc.

The backs of these cards are pretty interesting too, they are basically the same as the fronts just without the color:

The set is also notable for its size.  Most rectangular menko from that era are about the same dimensions of American tobacco cards, but there are bigger.  They aren't quite as large as modern cards, but about halfway between the two.

The player selection ( Hiroshi Oshita, Kaoru Betto, Shigeru Sugishita, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Michio Nishizawa and Makoto Kozuru) is also pretty impressive, all six would end up in the Hall of Fame.

Mystery Duck

 These are my cards from the 1947 set catalogued as JDM 11, one of the first post-war die cut sets produced.

Cool cards, eh?

If you are like me, when looking at the above photo your eye was probably drawn to the card on the lower left, which features Tokyuu pitcher Giichiro Shiraki.  And a duck.

What is that duck doing there?

Ducks don't belong on baseball cards, everybody knows that!

This duck has been bothering me for a while.  I've read up about Shiraki to see if I can find some amusing incident in his career that would explain the duck, but have come up empty.  He had a pretty short career, just 7 seasons, though he did lead the league in wins in 1946 and ERA the following season (though playing for a lousy team, he ended up with a losing career record of 97-98).  He is also notable for his post-playing career as a politician, becoming the first professional baseball player to be elected to the Diet in 1956 and serving until 1986.

But none of that would explain why he appeared on a baseball card in 1947 with a duck.

Google searches for his name and "duck" (in Japanese) don't turn up anything. His Japanese wikipedia page does tell us that team mates used to make fun of his big chin and repeat a very well known Japanese joke about long chins to him.

Would you like to hear the joke?

Well, I'll tell it to you anyway.  The Japanese word for chin is "ago".  So when someone has a long chin, people say to them in English "Long long ago"!  Ha!  Get it?

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Japanese humor either.

Anyway I'm not sure what to make of the duck.  Maybe its a pet?  Or it could have been a prize?  Food was very scarce in Japan in 1947 so giving a pro ball player a live duck to eat as a prize probably wasn't as strange back then as it would seem now.

To get back to the non-duck related elements of the set, this is what the backs of the cards look like.

Card #6 is Hall of Famer Tetsuharu Kawakami and the biggest name in the set which I have, though I kind of like the Shiraki mystery duck card too.

Its official: the 2020 Season has been postponed

A couple of weeks ago I speculated about whether the 2020 baseball season might be postponed or even cancelled due to the Coronavirus.

Today unfortunately it was confirmed: opening day (scheduled for March 20)  is not going ahead as planned.  The Commissioner of NPB, Atsushi Saito, announced that it will be postponed until April (a specific date has not been set yet).

It seems they had been debating whether or not to open the season on schedule but play games before empty stadiums until the situation improved, but according to Saito they reached the unanimous conclusion that the regular season should be played before actual crowds.  Professional Sumo has gone the other way and is holding its March tournament right now before empty seats in Osaka, which is quite sad.

I'm a bit concerned that even an April opening date might be optimistic at this point.  On the plus side the number of cases in Japan hasn't exploded like it has in South Korea, Italy or Iran, which indicates the measures the government has taken are having some effect.  On the other.....well, we obviously can't say that this situation will last given what has been happening in those other countries. Knock on wood that the outbreak remains mostly under control here, but we have to wait and see.

I hope this doesn't also happen with MLB, but with the way things are looking in the US right now I have to wonder.  The number of cases there is rising rapidly, its now overtaken Japan's total, and looks likely to rise further.

This disease sucks.  Stay safe!

The "Really Long Number" set

 There is a really cool set of menko issued in 1960 which Engel calls the "Many Digit" set (JRM 53).

The name comes from the really long eleven digit numbers on each card. While understandable, its kind of a shame. I really like the artwork on these ones, which have realistic caricatures of the players' faces on them.  Unfortunately that doesn't translate into an easy to understand set name, so "Many Digit" makes more sense.

I have two cards from the set.  The one on top of this post is of Hall of Famer Kazuhisa Inao, a pitcher for the Nishitetsu Lions.  He was one of the most dominant pitchers of the late 1950s and early 1960s and set the single season record with 42 wins in his 1961 campaign (to go with a 1.69 ERA).

The second card I have is Shigeo Nagashima, who I guess needs no introduction.

Engel lists three cards in this set, the two I have plus one of Futoshi Nakanishi.  They are really rare (R4, less than 10 copies of each known) so there might be more out there waiting to be discovered.

In the meantime I just have to track down a copy of the Nakanishi to complete my set of the known ones :)

The Bessho Head Hunting Incident on a Card

This is a card of Hall of Fame pitcher Takehiko Bessho.  It is from the 1949 Starburst set (JRM 2).

There is something really interesting going on in this card though.  Bessho is clearly wearing a Nankai Hawks uniform.  But the black text on the left side of the card identifies him as playing for Kyoujin, the nickname of the Yomiuri Giants.

Bessho had been the ace of the Nankai Hawks until the 1948 season, then moved to the Giants for 1949, where he remained for the rest of his career.  So this card was probably released sometime in early 1949 before they could get a picture of him in a Giants uniform.

But what is interesting about the card is that the manner in which he moved from the Hawks to the Giants created one of the game's biggest scandals in the immediate postwar years: The Bessho head hunting incident.

Bessho was one of the many Japanese star players who had always wanted to play for the Giants, but instead found himself playing for a much poorer team which didn't pay him much.  In 1948 he had gone 26-10 with a 2.06 ERA.  When he asked Nankai for a pay raise, the company said he hadn't been playing long enough to earn one.  When he suggested that he should be getting paid the same as Giants stars of similar stature he was told "Stop talking like an idiot, you think you can get special treatment?" (according to the Japanese Wikipedia entry).

Both Bessho and the Hawks appealed to the league (the Nihon Yakyu Renmei, which was reorganized into the modern NPB the following year).  During the appeal, a loan document between the Yomiuri Giants and Bessho was discovered, under which the Giants would lend him 100,000 Yen with a proviso stating "on your joining the Giants team...".  This occurred while Bessho was still under contract with the Hawks.

The league censured both Bessho and the Giants, fining the latter 100,000 Yen for tampering with a player from another team.  Bessho was suspended for two months.  It also gave the Hawks a 10 day period to negotiate a new contract with Bessho, after which Bessho would be free to negotiate with other teams.  The Hawks and Bessho never came to terms and he signed with the Giants.  The scandal is sometimes referred to as foreshadowing the events of the Suguru Egawa scandal 30 years later, which also involved Yomiuri shenanigans in poaching star players (which you can read about in Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa).

There were two interesting postscripts to the scandal.  One was that Bessho actually changed his name as a result!  When he played with Nankai he used his birth name, Akira Bessho.  After moving to the Giants he began using the name he is remembered by today, Takehiko Bessho.

The second postscript came in the first Giants -Hawks series of the 1949 season, shortly following the scandal.  Bessho was under suspension and didn't play, but there was a lot of bad blood between the teams as a result.  In the third game of the series, held at the Giants homeground Korakuen Stadium on April 14, the Giants had a one run lead in the top of the 9th inning.  The Hawks had a runner on first with nobody out when Toshiaki Okamura hit a ground ball to the Giants first basemen Tetsuharu Kawakami, who threw the ball to second to get a force out.  The Hawks baserunner, Keizou Tsutsui, slid hard into the Giants second basemen Katsumi Shiraishi and prevented him from throwing back to first to complete the double play.

Shiraishi and Tsutsui got into an argument and the benches emptied.  Giants manager (and Hall of Famer) Osamu Mihara got into an argument with the umpire over whether there had been interference, which he lost.  As he was returning to the dugout he walked past Shiraishi and Tsutsui, who were still arguing.  Something Tsutsui said set him off and Mihara walked right up to him and punched him in the face.

Mihara was suspended indefinitely and wouldn't return to manage until July, serving 100 days in total.

Both of these incidents, the tampering with Bessho and Mihara's punch, are part of Japanese baseball lore to this day and sometimes get mentioned whenever the Hawks and Giants face each other in interleague play.  I was kind of surprised that I couldn't find much about either in English when putting this post together, so I'm happy to put it out there for the public record!

So like I said, this card has a lot going on - the struggle between the Hawks and Giants over Bessho is nowhere better represented than on a card which shows him as a player for both!

Oh My! (Or should I say "My Oh"?)

 This is my 1963 Marusho Flag Back (JCM 13C) card of Sadaharu Oh.  Its a beauty.

This set is one of the ones that were imported to the US in the 1960s by Bud Ackerman, an American sailor stationed in Japan.  I highly recommend Dave's excellent post on the history behind that, its a really interesting read.

Ackerman and his young son, after buying a lot of 10,200 of these cards, went to work stamping numbers on the back to help American collectors with player identification. So a lot of the ones floating around in the American market today (though not all) have a number from 1 to 40 stamped on the card back.  Oh was given number 30 by Ackerman's son.

In Japan on the other hand its way more common to find them without a stamped number and my Oh doesn't have one.

I have a few cards from this set and none of them have the stamped number.  I was curious if maybe some of Ackerman's cards had found their way into the Japanese market, either back in the 60s or maybe more recently, but my own collection shows no signs of this.  My Masaichi Kaneda also lacks a number.

I guess this set must be one of the easier menko issues to find in the US, in Japan its about on par with the other tobacco era menko sets.  Because its easier to find in the US, prices seem to be a bit cheaper though, so its one of the easier to complete sets from that era.

1949 Yamakatsu are also cool

Yamakatsu is well known as the maker of some of the nicer (and odder) baseball card sets of the late 1970s, briefly rivalling Calbee as the main card maker in that stretch.  Prior to that though it also made a lot of really great menko sets over a lengthy period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

One of the earliest of these is the above, a round menko set issued in 1949 which Engel catalogues as JRM 51.  According to Engel the set has cards with three different sizes (small, medium and large I guess), I have the card of Giants catcher Tetsunosuki Fujiwara which is one of the medium sized ones.

I kind of like this set.  It seems every time I do a post about old menko cards I mention the bold colors being what I like about them. So its kind of trite, but once again I like the colors.  The team name in bold lettering also looks really cool.

You can tell it is a Yamakatsu card thanks to the logo printed on it:

This is a pretty cool logo, basically its the two kanji for "Yamakatsu".  The first kanji is Yama (山) which is one of the first kanji any Japanese student learns since its a pictogram.  It means "mountain" and it looks like a mountain.  Yamakatsu's logo makes it look even more so.  The second kanji is 勝　which means "victory".  They don't really do anything stylistic with that one, its an idiogram rather than a pictogram.  Anyway, Yamakatsu means "Mountain victory" which ....I have no idea where that comes from.  But its a cool name.

This particular set is one of the rarest Yamakatsu isses out there, Engel lists it at R4 (fewer than 10 copies of each card known) and this card of Fujiwara is the only one I have.

1950 Kagome Die Cuts are Pretty Cool

 I picked up a really nice lot of die cut menko the other day which included these four beauties from the 1950 Kagome set (JDM 6).

This is one of the nicest die cut sets since the artwork is very realistic compared to some others from that time which were quite a bit cruder.  And of the "realistic" looking ones, its one of the few to show most of the player's body rather than just a head shot.  The team logos on the bottom also add a really nice touch, as do the bold colors.

The backs have a circle at the top which say either "Pacific League" or Central League, while the player's name is written in the dark column in the middle.

From left to right I've got Yoshio Tempo, Nobuo Oshima, Kaoru Betto (HOF) and Hiroshi Oshita (HOF).

Engel has catalogued 18 cards in this set but there might be more.  It has an R3 rarity rating which means there are fewer than 100 copies of each known to exist, which seems about right.  This is one set which I really do want to complete since they are so beautiful, but will likely take some work as they don't show up in auctions that often!