2023 Season at an End

 

The Hanshin Tigers beat the Orix Buffaloes to win the Japan Series over the weekend, marking the official end of baseball games for 2023.  I always feel a little melancholic during the week after the Series ends since its the time of year when you have the longest wait until the next game.  This year I'm feeling it a bit more than usual since this was one of my most enjoyable years as a baseball fan.

This is kind of odd since I'm a Dragons fan and they had the most miserable year imaginable.  They finished with the worst record in NPB and set a number of records of futility (most times getting shut out for example).  But it was a great year nonetheless.

I was reminded of how the year began when I got a complete set of Calbee Series 2 in the mail the other day.  As I mentioned a couple of months ago, bags of Series 2 only briefly appeared in stores in August and then completely disappeared about a week or so after they showed up.  This prevented me from collecting the set bag by bag with my kids like we did with Series 1, so I just paid 1,000 Yen to get the regular set from a case-breaker on Yahoo Auctions.  

The above card is from a pretty decent 12 card subset in Series 2 which features scenes from each team's first victory in the 2023 season.  It shows Shuhei Takahashi in a game on opening day against the Giants.  I remember watching it on TV and it was such an exciting game.  The Dragons were losing 3-2 heading into the 9th, but were able to load the bases for Takahashi who came through by hitting a bases clearing double to put the Dragons ahead.  The picture on the card shows him celebrating that moment.

I had high hopes that this would be a harbinger of things to come, but both the Dragons and Takahashi unfortunately peaked during that exact inning and everything went downhill from there.  The Dragons finished last, and Takahashi only hit .215 with no home runs in limited play throughout the rest of the season (his 3 RBI from that one hit constituted more than 20% of his total over the entire season).  

But the game did accomplish one thing, which was to get me and my kids excited about the baseball season.  I took them to the Dome to see a couple of Dragons games in person, and we watched a lot of games on TV (or more accurately I watched a lot of games on TV and they would sporadically stop playing to have a look for a few minutes with me every now and then).  I took them to the park a lot to play ball too, and my son and I went to the batting centre.  

We also had fun collecting cards.  We had a crack at completing Calbee Series 1 bag by bag which ran into a few snags due to Calbee's distribution problems this year but when they finally sorted that out we did have a lot of fun opening bags together and got most of the regular set done.  When Calbee screwed up Series 2 (as mentioned above) it turned out to be a kind of blessing in disguise as I discovered the absolute joy of  buying unopened boxes of Epoch packs that didn't contain "hits" and were thus cheap as dirt. The kids and I formed a tradition of each opening one pack whenever we watched a game on TV and throwing all the Baystars cards onto the floor in disgust (because the Baystars beat the Dragons on the first game we went to at the Dome this year).  We kept this up throughout the season and in fact opened the last packs I had over the weekend during Game 7 of the Series.  We didn't quite finish the set, and most of the cards have dinged upper right corners from when my daughter dropped the box they were in, and the Baystars cards have additional damage from being thrown about in disgust, but who cares?  The point in collecting cards is not to own cards, but to have fun in getting them and this was a success in that regard.  

So all in all I had a lot of fun cheering for a lousy team and having my normal collecting routine disrupted by Calbee's bizarre incompetence in distributing cards.  Hopefully 2024 will be another nice one.  

PS: I haven't been posting much recently but this is just due to me being insanely busy at work. The blog is still going and I'm still collecting, hopefully things will settle down and I'll be able to get back to the blog a bit more often in the near future.  

Calbee Series 2 was here, breifly

 

Bags of Calbee Series 2 chips appeared in stores last week for a very short time.  I bought three bags at my local supermarket.  I went back a couple of days later and they were gone, sold out.  A trip to another supermarket yesterday turned up the same thing.  Its like what happened with Series 1 all over again it would seem.

This time though it doesn't seem to matter, at least from my perspective.  My kids had a lot more fun opening the Epoch packs that I got so when I brought these ones home, they showed no interest in opening them with me. I ended up just throwing them in the snack drawer for later.  Looks like we won't be collecting Calbee Series 2 in my house this year.

I did open one bag though, got a couple of regular cards from the miniscule 60 card base set.  While reading the bag as I did so I realized there is a major change with this Series - no Lucky Cards!

As I've written about before, Lucky Cards are a promotional thing Calbee does.  Pull one of them and you can send it in to the company for a prize of some sort.  The prizes have varied considerably over the years.  When I collected the 2004 set (the first time I tried to put one together bag by bag), they had a really fantastic Star Card set that you could get by sending in three Lucky card tabs.  More recently they have been less exciting albums, but they were a fun thing to pull nonetheless.

As far as I can tell, this is possibly the first time in its entire 50 years of making cards that it hasn't included Lucky Cards (or an equivalent, they were known as Home Run cards back in the 70s).  I've seen Lucky cards or their equivalent (ie something you could pull from packs that was redeemable for a prize) for every Calbee set going back to the 90s, and I've also seen them from most of the sets from the 70s.  The only time period I'm not certain about is the 80s. I've never seen a mini-card sized Lucky card from those years, and they didn't do Home Run Cards like they did in the 70s during that decade either.  But at the same time, I've seen albums (which are often the prizes you would get) for most of the sets from the 80s, so they likely had some way of being won similar to a Lucky Card, but I'm not sure how it worked. 

Anyway, history aside I'm not sure if this is just a temporary change related to the supply problems they've been having this year, or if its a permanent one.  If its the latter, its unfortunately just another reason for me to not buy new Calbee cards each year, which is a shame.  This is just speculation on my part, but abandoning the Lucky Cards might simply be a cost cutting measure unrelated to their current problems.  Inflation in Japan - which has been non-existent during the 20 plus years I've lived here - suddenly appeared last year and drove the prices of most things you find on supermarket shelves up.  This has led all food companies to either raise prices or engage in shrinkflation.  The price of bags of Calbee chips this year is the same as last (98 Yen), which makes me suspect the loss of the Lucky Cards is Calbee's way of keeping it that way.  Personally I would prefer to pay a bit more per bag for a decent set (more than 60 cards) and with some bells and whistles that my kids could chase, which the Lucky cards were great for (or would have been if they were a bit more generous like they were back in 2004).  I'm curious what they'll do in 2024, but not sure if I'll be collecting the set anymore by then!

My Sadaharu Oh Autograph

 

I was going through some boxes the other day and pulled out something I had almost forgotten that I had. Its card number 7 from the 1973 Calbee set featuring Sadaharu Oh. Its one of his first Calbee cards and, with him silhouetted against the blue sky, pairs up nicely with the first card in the set featuring Shigeo Nagashima.

Mine is autographed.

I didn’t get the autograph in person, rather this was something I bought on impulse several years ago. I don’t often buy autographed cards since I’m not good at detecting forgeries, but this one had a pretty decent provenance. I bought it from Biblio, a famous store in the Jinbocho neighborhood in Tokyo that is probably the leading dealer of vintage baseball memorabilia in Japan. The owner is known in Japan as one of the leading experts on baseball autographs and has appeared on a TV show that I watch every Tuesday called Nandemo Kanteidan, which is kind of a Japanese version of Antiques Roadshow. Regular people bring their antiques and experts tell them if they are valuable authentic pieces or worthless fakes. 

So if I see something from them, and it looks good to my amateur eyes, I figure its probably good. I didn’t go to the store in person (Dave has visited twice and has written about what the actual store was like, including a complaint on his last visit), but rather picked it up from their online store.

I bought it before the pandemic hit and the price of vintage stuff, and especially Sadaharu Oh vintage stuff, took off so I didn’t pay that much for it. I rather like autographed vintage cards and couldn’t resist this one in particular. It got kind of mixed up with some other stuff after I got it, something that often happens with oddball items in my collection that I don’t have a “category” in my rudimentary sorting system for. I was happy to find it.

Floor Yokohama Baystars Cards

 

We have developed a new tradition in my house.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been able to source large numbers of 2023 Epoch packs for very cheap prices. I now have a stockpile of them, and everyday my two kids and I open one pack each.

I took them to the Nagoya Dome earlier this year to watch a Baystars-Dragons game and the Baystars won 2-0. Ever since then my kids have hated the Baystars, largely because the loss robbed us of the ability to watch the post-game celebrations the Dragons and their mascots put on.

Epoch packs come with one card per team, and my kids started throwing the Baystars cards directly on the floor as a symbol of their contempt. I have joined them in doing so and we’ve now largely formalized the ritual. When we open the packs, we grab the Baystars cards, say “Ugh, bye bye Baystars” and fling them to the floor in disgust.

So we are trying to complete the set but with the Baystars cards mostly mid-grade.

2020s Junk Wax is Awesome

I made an interesting discovery the other day. I can buy unopened 12 card packs of this year’s Epoch baseball set for just 60 cents each.

This discovery was prompted by Calbee being MIA from store shelves for the past couple of months, which has forced me to look for other options for my contemporary baseball card collecting needs. I saw Dave’s post about the 2023 Epoch set and I thought the design looked pretty decent, as did the checklist,  so I started browsing Yahoo Auctions.

The set is sold in 24 pack boxes with 12 cards each which seem to sell for about 10,000 to 12,000 Yen each or so (70 to 90 bucks).

But there is a cheaper way, which seems to exist due to Epoch’s highly predictable  rate of seeding of the valuable autographed chase cards in boxes.

It seems they put one such card per box. So when box breakers open a pack containing one, they can deduce that the remaining packs in the box they took it from don’t have any and are thus of no interest to them. 

To get rid of these “stale” packs, they fill empty boxes with the standard 24 packs and sell them dirt cheap. I bought a box of them for just 2000 Yen, which works out to about 60 cents per pack. Other than the fact that your odds of getting a high value auto are pretty much nil, it’s indistinguishable from a regular box. Since I’m mainly interested in collecting these with my kids for fun these are just perfect.

They arrived in the mail today and I’m quite happy with them. My kids and I opened one pack each today and saved the rest for later. It was a lot of fun, opening 12 card packs provides for a more engaging experience than Calbee’s two card packs, though with the lack of chips being a notable drawback. 

We got some decent cards, including Yuki Okabayashi who is a favorite in our house. I noted with interest that the packs contain one card from each team which was neat. We also got two silver parallel cards so while we might not get any autos there is still something shiny for the kids to chase in them.

The bottom of the boxes are pretty cool too, with a 12 card panel of mini versions of the cards (though these are blank backed).

I’m not sure if this sort of thing is normal in the US and I’m just totally out of date and marveling at some hobby phenomena that’s existed for years, but being able to get these so cheap just really shocked me. This set is brand new - it was only released a few weeks ago - but I can already buy packs of it for almost nothing. It strikes me as being insanely wasteful, but I’m not complaining. 

I’ve already got another box of these ordered and on the way. Calbee better get its act together or I might switch my collecting habits altogether. Another big problem I have with Calbee - in addition to it just not being available for sale right now - is their limited checklist. This year they’ll only have 10 regular cards per team, not even enough to cover half a roster. Many of our favorite Dragons players just don’t have Calbee cards this year, but Epoch’s 36 cards per team means they get about everyone plus a lot of the 2 Gun guys.

This kind of makes me wonder who would ever buy a pack of these in stores? If the hitless packs are so easily separable, buying these in anything but full, sealed boxes can’t make much sense from the perspective of people hunting the auto cards. You’d think Epoch would be a bit more careful to avoid that happening, though I kind of hope this is a problem they don’t fix.

Collecting 2023 Calbee is Frustrating

 

I made a bit of a fuss on here in April when the first Series of Calbee cards/potato chips failed to materialize on store shelves on schedule.  

They ended up appearing about a month later than the announced release date, mainly a result of increased demand due to Japan's WBC win and Calbee's apparent prioritization of Amazon over brick and mortar retailers,  

Thankfully for about two months after they finally came out - roughly late April to late June - I was able to obtain a regular supply of them at my local supermarkets and would stop to buy three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids) on the way home from work several times a week.  This ritual is by far my favorite baseball card collecting activity ever.  We were able to slowly put together most of the set, we're about 10 cards short of the base set now and still need about half of the (harder to find) Star Card and Legends card subsets.

I picked up some cheap albums from the 100 Yen shop, and we also hit a Lucky Card which we redeemed for another album, so we've been putting them in those.

Frustratingly though at the end of June all of the stores pulled Calbee baseball card chips from their shelves.

This is actually normal because late June is when Series 2 comes out and replaces Series 1 on the shelves.

Only this year Series 2 is yet to be seen.  

A few weeks ago Dave had an email back and forth with someone at Calbee who suggested that Series 2 might not come out until August 21st (or perhaps even October 9th, the message gave these two dates but was a bit cryptic about what they meant).  Series 3 might be a write-off completely.

So here we are, the middle of the season - in fact this is exactly the All Star break - when demand for baseball cards is usually at or near its peak and yet there are no baseball card chip bags on store shelves like normal.  And it seems we won't see them again until the season is nearly over and interest in collecting them is likely to be waning considerably.  

The worst part is that my kids like them so much that they are actually asking me to go and buy more because they miss opening them!  Even my daughter, who is five and not a big baseball fan, gets excited about them (she was the one who got the Lucky Card and that really got her into it.  Whenever she gets a shiny star card she proudly shows it off to her mom and then gives it to me to put in the album if we need it).  

So this is all very frustrating.  I wish Calbee would get its act together, having their baseball card chips in stores is a key part of the "being a baseball fan in Japan" experience and the season really just isn't as fun without them (especially with my Dragons in last place. Its not a coincidence that I haven't been posting as much as usual for the past few weeks....)

Interesting 1951 Osato Gangu Set Find

 

Some neat 1951 Osato Gangu set stuff recently sold on Yahoo Auctions and has sparked my curiousity.

The set (which Engel catalogues as JGA 11) contains 48 cards and was originally sold as a set that came in a very cute little box.  I bought this set a few years ago, before the pandemic boom caused prices to rise.  They used to sometimes show up on Yahoo Auctions but its been a long time since I saw one.  The box is notable for the hamfisted attempt to spell baseball cards in English on the side:

The set is somewhat rare (Engel rates it R1) and is popular for having Wally Yonanime's rookie card in it:

I had always though this set was only sold in those cute "base boll card" boxes, and Engel indicates as much in his description of the set as well.  But last week an interesting item sold (for 62,000 Yen, unfortunately too much for my budget) on Yahoo Auctions. It was a taba of 120 baseball cards.  Taba are little envelopes, each containing one card, that were bundled together with a string. Anyone wanting to buy a card could simply pull a taba off of the string.  It was a common way for cards to be sold in Japan from the 1950s until as recently as the 1990s.  

What caught my eye about this taba was that it had a card from the 1951 Osamu Gangu set on the front of it.  

As you can see the envelopes from this taba were made of discarded newspaper.  This was a common practice in the early post-war years when Japan was still poor and recovering from the war.  Later taba - such as the postcard sized Yamakatsu cards from the 1970s - were sold in taba made up of tailor made envelopes rather than scraps.

It seems that each of the taba in this one had a card from the Osato Gangu set in it, with four prize cards (redeemable for something, not sure what in the case of these) and the rest being regular cards.  

Photos of the prize cards suggest that the backs were blank except for a prize symbol, which is unusual since the Osato Gangu cards are not blank-backed (they have a blue design with a picture of a lion on them).  I'm not sure if the pictures are the back of the cards though or rather simply specially made prize cards.

Since the Osato Gangu cards were a game that was meant to be played as a set (it comes with instructions, though I have to admit I haven't read them and have no idea how to play), I suspect that these taba weren't created by the original maker of the cards but rather by a third party who might have gotten their hands on some unsold "dead stock" of them or something.  

Its a very interesting item either way, and the price works out to less than $4 per card which was a real steal (depending on how many Yonamine rookie cards are in there it could be worth quite a bit more than that).  I wish I had been able to afford it, 62,000 Yen (about 450$ US) is a pretty cheap price to pay for the equivalent of an unopened box of early 1950s cards!  

1978 Yamakatsu Box

In addition to my giant 1977 Yamakatsu boxes, I also recently picked up a partial box of 1978 Yamakatsu cards.

I actually completed the 1978 Yamakatsu set a couple of years ago. Its one of the more popular ones owing to the fact that out of the many sets Yamakatsu made over the years its the only one whose cards are more or less normally sized. All the others are either huge , like those 1977s, or tiny like the 1979 and 1980 mini sized sets.

Until I bought this a few weeks ago I had never seen unopened packs of 1978 Yamakatsu before. The box I bought had 13 unopened packs in it, each of which seems to hold only one card.

In addition to the regular packs, the box also contained two packs with jumbo cards in them, which would have been given out as prizes to those who pulled winner cards from the regular packs. 

And it also had an envelope with two grand prizes, a card album and a giant sized card with a whole bunch of printed signatures on it. The need to accommodate these prizes explains why the box is so big despite the regular cards being standard sized. 

Since I already have the set, I’m going to keep these sealed. I’m not generally an unopened box or pack collector, but I’ve put together a pretty decent collection on unopened Yamakatsu stuff from the late 70s mostly through “that is just too good a deal to pass up” type impulse purchases (this box cost me about 40 bucks with shipping). 

Isao Harimoto Menko Gallery

 

I've picked up a few more Isao Harimoto menko cards recently.  I'm a big Harimoto fan, for reasons I outlined in this post here so I won't repeat them.  Suffice it to say that he's one of Japan's greatest players of all time, holder of NPB's career hits record, and he has an incredible personal story.

His career coincided almost exactly with that of Sadaharu Oh (they both debuted in 1959 and Harimoto played his last game in 1981, just a year after Oh).  This means that most of the menko sets that have Oh cards also have Harimoto in them, as did all of the Calbee sets of the 1970s (though there are more Oh cards in those).  

Since his cards are way cheaper than Oh's, I'm still able to collect them which is cool, though they don't show up in auctions too often.  These ones I bought in a lot for about 5,000 Yen (like 35$).  The same seller had a lot of Sadaharu Oh menko that sold for 345,000 Yen (about 2500$) on the same day, so you can see why I've shifted away from collecting his early cards!

Some more Menko Discoveries

 

Another interesting recent pick up (from my guy in Hiroshima with the shampoo from the 70s) is this two card menko panel, featuring Hankyu Brave Akiteru Kono and Motoshi Fujita of the Yomiuri Giants.

This is from a very rare set that Engel catalogues as JCM 133, easily identified by the pictures of animals and the three digit number on the backs:

Engel gives these an R5 rating (fewer than 5 known copies of each in existence) and doesn't list a checklist since too few cards have been discovered.  The guide is also unclear about whether the set was released in 1956 or 1957.

I think the discovery of these cards clears up the latter question.  Fujita made his debut with the Giants in 1957, so the set most likely dates from that year rather than 1956.  

Kono was a speedy base runner who led the league in stolen bases three times  (1956, 1957 and 1962 with the Dragons) in a career that lasted from 1954 to 1967.

Fujita is a Hall of Famer, elected both based on his playing career (119-88, 2.20 career ERA) and his managerial career with the Giants in two stints, 1981 to 1983 and 1989 to 1992, each of which netted a Nippon Series championship.  

Local collector attempts to move 1977 Yamakatsu premium cards by himself, dies.

Yesterday the writer of this blog made the foolish mistake of trying to carry some 1977 Yamakatsu Premium cards unassisted. He is survived by a wife and two young children.

Just kidding, I survived the experience with only a minor back injury as a result of trying to carry these absolutely massive cards around on my own.

The reason I was moving them around is that I picked up a couple of unopened boxes of 1977 Yamakatsu Jumbo cards recently, which I think are quite neat . 

The regular cards in this set, which came one card per pack in 30 pack boxes, are very large themselves, but the premium cards, which came three per box and would be given out to anyone who pulled a winner card from one of the regular packs, have got to be some of the biggest things that could be described as “baseball cards” ever made.

A few years ago Dave gave me a couple of these giant premiums when he visited Nagoya, and I have wanted to complete the set (of 6) ever since. I have now done so! 

I also have 60 packs of regular cards which I haven’t opened yet and am unsure if I should. 46 year old unopened packs don’t grow on trees, so I feel I should leave them in there. But its also a huge temptation and I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself….

The premiums, which came loose in the box, don’t present that problem. But they do pose a giant (literally) storage problem which I’ll have to work out.

Lamp Sale! No Dads Allowed.

 

I picked up three cards from one of the many oddball sets from the 60s the other day - the 1960 JBR 230 set ( referred to as "Toshiba Matsuda Lamp Coupon Bromides" in Engel).

This was a set of 25 cards issued to promote the 70th anniversary of......well, that is a hard question to answer but I'll give it a go here.

There are three issues with this set.  First, what is the name of the product at the heart of the sale being advertised?  Second, what is this 70th anniversary thing commemorating?  Third, why were dads excluded from the celebration?

Lets start with the name.  The Japanese spelling of the name of the product on the card is マツダランプ. Engel uses the correct conventions to turn that into the English "Matsuda Lamp", but on looking it up online it seems this might actually be a mistake.  According to the Japanese Wikipedia entry  the product in question was, bizarrely, actually an American rather than Japanese one.  In 1909 the Shelby Electric Company in Ohio released a lightbulb it called the "Mazda Lamp", which through licensing agreements would later end up being produced in Japan by Toshiba.  So I think "Mazda Lamp" is the correct name for these.

Now, what was celebrating a 70th anniversary in 1960? If the Mazda bulb was invented in 1909 it would have been only 51 years old in 1960 when these cards came out, not 70.  

Likewise Toshiba itself wasn't turning 70, it had been created as a result of a merger of two other companies in 1939 and was thus just 21 years old.

One of its two predecessor companies (of the two which had  merged to create Toshiba) - Tokyo Denki - had been founded in 1890 however, which makes the math work and thus these cards likely mark the anniversary of Tokyo Denki's founding, rather than the invention of the Mazda Lamp or the founding of Toshiba.

That leads us to the third issue, which arises from the back of the cards.

Look at all that blank, wasted space - you'd think you were looking at the back of a 2023 Topps NPB card.

The interesting thing is that little bit of writing at the bottom.  The bottom part of the card was a cut off entry form that you could mail in to Toshiba in order to win a prize.  

It appears however that dads weren't allowed to enter this contest.  The columns are divided into two groups, one of which lists prizes for mothers (diamond ring, pearl necklace, perfume, cosmetics case, etc), and the other lists prizes for children (baseball glove, bicycle, tennis racket, etc).  It doesn't specifically say that dads aren't allowed to enter, but there are no prizes for them listed so we can infer that they were de facto excluded.  

If you are familiar with how tightly Japanese society still defines gender roles today, and then subtract 63 years of minimal progress on the gender equality front from that, the existence of this is not surprising.  Moms go shopping for Mazda Lamps, kids come with them, dad goes to work and has nothing to do with that, so why even bother including him in a contest he's never going to see?  Logical, but also kind of an odd piece of social history to see primary evidence of on a baseball card.

I should perhaps mention the players I got.  Junzo Sekine, Katsuya Nomura and Minoru Murayama. All hall of famers!  Not a bad group.  The cards themselves are kind of neat - they are about postcard sized only more elongated.  Definitely going to be a pain in the butt to figure out how to store them, but otherwise I'm happy to add them to the collection. 

New 1947 JRM 56 Menko Discovery

 

I made another recent menko pick up (from the same seller where I got the cards in my previous post): four cards from the 1947 set Engel lists as JRM 56 ("Circle K", owing to the K in the circle.  This used to be the name of a convenience store chain in Japan but I think the two are unrelated).  

I was really interested in these due to their unique red/green/white color scheme which makes them quite distinctive from other menko sets of the time.  

These are among the rarest menko out there, Engel ranks them at R5 (less than 5 copies of each card known to exist) and only six cards from the set have been identified.

Three of the cards I have - Hideo Shimizu, Rentaro Imanishi and Hatsuo Kiyohara are already catalogued, but the fourth (the one at the top of this post) is not and is thus a "new find".  It features Tadayoshi Kajioka, a pitcher for the Tigers.  Kajioka was a star pitcher for several years in the late 40s and early 50s. In his rookie year in 1947, when this card was issued, he went 22-8 with a 1.92 ERA.  In his second year he would go 26-17 (meaning after just two years he had already won 48 games) and led the league in complete games with 35.  Overuse, plus the fact that due to the war he didn't make his pro debut until he was 27 years old, meant that his career only lasted 9 seasons, but he managed to squeeze an impressive 131 career victories into those years.  

Some New Vintage Dragons Cards

Another "find" I made recently were these four cards, all featuring members of the Dragons from the 1950s.  

These cards (which are roughly the same size as 1980s Calbee mini cards) seem to be uncatalogued (if I just missed their entry in Engel, someone let me know!).  They are made of cardboard and look like they were handcut. Their backs have a simple design.

The fronts of the cards say "Nagoya" and have the player's name written on them.  The ones I got (with their years with the Dragons) are:

Shigeru Sugishita (HOF) (1949 to 1960)

Michio Nishizawa (HOF) (1949 to 1958)

Satoshi Sugiyama (1948 to 1958)

Tokuzo Harada (1948 to 1958)

This was not a Dragons only set, the seller just broke up the cards he had into lots organized by team and, being a Dragons fan, I bid on the Dragons lot.

In terms of dating the set, all four players had a lengthy overlap in their careers spanning from 1949 to 1958 so its hard to narrow it down.  The fact that the team is identified as "Nagoya" rather than its current "Chunichi" is an important clue though as the Dragons were known as the "Nagoya Dragons" for just a short period between 1951 and 1953, so these likely came out during one of those years.

They are kind of cool cards, I like the colorful backgrounds on them.  They don't have any menko-related symbols or anything on them so they aren't menko. At the same time they don't look like other early 50s bromides, nor do they have any ads for confectionary items either.  This makes them hard to categorize based on other types of sets that were available in the early 50s in Japan.  

Junk Hockey Comes to the Rescue, Unexpectedly

 

I stumbled across something interesting on Yahoo Japan Auctions a little while ago. There is a seller, not a guy who specializes in cards, who for some reason has an absolutely insane mountain of junk wax era (1990 to 1993 ish) hockey cards. It looks like a horde put together by some Canadian 30 years ago that somehow found its way to Japan.

Hockey isn’t big in Japan, so it kind of caught my eye. Why was this here? The cost of shipping tens of thousands of junk wax hockey cards to Japan is way more than the cards are worth, so you just don’t see stuff like this here. 

The seller had broken some of the bunch into lots of two to three thousand cards each. No thanks, I’m not a hockey collector. But there were also a couple dozen binders full of cards being sold one by one.

These binders were being sold for 1000 Yen ( about 7 bucks) each and caught my eye. Not for the cards, but for the binders themselves. They were all pretty good quality binders and each had about 60 to 70 ultra pro sheets in nice condition in them. Buying those on their own would cost several times more than that, and I realized what a bargain these were. And right now Ultra Pro sheets are somewhat hard to come by here in Japan. So I bought five of them.

I chose the binders not based on the cards, but by looking at the photos and judging which ones had the most Ultra Pro sheets in them. I now have several thousand cards from the 1990-91 Upper Deck and Bowman (ugly) sets and the 1991-92 Upper Deck, OPC and Pro Set sets. I am in the process of removing them from those pages. This is an annoying and time consuming task. But it is worth it, since this allows me to do some long overdue bindering of some of my vintage Menko and Calbee sets.

This is so great. In one fell swoop I have enabled myself to binder so many sets that until now have been scattered about in random boxes. Which was just wrong.

I only have two problems now. One is the massive pile of junk hockey cards that are now in my possession.  Space for cards is already at a premium in my house and these are simply going to have to go, but I have no idea where. These cards were available for sale on Yahoo Auctions in nice binders for almost nothing for months with no takers until I came along, so selling them or even giving them away is going to be a long shot. I have to give some thought to that. If I was these cards, I would be feeling very apprehensive each time cardboard recycling days in our neighborhood come along.

The other is that while all these binders and pages are top quality and in nice shape the binders all say “Hockey” on them. There is no rule that says you can’t put baseball cards in a hockey album of course, but  its one of those inconsistencies that is going to nag my brain every time I see them. I’m a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to supplies though so this is something I’m willing to live with.

Mr. Tigers

 

After a fairly lengthy drought I was finally able to pick up some cool vintage menko the other day, from the same seller in Hiroshima who was selling 1970s Carp children's shampoo.  

One lot that I couldn't resist, and which fell within my price range, was a three card lot of menko of hall of famer Fumio Fujimura.  

Fujimura is an interesting figure in Japanese baseball history.  He played his entire career for the Hanshin Tigers from 1936 until 1958.  That meant that his playing career encompassed both the very first season of professional baseball in Japan, and also the rookie season of Shigeo Nagashima.  

He was a kind of Shohei Ohtani type talent in that he was both a dominant pitcher and a dominant hitter (something that was more common in the early years of Japanese baseball).  On the mound he posted a 34-11 record with a 2.43 career ERA, most of which occurred in the first half of his career.  

His batting was where he made his biggest mark though.  In 1950 he led the league with a .362 batting average and collected 191 hits to set the Japanese version of George Sisler's single season record.  It was Fujimura's record that Ichiro broke when he had his 210 hit season for the Blue Wave a few years before he broke Sisler's record with the Mariners.

Like many Japanese players of his generation a very large chunk of Fujimura's prime years were stolen by the war.  He entered military service in 1939 and spent most of the war in southeast Asia.  He was present at the fall of Singapore and, if his account is true, was the first Japanese soldier to spot the British raising the white flag.  Other wartime exploits of his include falling off a cliff in a jungle and suffering an injury so bad they almost amputated his leg, and having to spend a day swimming through shark infested waters after surviving the sinking of a transport ship that had been torpedoed.  

Towards the end of his career he served as player-manager for the Tigers.  Though the team played well under him he seems to have had a "difficult" relationship with his players. In 1956 a group of them, led by Juzo Sanada and Masayasu Kaneda, demanded that Fujimura be replaced as manager.  The team sided with Fujimura, who kept his job, and the incident seems to have ended Sanada and Kaneda's playing careers.

The Fujimura cards I have are pretty cool ones.  I particularly like the two round ones which have very striking and colorful artwork on them.  I'm having trouble identifying them as they both seem to be from uncatalogued sets.  The one pictured at the top of this post has a kind of "bullseye" background on it and there are two similar sets listed in Engel (JRM 47 and JRM 52, from 1948 and 1949 respectively).  The coloring and design on those are slightly different though, I haven't seen any with a red and yellow bullseye before.  The other circular one has a quite striking look to it, but it is unlike any round menko listed in Engel's guide.

The rectangular one in contrast is easier to identify, its from JCM 92, issued in 1948.  The artwork is a bit cruder than on the other two but I like it!

1985 Calbees, a Famicom and a Sony Trinitron TV

I got a nice little pile of 1985 Calbees off Yahoo Auctions a little while back. I wanted to try to recreate their original 1985 environment, so I hauled out my Famicom and a 1980s vintage Sony Trinitron TV that I had in the closet.

If you aren’t a retro gamer, a Famicom is the original Japanese version of Nintendo’s NES. It was released in Japan in 1983 and looks nothing like the North American version on the outside, but has the same guts inside. It was massively popular here in the 1980s and odds are pretty good that the kid in 1985 who pulled these Calbees from packs had a Famicom in his living room.

I’ve got a Super Mario Bros cart in there, a game that like these Calbees was released in 1985 and was a must have game for kids here, as it was…..pretty much everywhere.

Sony Trinitrons were a pretty popular TV model in the 80s here. I bought this one twelve years ago, just after Japan’s TV broadcasting switched to digital, so I could play old RF game systems on it. I couldn’t resist the red color. Its turned out to be a major pain to keep it tuned when I hook games up to it so I’ve mainly been using a more modern AV version of the Famicom to play games on our regular TV.  My wife has been urging me to get rid of this red TV for years now and I’m not sure how much longer it will be in that closet…

I think these old cards look nice with their contemporaries like this.