Intriguing Baseball Menko

 

A rather intriguing pair of uncatalogued baseball menko sold on Yahoo Auctions the other day.  They appear to depict an unidentified player in a Keio University uniform standing in front of a couple of trophies. 

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. 

Despite these issues the seller listed them with a description which strongly suggested they dated from 1919.  The bidding on these went fairly high, suggesting that the buyer might have also thought they dated from that year.  

They sold for 45,000 Yen (about $350 US), way more than what most menko featuring generic players go for.  This is certainly an intriguing card, but I wasn't willing (or able) to go anywhere near that high in bidding on it.