Some Thoughts on the Unfortunate Demise of Kanji on the Front of Japanese Baseball Cards

The first time I ever visited a baseball card store in Japan was in 2002.  It was a shop in Himeji which has long since gone out of business.  I didn`t know much about Japanese cards at the time and I remember going over to have a peak in the glass case where they had all their valuable single cards on display.  In addition to the usual suspects – 1993 BBM Ichiro and the like – they had a fair number of older Calbee cards from the 1970s of players like Nagashima and Oh in there.  It was the first time I had ever seen older Japanese cards.  In my eye the thing that set them apart the most from contemporary cards wasn`t their smaller size or the lack of glossy foil borders.  It was the use of kanji on the fronts of the cards to indicate the player`s name and team.

This I found to be immensely appealing.  This was something that no American card ever had.  It harkened back to a pre-globalization era when countries actually mattered and products were designed for local tastes rather than for generic international markets.  The kanji on the fronts of the cards just screamed “These are Japanese cards intended for Japanese people who happen to like baseball. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I loved them.

I long wondered why Japanese card companies abandoned that practice and started using the Roman alphabet to display information on the front of the card.  Today pretty much all sets with a few exceptions like the odd Calbee Star Card subset don’t have kanji anywhere on the front of the card (the card backs, of course, are still written in Japanese).  If we look back at the development of cards year by year, it is easy to spot an exact point at which this transition happened – 1990.  The 1990 Calbee set started pretty much like any other that had preceded it – the first series was mini-card sized and featured the names on the front written in Japanese.  Then suddenly BLAMMO!  Series 2 comes out and not only are the cards much bigger in size, but the player names are now displayed in alphabetical form on the front.  A few months later the 1991 BBM set was released, also with alphabetized names on the front, and kanji card fronts basically died out.

If you haven’t read this excellent post on Japanese Baseball Cards about Larry Fuhrmann and the development of that first BBM set, I highly recommend doing so. In part I suggest it because it is an engaging and thoroughly well-researched article, but I also do so because it sheds some light on this very question that I have long grappled with.  Apparently the idea of using the Roman alphabet originated with Furhmann, who suggested that Calbee put player names in roman letters on the backs of the 1989 Calbee cards as a way of making the cards appeal not only to Japanese collectors but also to American ones.  His relationship with Calbee ultimately went sour, but the timing of the radical changes to the design of Calbee cards which occurred midway through the 1990 run, which seemed to presage many of the features of the 1991 BBM set that Fuhrmann had a big role in creating (larger cards, alphabetized names on front) seem likely to have been a result of his contact with Calbee (though the article does not explicitly state this).

Aside from this rather intriguing question, I find the abandonment of kanji on Japanese cards to be a bit of a lamentable development even when viewed from the standpoint of a foreign collector.  From a functional point of view, it is fair to say, having the names in alphabetical form makes them much more accessible and easy to read.  Kanji are hard to learn, especially those used in first names, which are often quite obscure.   From an aesthetic point of view, though, removing kanji from the fronts of Japanese baseball cards really robs them of their most appealing quality when seen through foreign eyes: their exotic nature. The kanji tell us something in addition to just the player`s name – they tell us that NPB isn’t just an independent minor league. Rather it is the Japanese league which is embedded within a completely different culture that uses a completely different form of writing to express itself.  Hey, isn’t that neat?  It kind of has the same appeal that the Dude’s T-shirt of Kaoru Betto in the Big Lebowski does:

That t-shirt would have been way less cool without those kanji.

Its not just the aesthetics though. Collecting cards where all the information is written in another language adds another challenge to collecting, which is kind of unique.  It forces the collector to actually learn something about the cards which they don`t have to with American cards - how to read basic stuff.  I have learned a lot of baseball related kanji, including a lot of player names, from having to read the info on their cards.  Having the basic stuff written in English feels like its adding a shortcut - dumbing down the challenge and enjoyment of collecting Japanese cards.It just sort of feels....wrong to me for some reason.

Post 1990 cards just don`t have the same kind of appeal that earlier ones do and I think a lot of that is attributable to this change.  They are incapable of impressing the way those 1970s Calbees did to me back in 2002.    They look just a bit blander and a bit too generic without those lovely kanji on them.

Nippon Ham Sausage Cards

I picked up a couple of new cards for the collection this week, Nippon Ham Sausage cards of Isao Shibata and Kenji Awaguchi. According to Rob Fitts these were released in 1975 with...well, sausages I guess.

I have been trying to find some cards from this set for the longest time, mainly because I love the design on them, it kind of reminds me of the 1963 Topps set only better.  The color border on the bottom with the team name looks pretty cool, as does the full bleed photos on the top. The backs are pretty mundane but about par for the course for a Japanese set from the 1970s.

One problem in collecting these is that they are extremely difficult to find, even in Japan.  There are only about half a dozen singles available on Yahoo Auctions at the moment (compared to thousands of BBM and Calbee cards).  I`m guessing they almost never turn up on Ebay. I lucked out on these two, one seller had an auction with about 10 of them and I put bids in on most.  I lost some of them by a wide margin but these two for some reason only attracted moderate interest and I was able to score them for only a few bucks each, which is surprising since they are both in really nice shape (exmt-nrmt or so).

 Nippon Ham is, of course, the owner of the Nippon Ham Fighters so this set was actually put out by a company which owns an NPB team, an interesting conflict of interest.  I haven`t seen a checklist so I`m not sure if there are more Fighters cards than those of other teams or if they went the Calbee route and drowned the selection in Giants players (the fact that my randomly acquired cards are both of Giants players suggests this might be the case).  Another interesting question arises from the fact that these cards were released just a couple of years after Nippon Ham purchased the Fighters (previously the Nittaku Flyers).  I wonder if there was some sort of connection there?  Seems logical, perhaps there were some baseball fans on Nippon Ham`s Board of Directors back in the 1970s.

Anyway, I love these cards and will be keeping my eyes peeled for more....

1991 Calbee Hideo Nomo and Some Others

 I made another Yahoo Auction purchase the other day.  It was a bit of a splurge item, a large lot of 55 1991 Calbee cards, along with an album.

I only had a couple of 1991 Calbees before getting these so I guess this can be added to my list of Calbee sets that I am working on.  The 91 set is pretty cool, its design is simple and looks the same as the higher number cards from the 1990 set.  Among the highlghts are this card of current Chunichi Dragons catcher/manager Motonobu Tanishige back in his younger days:

 Of course the main highlight of the 1991 set are the rookie cards of Hideo Nomo.  I think there are 4 cards of Nomo in the 1991 set and this lot contained three of them, which was pretty awesome (though one did have a dinged corner, the only card with any damage out of the whole lot!)

55 cards still leaves me pretty far from a complete set so this will be another work in progress probably for another 20 or 30 years!

2002 Calbee: Tough Set, Nearing Completeion

 I picked up a large lot of about 500 Calbee cards on Yahoo Auction last week.  It was a mixed lot and I didn`t know what cards would be in it until they arrived (the photos were pretty grainy and the seller`s description was pretty vague). I kind of like buying cards that way, it builds anticipation in me that is similar to opening a wax pack.  Sometimes you get screwed with a bunch of damaged cards, but sometimes it pays off.

This one actually did pay off.  There was a pretty wide selection of cards, including about a dozen from the 1975-76 Calbee set which were alone probably worth almost as much as I paid for the whole lot.  The thing that got me most excited though was that about 100 of them were 2002 Calbees. 

I think the 2002 Calbee set is probably the most difficult to find out of the post-1998 Calbee sets.  Word on the street has it that the reason for this is Japan`s co-hosting of the World Cup that year with Korea, which diverted everyone`s attention away from baseball.  This resulted in Calbee printing way fewer baseball cards (and presumably way more soccer cards) that year, making the 2002 Calbees harder to find than most.

This story generally squares with my own experience in buying these lots, which almost never include any 2002 Calbee cards (the 1999 and 2000 sets on the other hand are usually over-represented, making me think they were printed in greater quantities.  Those were Ichiro`s last 2 years in Japan, which makes me wonder if his popularity transferred into greater baseball chip sales in those years, followed by a steep decline after his departure in 2001).

As somebody actively trying to complete most Calbee sets, my 2002 set up until now had been way less developed than any other set of the past 16 years, with only a few dozen cards mostly from the regular set.  With the additions from this big lot, I now suddenly find myself about 75% of the way to a complete regular set and well on my way with most of the subsets too.

The design of these cards is slightly different from most Calbee sets in that it has a 30th anniversary logo on the front, but otherwise they are about the same.  I think this must have been Hideki Matsui`s last Calbee baseball card before singing with the Yankees.

 The lot even included an un-used Challenge card from that year.  The 2002 set had a pretty sucky prize system, you had to collect and mail in two of these, which didn`t actually guarantee you a prize, but just put you in a draw for one of 3000 card binders they were giving out.  I much prefer it when Calbee gives special card sets as prizes rather than these stupid binders that don`t even have enough space for the whole set and generally look terrible (at least the recent ones).

 To commemorate the 30th anniverary of their baseball cards they issued a special memorial card subset whcih featured reprints of various cards from previous years.  I now have almost all of this set.  I have to say it is really really poorly designed, with just horrible looking beige or grey borders and a very uninspiring `Memorial Card` band along the bottom.  Do they really need to tell us in such big letters that this is, in fact, a memorial card?  Also I think the use of the word "memorial" is a bit misplaced, it sounds like the set is dedicated to players who have died in the past year or something.  Anyway, they did something similar in the 2012 set when they commemorated the 40th anniversary with reprints of cards from previous sets, but the subset from that year was much better, dispensing with the borders and just making a straight-up reprint of the cards. 

Anyway, thats my 2002 Calbee set so far, I`m down to about 30 cards for the regular set which I need. 

Looking Back: 2000 BBM

 I moved to Japan for the first time in December of 1999 (15 years next month, how time flies).  That meant that my first encounter with Japanese baseball came in the 2000 season and, along with it, my first encounter with Japanese baseball cards in the form of the 2000 BBM regular set.

I spent that first year working as an English teacher in Akashi, a small city just outside of Kobe.  I knew absolutely nothing about Japanese baseball  - or Japan come to think of it - when I arrived.  But I was quickly schooled about two things: the Hanshin Tigers and Ichiro.

Ichiro was just enterering what would be his last year in NPB, playing for the Blue Wave at Green Stadium in Kobe.  Everyone in Akashi knew who he was, though it seemed nobody was an actual Blue Wave fan, everyone in Kansai cheering for the Tigers instead.  I got to take in a couple of Tigers games at Koshien that summer and one game at Green Stadium between the Blue Wave and Seibu Lions in what is likely to prove to be the only time in my life I will have seen Ichiro play in person (he went 1 for 4 in the game, I don`t remember who won though).

Having collected baseball cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s back home, I had a vaguely formed interest in Japanese baseball cards but knew nothing about them until one day I was wandering around near Sannomiya station in Kobe.  Back when the Blue Wave still existed they had a team-goods store in Sannomiya which I stumbled across by chance.  I wasn`t really interested in Blue Wave goods (like everyone else I had chosen to identify as a Tigers fan) but they did have a box of 2000 BBM packs for sale.  I picked one up for 200 yen and that was the beginning of my Japanese baseball card collection.  I vaguely remember having gotten a Bobby Rose league leader card and thinking that was pretty cool since he had a monster year in 1999, but other than that I don`t remember  the contents of that 10 card pack.


I provide this relatively lengthy piece of autobiographical reflection mainly just to establish that the 2000 BBM set has a special place in my heart since it was my first.  It was a fairly brief affair at the time as that one pack would turn out to be the only one I would buy that year.  Nonetheless, that set with its admittedly boring design holds a special place in my collection.  Which is why, last week, I splurged on Yahoo Auctions and bought a partial 2000 BBM set (480 cards, but some of them from the preview) in a nice binder with pages.

I normally don`t go for BBM sets, being a Calbee collector, but I made an exception in this case.  In retrospect its actually kind of annoying for me that I didn`t buy a bag of Calbee chips back in 2000 as my first baseball card purchase. At the time however it wouldn`t even have occurred to me to look for baseball cards in the chips section of my convenience store and the internet wasn`t exactly overflowing with useful information like that back then (and even if it had been, I didn`t own a computer). 

Anyway, the 2000 BBM set is pretty cool.  It has one of Ichiro`s last regular cards in it which is rather colorful:

And Leo Gomez, who I remembered from his days as a prospect for the Orioles in the early 1990s:

As a Canadian I was surprised to discover that year that former Toronto Blue Jay all star Tony Fernandez (who was my best friend`s favorite player back in high school) playing for Seibu in the same game that I saw Ichiro play in.  His 2000 BBM card is pretty boss:

And being BBM they  of course have to load the set up with a bunch of insert sets of varying levels of interest:

Included among which is the New Face set, where you can see which teams the Giants raided for their star players in a given year.  It is basically the same idea as a Traded or Update set, which makes me wonder why they thought it was worth turning into an insert set, but anyway....

In conclusion I now have a slightly over half-complete set of 2000 BBM which I have decided to add to my list of  "sets I am working on."  It is the only BBM set on that list, though I might add the 2002 set that I worked on but never finished back in the day.  The fruits of that endeavour are in a storage bin in my parent`s garage in Canada at the moment, I`ll have to retrieve them someday....

Collecting 1984 Calbee

 As I mentioned in my previous post, 1984 Calbee has recently officially entered my list of vintage sets that I am trying to complete.

This was spurred by a Yahoo Auction purchase I made last week of a lot of 59 cards from the set.  I added these to the 60 cards I already had (in a piece of incredible luck the new cards were almost all ones I needed), meaning that I now have over 100 different cards.

 This is the third vintage Calbee set that I am actively trying to complete, with the 1987 Calbee (about 3/4 complete now) and the 1990 Calbee low numbers (about 1/2 complete) being the others.

The big difference between the 1984 set and the 1987 and 1990 ones is the difficulty of putting them together.  The latter are among the more do-able of the pre-1998 rare Calbee sets to complete, while the 1984 set is among the hardest.  The sheer size of the set - 715 cards - is daunting (the 1987 set has about half that and the 1990 low number series only 55).  Among these are a number of series which were only released regionally in limited quantities (detailed here) which account for about one quarter of the total and are incredibly expensive.  I don`t have any of those and might content myself with tracking down the easier to find ones first and, if I become independently wealthy in the future, might work on the rare block ones then.

There are some pretty cool cards in the set, which has a distinctive look to it.  I love this Reggie Smith with his hair overflowing from under that batting helmet.

 The final cards in the set are season highlights.  This one commemorates Koji Yamamoto`s 2,000th career hit.

I`ll be curious to see how far I get with this.  Where as the 1987 and 1990 sets I think I have realistic shots at completing within the next couple of years, the 1984 one might be more of a pipe dream.  Still though, I like this set quite a bit and hope I at least make the halfway mark or so.

Timely Purchase: a Couple of 1984 Calbee Randy Bass cards

With Hanshin having trounced the Giants 4 straight (yes!) and about to play in their first Japan Series in over a decade (interestingly also played against the Hawks), there has been a lot of talk about 1985, the last time they actually won it all.

I picked up a couple of cards of Randy Bass, the key player on that 1985 Tigers team, off of Yahoo Auctions that arrived today.  They are both from the 1984 Calbee set, which I am starting to make a more serious effort at putting together (more on that in another post). I kind of like these cards.  The one on the left, from the "big hat" part of the set, has a pensive looking Bass staring at the ground.  The one on the right, from the "little hat" part of the set, is kind of an awkward photo with his face mostly lost in shadow, but I love the pinstripes of the hat that the 84 Tigers wore.

I have a soft spot for the Tigers and Randy Bass is one of my all time favorite NPB players, so I am very tormented about who to root for in this series.  I have spent 4 years of my life living in Fukuoka as a Hawks fan and 5 years of my life living in Hyogo prefecture as a Tigers fan (plus 2 years living in Nagoya, my current city, as a Dragons fan).  It is very troubling because both teams have things that strongly attract me to them.  I only left Fukuoka in 2012 so this year's team still has a lot of the players I used to root for when living there - Matsuda, Uchikawa, Morifuku, Settsu, Honda and company.  On the other hand, I kind of fell in love with this Tigers team.  Going into that series everyone was saying the Giants would just walk over them easily, and seeing the Tigers turn the tables and make Kyojin look awful.....it was immensely impressive. 

I will have to think long and hard about this before game time......