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.

Vintage Baseball Shampoo

 

A guy from Hiroshima was selling a few of the regionally issued cards of Carp players from the 1975-76-77 Calbee set on Yahoo Auctions the other day so I put some bids on a few (and won two of them yesterday, the set inches closer to completion).  

While perusing his stuff I noticed he had an interesting item that was getting a lot of attention: an unopened bottle of children's shampoo featuring members of the 1975 (I think) Hiroshima Carp on it.

The red characters immediately below the players say Akaheru Gundan, which means "Red Helmet Squad".  The Carp had changed their team color to red in 1973 and in the mid-70s that was a popular nickname for the team.  It helped that they were a good team too, winning the CL title in 1975 (though losing to the Braves in the Nippon Series).  I need to brush up my 1970s Carp facial recognition skills, I recognize Koji Yamamoto and Sachio Kinugasa on there but will have to go through some photos to figure out the others.

 The shampoo itself was put out by a company called Sunstar and contained 200ml of shampoo. Other than that I don't know anything about it. The lot also contained what looks like a bottle opener.

Since I'm not a Carp fan, nor a shampoo collector, I didn't bid on this. It did attract 5 bids though and sold for 1300 Yen (about 10$ US).  

Card collectors are fond of jokingly reminding each other "not to eat the gum" when we buy old wax packs of cards.  I wonder if shampoo collectors jokingly remind each other "not to wash your kid's hair with this" when they buy old bottles of children's shampoo.  

I'd like to think that they do. 

Big Pile of Calbee Baseball Card Chips Bags

 

Went to my supermarket on the way home and found these glorious babies.  98 Yen per bag for as many bags of Calbee baseball card chips as you can buy.  Oh so good.  

Calbee Cards are Back, Thank God

 

About a month ago I was complaining that Calbee baseball card chips weren't available in stores like usual this year.  It seemed that heightened popularity due to Japan's WBC success combined with Amazon sellers getting some sort of priority access meant that retail stores had been left in the lurch.  For the first time in many years spring in Japan had arrived without Calbee baseball cards on the shelves.

I'm happy to report that little over a week ago bags finally started to appear in major supermarkets in my neighborhood and I've been able to start buying them on a regular basis again.  Hooray!

Most importantly for me, this means that my kids are getting into it again this year too.  I buy a few bags at a time at the supermarket and keep a stockpile at home. This allows me to randomly say "Hey, want to open some baseball card chips with me?" when the two of them seem to be at a loss for activities to do, or when I'm watching a game on TV and they come into the living room to sit with me.  Both of them have been responding quite positively when I do that and we each open one bag (with three of us that leads to a net total of six cards) and see what we got.  It only eats up a couple of minutes (more if we eat the chips), but its a nice ritual to go through every once in a while as we slowly build up the set over the year.  Doing that with them last year was definitely the most enjoyable experience of my collecting life - including even my own childhood experiences collecting on the playground.  Not being able to do that for the first month of the season had been frustrating, so I'm quite glad to be able to do it again. 

This, more than anything else, is what I really like about Calbee cards.  I complain on here a lot about their repetitive photography and other things, but those are relatively minor quibbles and I really do love them as a card maker.  They are the only one that I know of, in Japan or North America, that has successfully maintained a child-friendly business model in the face of decades of crass, commercial "grown-up-ization" of the baseball card collecting hobby.  While they've certainly made a few adjustments over the years in response to hobby developments - they have insert and chase cards - none of these have led them to seriously jacking up the price or succumbing to the many temptations that I remember seeing card makers in the US falling to in the 90s which really ruined the hobby back then.

So I'm happy to be able to work on another set bag by bag this year.  My son even pulled a Lucky Card yesterday which means we can mail it in for an album.  He was quite excited by that despite being a bit let down by the album he got in the mail last year.  Its just the thrill of hitting a chase card I guess, but I was glad to see that enthusiasm still there.  

The Sadaharu Oh Bottleneck

At heart I am a set collector. Mainly old stuff. Almost all of my collection is cards from sets I am, with varying levels of intensity, pursuing. This is sort of a default setting for me. Most of these are sets I’ll never seriously go after, but if I have at least one card from a set, the remainder are ones I’d like  to have.

Until recently it was relatively easy being a set collector in Japan because most sets didn’t have any insanely valuable rarities to discourage you. There are a few exceptions, like 1967 Kabaya Leaf or 1973 Calbee which have some hyper rare short prints but otherwise there were a lot of do-able sets out there (well, at least if you live in Japan where its easier to find them).

Over the past couple of years though this has quickly changed. Us set collectors now have a Sadaharu Oh problem.

In Japan, like the US, the pandemic led to a surge in prices on vintage cards. Here though the price bump has fallen disproportionately on a single player’s cards. Sadaharu Oh card prices have gone through the roof, with many increasing in price 5 to 10 fold over 2019 prices. 

To give one example, I paid about 10,000 Yen for my JCM30b Sadaharu Oh rookie card in 2019, which was about normal. Today that card goes for about 10 times that much, if you can find one. Other examples abound.

I’m extremely glad I was able to buy that Oh, and a few others, when I did because as it stands now I have been completely priced out of the market on any Oh menko at all, not just his rookies. As a set collector though this price rise has completely destroyed my menko collecting goals since there are quite a few other sets I was working on but hadn’t acquired the Oh yet. Now those are all dead ends.

The Oh price explosion has annoyingly also affected his Calbee cards from the 70s too, which have gone up quite a bit. A few years ago his cards (and those of other major stars) only commanded a small premium over common prices since there were so many of them. Now Oh cards sell for a noticably higher price. Fortunately this isn’t forcing me to abandon my set collecting goals for Calbee cards since the starting point for those cards was way lower. With some exceptions I used to be able to easily get his cards from the 1975-76-77 monster set that I’m working on for 200 to 300 Yen each. Now they are usually in the 700 to 1000 Yen range. More expensive, but still within my budget at least. It helps that the hyper rare cards from most Calbee sets in the 70s were in series that didn’t include Giants players, so no Oh card is too rare, though there are a few 1977 and 1978 cards of his that are quite expensive now.

I do wonder if this Oh price explosion will cause some tension among Japanese collectors. Its pretty obvious that most of this movement is due to Americans buying up his cards and not domestic collectors. I can still buy menko of Hall of Famers whose names are unfamiliar to Americans for insanely cheap prices, but the one guy whose name gets checked in a Beasty Boys song is the only one in the stratosphere. Not hard to put two and two together. 

Vintage Oh cards are a finite resource that Japan seems to be exporting at a high rate, meaning the remaining supply for domestic set collectors is getting smaller and smaller. The number of such set collectors is small, but then again so is the number of such cards. I was lucky to start collecting when I did, I think if I was trying to start a collection today I’d have taken one look at those Oh prices and walked away. Well, maybe not walked away, but at least have limited my collecting way more than I did.