Sometimes old cards need to breathe, they need to be naked. Not just for their own sake, but for the benefit of those of us looking at them.
The card is based on Oh's menko in the JCM 165 set from 1975, which I posted about a little while ago and was the inspiration for this card. Gregory was kind enough to send one to me solely based on having seen the original card in my post, which was very nice of him.
The original card is quite distinctive with that halo like sun (or whatever it is) behind Oh's head:
If you like old baseball cards and you've ever visited one of the main card shops in Japan you've probably asked yourself "where the vintage stuff at?"
The three big stores here in Nagoya don't stock vintage (except a tiny handful of 1970s Calbees at Mint Ponyland and 80s Calbees at Bits). And looking around at write ups of card shops in other cities by Dave and Ryan it seems this is pretty common at card shops elsewhere too (with the occasional exception).
Its always seemed to me that most card shops here view things like menko, bromides and even early Calbee sets as something that simply doesn't belong in their stores. Like its a completely different kind of product and you might as well be asking if they stock watermelons or something if you ask if they have anything from before the 90s.
This doesn't however mean that there aren't stores that specialize in vintage baseball cards. It just oddly means that those stores aren't baseball card stores. Rather they are vintage toy stores, which in my opinion are a million times more fun.
In recent months I've become an active online follower of one such store, Kinkizu (キンキーズ）which is in Osaka. Sadly I've never been to the actual store before (its not easy to get to from where I live), but I really do want to make the pilgrimage out there some day. It doesn't seem to feature at all on the radars of foreign collectors who are more accustomed to the likes of Mint (and others), which is a situation I hope to remedy with this post. If you are into vintage Japanese cards, forget about the big baseball card stores in major cities, they won't have what you are looking for. Instead, look for shops like Kinkizu.
Kinkizu advertises itself as a store specializing in cards and toys from the Showa era (which lasted from 1926 to 1989, though for practical purposes it really just covers post-war stuff up until and including the 1980s). Its got a huge selection of vintage vinyl, comic books and toys from that era. But for our purposes its most interesting feature is their massive stock of vintage baseball cards.
This here is a good video tour of the store on Youtube which is worth a watch.
These screen grabs I think do a good job of demonstrating why I'm so intrigued by this store. They've got showcase after showcase full of vintage Kabaya Leaf and Calbee cards nestled together with Sofbi toys from the 60s and 70s, which is just absolutely the best way to display those cards.
They've got a blog here which details their new arrivals each month, which I like to follow because its cool to see the new piles of vintage Calbee cards they keep getting in.
As you can see from the video, and pictures like this one below, they don't just stock baseball cards but also a wide range of other vintage, non-sport cards. The thing they have in common is that they all come from the Showa era, and they are all awesome.
You can kind of detect a cultural difference at work in the Japanese hobby which doesn't have a parallel in the American one - vintage cards are part of a broader "vintage toy" category of collectible, while modern cards are in a category of their own. Shops that specialize in one are completely different from shops that specialize in the other.
I'm using Kinkizu as an example in this post because I think its the best such shop I've found so far, though its by no means alone. Mandarake, a nationwide chain of stores that started off 40 years ago as a used comic seller which expanded to sell all kinds of vintage toys also sells vintage baseball cards. In fact here in Nagoya its the only store I know of that has a decent selection of vintage 1970s Calbee cards available. I've never been card shopping up in Tokyo but I wouldn't be surprised if there were shops like that (in addition to their Mandarake locations) which also had that vintage toy/ old baseball card mix of stuff for sale.
Just to further illustrate my point, its not just about what they stock, but what the shops are like. Here are two photos, one of the interior of Kinkizu, the other the interior of Mint's Shinjuku store which I am stealing from Dave's blog.
Which of the above two places looks more fun to explore? The one where everything is kept in uniform rows of plastic shelving that looks more sterile than a dentist's office, or the one where you've got massive piles of awesome looking vintage cards and albums chaotically scattered about the room under a ceiling made of giant, inflatable red monsters?
I could see myself breezing into and out of that Mint location in about 30 seconds and never going back. I could also see myself spending a whole afternoon in that Kinkizu shop just trying to take everything in. I wish there were more shops like that around.
What is intriguing is not the player or the trophies, but rather the text on the banner below the trophies. It says, in English:
BB Team
1919
From
Seattle Japan
There are two confusing things about this: the year and the geography.
Keio University did indeed have a team in 1919, but it obviously isn't from "Seattle Japan". I'm not sure if they might have visited Seattle (er, the American Seattle, not the non-existent Japanese one) on some sort of tour in that year (seems unlikely as that was smack dab in the middle of the Spanish influenza pandemic), but perhaps someone with more knowledge than me about Keio's history might know?
Also, there is a question of whether this card itself was made in 1919 or if it was made later and just purports to depict something that happened in 1919. If it really was made in 1919 then this would be a very significant find - the oldest Japanese baseball cards listed in Engel date from a decade later in 1929, making this perhaps the oldest Japanese baseball card ever made.
Looking at the cards though I have my doubts that they actually date from 1919. The style, both front and back, look very similar to menko sets from the 1930s and late 1940s/early 50s. I've seen non-baseball menko that were made before the 1930s and they look nothing like this, featuring very crude artwork using more rudimentary printing processes rather than the detail depicted on this. Also I doubt that menko produced in 1919 would have featured English on them. The only menko I know with English writing on them date from the late 1940s to early 1950s, during the post-war US occupation period.
Sort of.
What I have completed is Series 1 to 3 - a total of 216 cards. Unfortunately Calbee didn't stop with those and tacked on a 20 card set of Giants cards (217 to 236) to the end of it. Those last 20 cards were short printed (probably only regionally released but I'm not sure about that) and are extremely rare compared to the rest of the set. I only have one of them so am technically still 19 cards short of the complete set.
The idea of spending a ton of money on late 90s cards of Giants players is not particularly enticing to me, which is why I've decided to declare this set "done" without those last cards (though if I ever stumble on any at a good price I'll be quite tempted to buy them, they only show up for sale every once in a while).
I started seriously building this set about 3 years ago when I bought a big lot of them on YJA. Compared to Calbee sets from the 70s or 80s this one was a lot easier and a lot cheaper to complete. I was aided in finishing it off by a seller who had a huge stockpile of late 90s Calbees putting a whole bunch up for sale last week. The key cards in the set are three Ichiro cards (one for each series) and I was fortunate to get all of them in the big lot I started out with. No single card cost me more than 50 Yen, and I think the whole project only set me back about 6,000 to 7,000 Yen total, which is not bad.
One thing I'm debating now is what to do with them. They are just sitting loose in a box along with most of my other Calbee sets. I'd like to put most of them into albums some day, but right now its only a select few (1975-76-77, 1986 and 1987) that get that privilege, mainly because my budget for albums and pages is limited. Over time I'd like to get all the vintage ones into albums (which is tricky for the 1980s sets due to a shortage of 12 pocket pages), but I'm not sure where to draw the line between "sets that are good enough to be in albums" and "sets that stay in boxes". The late 90s seems to be roughly where I'll be drawing that line, but I'm not sure which side the 1997 set will fall on.
There was an interesting lot that sold on Yahoo Auctions yesterday. It was a fourteen card lot of bromides that featured a mix of Japanese players and players from the New York Yankees from the 1950s. The Yankees cards included some very big names - Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Hank Bauer all had individual cards.
I've never seen these cards, which are blank-backed, before. Engel's guide lists some bromides featuring Yankees players from the 50s (like JBR 134), but I don't think these are from that. I'm not super knowledgeable about 1950s bromides though, perhaps somebody else might recognize these? If not, I wonder if they might be "new" discoveries.
Sadly but predictably I was never an actual contender to win this lot and was watching it mainly just out of curiosity. It sold for a little over 1.3 million Yen (about 10,000$ US at current exchange rates). Not being in that class of collector myself I have no idea if that was a good deal or not, but whoever won it got a pretty nice set of cards.
This is not for a lack of effort on my part. Almost every day for the past couple of weeks I've been stopping on the way back home from work at every convenience store or supermarket I can find (and there are a lot of them) and every time I've come up empty.
This is very unusual. I've been buying Calbee baseball chips for years now (first bag purchased was in 2000, though 2004 was the first year I bought them in large numbers to try to complete the set) and this has never happened before. Usually within a few days of the release in late March bags of Series 1 Calbee baseball chips are to be found at pretty much every major supermarket chain in town (convenience stores are more hit and miss).
I was wondering if this was just a Nagoya thing, but on looking it up online, Japanese collectors nationwide have noticed this too and are complaining about it on social media (like here and here). In fact they've done more than complain about it, they've asked their local supermarkets, and some even asked Calbee directly, about what is going on. And the answer they received may surprise you.
The culprit? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.
Ah that gag never gets old (laughs to self).
Seriously though, they indicate that the shortage is the result of the World Baseball Classic. It seems that the demand for baseball cards has shot through the roof and Calbee hasn't been able to produce enough to meet it, which explains why they aren't on sale almost anywhere.
This kind of makes sense, but it also pisses me off. The increase in demand doesn't mean that Calbee is producing fewer cards than normal. Nor does it mean that they are so popular that they are flying off store shelves: rather they aren't even reaching store shelves in the first place.
We can infer from the fact that the only place that has a ready supply of them available is Amazon that what it really means is that Calbee has given most of its production to that outlet and left retail stores in the lurch.
This sucks for a few reasons.
First, Amazon only sells them in cases. Who in their right mind wants to buy bags of plain chips by the caseload? Unless you are a flipper, probably not you.
Second, Amazon prices are a rip off. A case of 24 bags costs 5900 Yen, which works out to 245 yen per bag. That is more than double what they sell for at convenience stores (the ones I bought last week cost me 116 Yen per bag).
Third, kids don't buy expensive stuff in bulk off of Amazon. They can on the other hand buy cheap bags of chips at local supermarkets or stores. This is one of the things I've always liked about Calbee: they make the hobby accessible to kids. Limiting sales to Amazon on the other hand means only selling to grown ups. Hard core grown ups at that: casual collectors who might buy a few bags here and there on their way home from work (like me) sure as hell aren't going to buy massive cases of overpriced chips they can't eat.
And just to reinforce my annoyance with Twitter, in order to find posts by actual Japanese collectors talking about this year's Calbee cards to try to find out what was going on I had to wade through a massive shitstorm of Amazon shill ads (like this one) mocking convenience stores for not having Calbee baseball chips in stock while encouraging us to go to Amazon to buy them. In fact, going through the Twitter storm its notable that Calbee itself isn't doing most of the advertising for Calbee baseball chips anymore, Amazon is. Fuck all of us who don't want to buy Calbee cards by the caseload at double the normal price is the message to us collectors I guess?
Its not clear if this situation is going to be resolved or if this is a permanent thing, - according to Calbee's own website the product is no longer on sale ("休売中") - meaning that this might be the first spring in many years that I've been unable to easily buy Calbee Series 1 baseball chips. This is really frustrating. A few years ago I wouldn't have minded too much since I was getting into the habit of buying the complete sets off of Yahoo Auctions flippers anyway. But last year I really enjoyed being able to collect the sets bag by bag with my kids and I spent all winter quite looking forward to being able to do so again this year. Hopefully by the time Series 2 is released this stupidity will be resolved, though our enthusiasm will likely have waned by then (if the Dragons' performance so far is any indication of how that will develop) and this might be the sort of thing that completely kills my kids' already somewhat frail interest in collecting baseball cards. Well done on that accomplishment, Calbee and Amazon.
Until a few months ago I was both an active blogger and an active Twitter user. The two activities seemed complimentary - Twitter was good for making short comments about Japanese baseball cards and connecting with other people making short comments about the same. Blogger in contrast was good for writing longer pieces that couldn't be summarized in under 280 characters. There was a lot of overlap between the two, most people who blog about baseball cards also Tweet about them (though the reverse is not necessarily true, so being on Twitter allowed me to get in touch with a wider range of people it seemed).
Like everyone else on Twitter I watched last year as the Elon Musk parade took over that platform. I didn't really care at all about the culture war politics or whatever that was animating a lot of people in relation to that. The political views of whoever is running the platform is not my concern, I just want to use it to talk about baseball cards.
Despite having found it so useful, in December I decided to delete my Twitter account and completely walk away.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was Musk's plans to basically switch Twitter's business model towards a form of "pay to play" system. The future vision he has for Twitter is clearly one in which people who pay 8$ a month have a "good" Twitter experience with their posts reaching an audience and people interacting with them and following them, while those who don't will find their content buried by the algorithms and don't get much interaction from it.
I wasn't going to pay 8$ a month and I didn't see much point in sticking around as a second tier user, so I walked away.
I'm sure many Twitter users out there who still use it without paying 8$ a month will tell me that not much has changed for them. But it will change simply because it has to for Musk's business plan to make any sense. If the free version continues to work fine, they won't get enough people signing up for the paid version. In order to incentivize people to do so, they pretty much have to make the free one suck. If they did it all at once then everyone would simply walk away from Twitter completely, so they haven't throttled the user experience in a drastic form yet. But slowly, over time, people using free Twitter can expect it to start sucking a little bit more over time, almost as if it was designed to not suck enough that they would walk away completely, but just enough to make them think about paying 8$ a month to try to halt the slide to suckiness.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how platforms evolve like this, in a process he calls "enshitification". He describes it like this:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
This tracks pretty closely with my experience with a lot of social media platforms. Facebook was great when I signed up in the 00s. Now it sucks. Twitter I've already explained. Other examples abound.
But one social media platform hasn't really done that, and that is Blogger.
The Blogger that I use today is pretty much exactly the same as the Blogger I used in 2008 when I started my first blog. In 15 years the only changes I've noticed are cosmetic, they made one significant update to the way blogs look a few years back, but all the features and functions have remained basically the same. Whereas my Facebook feed has been taken over by ads and promoted content that I hate, my blogger experience is completely ad free and the only blogs I see are ones that I deliberately added to my blog roll. Blogger has never required me to host ads. Blogger has never forced me to pay for anything. I really like Blogger a lot, its the only social media platform that I signed up for in the 00s that hasn't turned on me and become a useless mess.
Still though, I worry. I don't understand how Google makes money off of me as a Blogger user. Blogger doesn't allow Google to use algorithms to manipulate me the way Facebook, Twitter or Youtube do. This is great, but at the same time Google is not a charity and I worry that at some point the same thing that has enshitified the rest of the internet is going to infect this platform too, simply because they want to monetize it more. Google is after all no different from other platforms and a lot of its other, bigger things like its search engine have gotten progressively more useless and awful over the years as they turned them into advertising delivery devices to make money. In fact, I suspect the latter is one way in which enshitification is indirectly creeping into Blogger. My old blog (Famicomblog) used to get a ton of traffic in the late 00s/early 10s from Google searches because it ranked high in some search term results. That doesn't happen anymore, searches for those terms now lead you inevitably to businesses selling stuff rather than people writing about stuff.
Likewise this blog which started later, in 2013, has never gotten any significant traffic from search results, despite being dedicated to an extremely niche topic that only a handful of other places on the internet have information about. Searches for the stuff that I write about inevitably lead you to Amazon or Ebay sellers, rather than to actual articles written by people about those things. I note that a common lament among baseball card bloggers is that the traffic they used to get 10-15 years ago has dried up. They often chalk it up to people losing interest in blogs, but I think that a more likely explanation is that changes to how Google and other search engines direct traffic have de-prioritized blogs because they aren't money makers. Just a theory, but it makes sense.
Anyway, despite that I'm still quite happy with blogger because, whatever the search engines do, this platform itself is still the same one I've always used. I hope it stays that way. Unlike Twitter, Blogger isn't something I can easily walk away from. Tweets are almost designed to be thrown away. My blog in contrast is a repository of hundreds of articles I've invested a non insignificant amount of time in creating. Its not something easily discardable.
In typical fashion, as soon as I complain aloud about not being able to find something, I immediately find it.
After writing yesterday's post about not being able to find any 2023 Calbee, I decided to take another hunting expedition to try to find them while on my way home from work.
Things didn't get off to a good start - I hit three separate convenience stores (Family Mart, Lawson, 7-11) and came up empty at each. I was about to give up when I decided to try one last place that I viewed as a long shot. In Ozone station near the Nagoya Dome, which I was passing through anyway, there is a little place called Bellmart Kiosk which sells snacks and is basically a convenience store. Not being one of the major chains though I didn't think they would have any, but I would be walking right past it so I decided to duck in and take a look.
To my surprise, they had them! They were 116 Yen per bag, which is more than they usually cost. I'm not sure if this is due to inflation, or just due to how they price stuff at Bellmart Kiosk. Anyway, I gladly bought three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids).
I got home just as the Dragons game was starting on TV so I sat down to watch the game with the kids and we each opened a bag. This was what we got:
The Oshima Star Card was a great find, and we actually saw him get a hit just a few minutes after pulling it which was a nice touch (even better was watching the Dragons beating the Swallows 3-1, breaking a four game losing streak).
Being able to buy Calbee chips in stores like this has become a very important ritual of my life in Japan (which started off as just a one year stint as an English teacher looking for an overseas adventure in a new country and somehow evolved into me having spent more than two decades of my life here). There are three things that mark the start of spring in Japan for me:
1) Cherry blossoms coming into bloom;
2) NPB regular season starting;
3) Buying bags of Calbee baseball chips
Not being able to check off that third one had been bugging me for a while, it was almost like without being able to do that winter would not be over in my mind. Now that it is, I feel much better.
Anyway, this year's set is pretty much the same as every Calbee set for decades. Same design, same predictable photography, etc, so I won't repeat my criticisms about those elements. The one new thing, which Dave noted a few weeks ago, is that unfortunately the set this year is smaller than usual - just 60 regular cards rather than 72 as has been the norm in recent years. That means that they feature just five players per team on regular cards. Assuming they keep this up for Series 2 and 3, they'll end up with only 15 players per team on cards, way fewer than the full roster. So likely my kids and I are not going to be able to get cards of a lot of Dragons players who we like, which is a bit of a bummer.
Hopefully now that I've confirmed that they are in fact starting to appear in some stores they will soon start appearing in others. In fact that is going to be a pre-requisite to us collecting the set via bags of chips again this year - that Bellmart Kiosk is a bit too out of the way for me to regularly stop there for chips so I'll need one of my local supermarkets to get their act together ASAP!
Last month on Calbee's website (as also noted by Dave in his post about it) it was announced that Series one would be on sale from March 27th. That is pretty normal, Calbee usually puts there Series 1 sets on sale at the end of the March, roughly coinciding with the start of the season.
I was looking forward to that date since I had so much fun putting the sets together with my kids last year. So on March 27th I eagerly hit one of the supermarkets that normally sells Calbee baseball chips. They didn't have them. I then went to another. They didn't have them either. And another. And another, etc etc.
Day after day for the past 10 days I've been hitting everywhere they might be available and always coming up empty. I initially thought this might be due to the fact that most stores were still selling Calbee's Team Japan soccer chips and wanted to burn though their stock of those before switching to the baseball chips. But last weekend all those soccer chips were pulled from store shelves, but no baseball chips appeared to replace them.
On looking a bit deeper into it, I discovered in a Calbee press release that the March 27th date was their release date for convenience stores only, which would explain why I didn't find any in supermarkets. But I haven't found any in convenience stores either yet. And the release date for supermarkets, April 3rd, has also already come and gone without them showing up.
So I'm playing a very frustrating waiting game with Calbee right now. Its not unusual for Series 2 or Series 3 to appear in stores later than the official release date since stores usually only start selling those once they've exhausted their supply of Series 1 chips. But I've never seen Series 1 fail to appear on shelves within a day or two of the offical release date before. I know the sets have been made because re-sellers on Yahoo Auctions are already selling singles and even sets. But I want to do it the old fashioned way this year (even though, as Dave has informed me, the set is smaller than usual and has no design innovations or anything like that).
After finishing my 1987 Calbee set three years ago I decided that 1986 would be the next Calbee set from the 80s that I would try to complete. I actually have most of the other 1980s sets "on the go" but the 1986 set is the only one I have a realistic shot at completing in a reasonable time frame (ie this decade). All the other sets from the 80s have at least one or two hyper rare series that make them extremely difficult to put together. The 1986 set isn't too bad in that regard and at only 250 cards its quite small and probably even easier than the 1987 set, which has almost 400 cards, to put together.
As you can see from the pictures in this post my 1986 set has a binder of its own and sits in lovely 12 pocket pages that are the perfect size for 1980s Calbee cards. This is a mark of honor for it, those pages are extremely hard for me to obtain. Nobody sells them on YJA or Amazon (they do have other 12 pocket pages available, but they aren't quite the right size for 80s Calbees which only THESE specific pages work for). I make a visit to the local card shop Bits once a year or so and the main thing I buy is however many 12 card sheets they have, which is never enough. I'd like to put all my 1980s sets into them, but thus far have only scrounged up enough for the 87 and 86 sets.
Anyway, by my latest count I have 212 cards (84.8%) meaning I just need another 38 to finish the set. Not bad! When putting together my 1987 Calbee set I had narrowed it down to the last 31 cards I needed about 2 years before finishing it, so maybe that might be a realistic timeline for these. Of course that was before the pandemic when cards were a bit easier to get for a decent price so I might have to factor that into it.
One thing I've noticed is that even though there don't seem to be any known short printed series in the set, nearly half of the cards I still need (listed at the bottom of this post) fall between 100 and 150. This could be just a coincidence, but I do wonder if those ones might be a bit harder to find than the other series.
Anyway, I kind of like this set. Its got Kiyohara's rookie card(s) in it and most of the famous 80s foreign stars like Baas and Cromartie. I'll be happy when its finished.
The remaining cards I need are:
59,60,62,74,81,90,99,100,102,103,104,113,115,119, 123, 125, 127, 130, 134, 137, 139, 188, 190,192,204,205,218,219,224,240,243,244,245,250
