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!  

Kaoru Betto 1951 Osato Gangu

In an earlier post I mentioned getting some cards from the hyper rare 1952 Osato Gangu set.  I also picked up a small lot of cards from the 1951 Osato Gangu set, which is almost identical except the pictures are in black and white instead of color. One of the cards in the lot was the above featuring Kaoru Betto.

Betto is a Hall of Famer who played for the Tigers and Orions in a relatively brief pro career that spanned from 1948 to 1957, the start of his playing career having been interrupted by the War (he was already 27 years old when he made his debut).  His best season was in 1950 when he led the league in most offensive categories, just missing the batting average title that would have won him the triple crown.

In the US he is probably best known by the fact that Jeff Bridges has a T-shirt of him that he kept wearing in movies back in the 1990s:

In Japan on the other hand his famous bespectacled look allowed him to transition after retirement into a cushy gig as the public face of Hoya, a major glasses maker.

In addition to featuring black and white rather than color images, the other big difference between the 1952 and 1951 Osato Gangu sets is rarity.  While less than 5 copies of each card from the 1952 set are known to exist, the 1951 set is more common.  Engel classifies it as R2, which means somewhere between 100 and 250 copies of each card are known to exist.  That makes cards from that set more affordable, hence my ability to acquire a hall of famer in this set while my 1952s are all commons.

Kind of weird that cards where less than 250 copies are out there are the "easy" version, but that is vintage Japanese cards for you.