Neat Ichiro Find, I think.

 After writing my last post about the fake 1994 Calbee Hokkaido/Kyushu/Sanyo Ichiros I flipped through my pile of "vintage" Calbee Ichiros from the mid-90s.  I had some paranoid thoughts running through my head about whether they might be fake too, though I've never heard of any of his other Calbees being counterfeited.

In that frame of mind I had a bit of a collector heart attack when I noticed something amiss with my 1995 Calbee Choco Snack Ichiros.  As I mentioned in a post in February, I bought that entire set complete in their original transparent packs.  I love that set. It has two Ichiro cards, numbered C-4 and C-32.

As I also mentioned in that post, purchasing the entire set gave me a double of one card, one of the Ichiros which I had purchased individually about a year ago (highlighted in this post here).

I put the Ichiros I have doubles of in the above photo.  Exactly the same, right?  But this is what the backs of those two cards look like:

Somebody in this picture doesn't belong here!!!  The one on the left (which is the one I purchased as a single last year) is number C-32, while the one on the right (that came with the set) is number C-4!  But they are the same card on the front.

The one on the left is the odd man out here, C-32 has a different picture.  This is what it looks like here, the card on the right, which is a totally different picture (these are the two Ichiros I got in the complete set):

At first I thought this might be an extraordinarily unlikely wrong back, but the likelihood of a wrong back which coincidentally had the same player on it was way too low to be realistic.  I also considered the possibility that it might be a fake, but also discounted that: if someone was going to go to the trouble of making a perfect fake that looks identical to the real one and even somehow get it into an identical sealed pack, they'd probably not have made such an obvious mistake as putting the wrong back on the card!  Also this is the black letter version which isn't really valuable enough to make it worth a counterfeiter's while like the 94 Calbees are.

Finally after frantically scouring the internet I hit upon what seems to be the correct explanation for the discrepancy.  According to the Collecitng Ichiro website, there was a Chiba Lotte Marines Stadium promotional giveaway in 1995 in which a specially made Ichiro card featuring the front design and photo of C-4 from the regular set, and the back design (and number) of C-32 on the back was used.  

So the card that I bought as a single last year would seem to have been from that promotion and not from the regular set, even though except for the switched photo it looks exactly like a regular 1995 Calbee Choco Snack card.  

Looking around the Japanese internet and auction listings the variation seems to be a lot harder to find than the regular card, which I guess makes sense.  Kind of a neat find, I had no idea this existed even though I've owned one for a year now, it can be fun to discover random things in your collection like this you never knew existed.

(Also, excuse the lousy photo quality.  My scanner (which ironically I placed these on top of to photograph) no longer works and I lost my camera during my trip to Canada last month so for the time being all my pics are with a semi-functional old iPad that I have!)

Why Graded Cards are Stupid: 1995 Calbee Ichiro Edition

I picked up my first graded Japanese card this week.  Its a 1995 Calbee/ Choco Snack, card C-32 in the set.

I actually picked up this entire set just two months ago so I already have this Ichiro, but not THIS version of it.  This is the harder to find gold parrallel version, which has his name written in gold rather than black letters.  These generally sell for about double what the black letter regular versions of each card go for.

I feel bad for the guy I bought this card from because I got an insane deal.  The cheapest BIN prices or starting auction prices on this card (and the gold version of the other Ichiro from the same set) is 9,000 Yen right now, which is about normal.  This one popped up with a starting bid of just 1700 Yen which I put in and won the card without anyone else bidding. It was an insane bargain.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, graded cards are pretty rare in Japan, the hobby just isn't anywhere near as obsessed with condition as the American one is. All the other copies of this Ichiro card I've seen are raw rather than graded.  I didn't buy this card because it was graded, but rather in spite of the fact that it was graded.  Its cool to see that its in nm/mt+ condition but I could see that from the photos anyway.  Its an almost perfect card - the front is flawless and the only thing that I can see which may have prevented it from getting a "Mint" grade is some microscopic flecks of white on a bit of the edge on the back.

But the cost of having it graded by the seller must have cost almost, or maybe even more than, the amount I paid for it.  It just makes so little sense that I can only imagine the guy is kicking himself for having gone to the expense.

In the US I guess getting cards like this graded is kind of like playing the lottery that you'll get a Gem Mint grade and hit the big bucks.  So you might take the hit on stuff you got with lower grades.  But in Japan I don't think it works like that. It makes no sense that I got this card in this condition - its basically perfect - for this price.  I don't know if Japanese buyers were avoiding it because it was graded and they just don't know what that is or how to value it, or if I just lucked out.  Or is it like the US, where once it is established that a card has an insanely minor flaw and won't get a Gem Mint grade, the bottom falls out of the market for it.  I find the latter really doubtful given the way the market works here.

Anyway, I'm happy with this card in my collection.  I don't think I'll go for the entire gold parallel version of the set because...why would I?  But its cool to have a sample of one and that sample being an Ichiro!

Oh God, What Have I Done?

 Behold!  The entire 1995 Choco Snack/Calbee set!  Complete in all its glory!  Its mine!

Until a couple of days ago I only had one card in this set.  Now I have all of them.

I'm not sure what happened.  With my vintage Calbee sets (with Calbee, 1995 counts as vintage, these are hard to find) I've been pretty much putting them all together the old fashioned way, one card at a time.  This is made easier by the fact that full sets of pre-1998 Calbee sets almost never come up for sale (and when they do the prices are out of my range).

Then I found myself browsing Yahoo Auctions looking for 1995 Tokyo Snack/Calbee singles - the "other" Calbee set from that year - since I'm getting really close to finishing up the first series of that one.

And I noticed at the top of the listings this beauty - the entire 72 card Choco Snack set.  The starting bid was 9800 Yen, which works out to just over 1$ per card.  It has two Ichiros in it which alone are worth about that much.  And, only having one card so far, it was tempting.  So I put a bid in not really expecting to win - the set lists for twice that much in SCM and is pretty hard to find.

Then, as you can probably imagine, I won!  Nobody else put a bid on it!

Finishing this set wasn't even on my radar until I saw this, its a great set that I wanted to work on but was sort of on the backburner while I worked on others.  Now it has leapfrogged to "complete" status, it is the oldest Calbee set that I have complete (though the 1987 is bound to overtake it quite soon, I am only 8 cards short of finishing that one).

 I had some misgivings as I always do when I win something that I thought I had put a bid way too low to win on.  Why didn't anyone else bid on it?  Is something wrong with it?  Do all the Japanese bidders have some kind of radar that allows them to detect red flags that foreigners like myself are oblivious to?

I nervously waited for the package to come in the mail and discovered....everything was OK!  In fact, better than OK, this set is amazing!

The most impressive thing about the set is that every card came still sealed in its original pack.  Unlike other Calbee sets, the cards in this one came packed in transparent packs so you can see the card perfectly without opening them.  Its the only major Calbee set that I know of which was distributed like that.   A fair number of the listings I've seen for cards from this set are for singles still in their original package, which usually command a premium over ones being sold loose.  So finding an entire set still in its packages, while not something I would have necessarily set out to collect in itself, is just a kind of cool bonus.

 The set is crammed with stars.  Hideki Irabu before his tragic American odyssey:

 Shane Mack after his non-tragic one:

 Ichiro in just his second Calbee year (appearing on two cards, both of which are among his best Calbee cards):

 Atsuya Furuta:

 Hideki Matsui (also appearing on two cards):

 And a ton of other hall of famers or stars.

I'm totally ga-ga over this set.

As a bonus the set also included an Atari card, also still in its pack. Send in 8 of these and they'd send you a soccer ball (not so unusual as it sounds for a baseball prize since the Atari marks distributed with Calbee soccer cards that year were interchangeable with these).  Send in 3 and you'd get a card album.  Send in 2 and you'd get a baseball or soccer magazine of your choice.

This set is pretty hard to find, slightly more so that the other Calbee set, Tokyo Snack, of that year.  That is because this was one of the regional issues, only sold in Tokyo and Saitama that year.  Since Tokyo is a pretty big market its probably easier to find that some other 1990s regional issues like the 1994 Hokkaido one which was sold in a much smaller (population wise) region.  Still though, its pretty tough to find, Yahoo Auctcions currently has only 283 listings for all 1995 Calbee products and most of those are for the Tokyo Snack set which, despite its name, was released nationwide and is a bit easier to find.

The final thing worth mentioning about this set is the color of the player names on the front of the cards.  I have what could be called the "base set" since all the player names are written in black.  Calbee issued a parallel set which is identical except the player names are in gold.  The gold ones are said to be a bit harder to find and thus command a premium, usually selling for about double what the black letter versions sell for (a gold letter Ichiro is currently for sale for 10,000 Yen on Yahoo Auctions, not in its original pack.  The black letter version in contrast can be found for 3,000 to 5,000 Yen).  If this had been a gold set I probably would have been outbid by a wide margin on it.  Not being a parallel collector though I don't really care!

Still I'm of mixed feelings about this mainly because between this and my recent 1975-76 Calbee pick ups, I have already blown my entire 2019 budget for cards and we're barely halfway through February now.  Its hard to resist deals when they come around, but buying big ticket items like this radically throws off the pace of my collecting which I generally like to keep a bit more down to Earth.  So I'm left with a "Wow this set is a great pick up" feeling on the one hand and a "Oh god, what have I done" feeling on the other.

1995 Calbee Choco Snack Ichiro Suzuki

 I mentioned in an earlier post that I have been collecting 1995 Tokyo Snack which is kind of Calbee's flagship set of that year.  The other set that Calbee released was its Choco Snack set (which as the name implies, came with a product called Choco Snack).  The Choco Snack set was only released in Tokyo and Saitama, though despite being a limited regional issue they seem to be only slightly rarer than the Tokyo Snack (though it is worth mentioning that Tokyo Snack is pretty hard to find).

My Tokyo Snack set is coming along nicely but I only have one card from the Choco Snack set; Ichiro Suzuki (C-32).

Ichiro appears on two cards in the set (this one and C-4).  The cards have two versions, one with the player name on the front in black lettering and another in gold, which is the more valuable of the two (as you can see, my Ichiro is the black lettered version).

Also as you can see my Ichiro card is still in the original baggie it came in.  This is something that sets the Choco Snack set a bit apart, it is probably the only Calbee set to have been issued in clear packs so you could see who you got.  I'm guessing these were distributed inside the packages of Choco Snacks so as to prevent cherry picking back in 1995, though I'm not certain of that.  Anyway, due to this its actually not uncommon to find cards from this set on Yahoo Auctions still in their packs - I guess people figured they might as well keep them in there!

Anyway, with Ichiro retiring I've decided its high time I started tracking down some of his harder to find Calbee cards from the 1990s and this is one of them (the 1994s will cost me way more).  I like seeing the awkward looking young Ichiro in his Blue Wave uniform, it really brings me back to my first year in Japan when I lived just outside of Kobe and went to see him play at Green Stadium.