Sometimes old cards need to breathe, they need to be naked. Not just for their own sake, but for the benefit of those of us looking at them.
The card is based on Oh's menko in the JCM 165 set from 1975, which I posted about a little while ago and was the inspiration for this card. Gregory was kind enough to send one to me solely based on having seen the original card in my post, which was very nice of him.
The original card is quite distinctive with that halo like sun (or whatever it is) behind Oh's head:
If you like old baseball cards and you've ever visited one of the main card shops in Japan you've probably asked yourself "where the vintage stuff at?"
The three big stores here in Nagoya don't stock vintage (except a tiny handful of 1970s Calbees at Mint Ponyland and 80s Calbees at Bits). And looking around at write ups of card shops in other cities by Dave and Ryan it seems this is pretty common at card shops elsewhere too (with the occasional exception).
Its always seemed to me that most card shops here view things like menko, bromides and even early Calbee sets as something that simply doesn't belong in their stores. Like its a completely different kind of product and you might as well be asking if they stock watermelons or something if you ask if they have anything from before the 90s.
This doesn't however mean that there aren't stores that specialize in vintage baseball cards. It just oddly means that those stores aren't baseball card stores. Rather they are vintage toy stores, which in my opinion are a million times more fun.
In recent months I've become an active online follower of one such store, Kinkizu (キンキーズ）which is in Osaka. Sadly I've never been to the actual store before (its not easy to get to from where I live), but I really do want to make the pilgrimage out there some day. It doesn't seem to feature at all on the radars of foreign collectors who are more accustomed to the likes of Mint (and others), which is a situation I hope to remedy with this post. If you are into vintage Japanese cards, forget about the big baseball card stores in major cities, they won't have what you are looking for. Instead, look for shops like Kinkizu.
Kinkizu advertises itself as a store specializing in cards and toys from the Showa era (which lasted from 1926 to 1989, though for practical purposes it really just covers post-war stuff up until and including the 1980s). Its got a huge selection of vintage vinyl, comic books and toys from that era. But for our purposes its most interesting feature is their massive stock of vintage baseball cards.
This here is a good video tour of the store on Youtube which is worth a watch.
These screen grabs I think do a good job of demonstrating why I'm so intrigued by this store. They've got showcase after showcase full of vintage Kabaya Leaf and Calbee cards nestled together with Sofbi toys from the 60s and 70s, which is just absolutely the best way to display those cards.
They've got a blog here which details their new arrivals each month, which I like to follow because its cool to see the new piles of vintage Calbee cards they keep getting in.
As you can see from the video, and pictures like this one below, they don't just stock baseball cards but also a wide range of other vintage, non-sport cards. The thing they have in common is that they all come from the Showa era, and they are all awesome.
You can kind of detect a cultural difference at work in the Japanese hobby which doesn't have a parallel in the American one - vintage cards are part of a broader "vintage toy" category of collectible, while modern cards are in a category of their own. Shops that specialize in one are completely different from shops that specialize in the other.
I'm using Kinkizu as an example in this post because I think its the best such shop I've found so far, though its by no means alone. Mandarake, a nationwide chain of stores that started off 40 years ago as a used comic seller which expanded to sell all kinds of vintage toys also sells vintage baseball cards. In fact here in Nagoya its the only store I know of that has a decent selection of vintage 1970s Calbee cards available. I've never been card shopping up in Tokyo but I wouldn't be surprised if there were shops like that (in addition to their Mandarake locations) which also had that vintage toy/ old baseball card mix of stuff for sale.
Just to further illustrate my point, its not just about what they stock, but what the shops are like. Here are two photos, one of the interior of Kinkizu, the other the interior of Mint's Shinjuku store which I am stealing from Dave's blog.
Which of the above two places looks more fun to explore? The one where everything is kept in uniform rows of plastic shelving that looks more sterile than a dentist's office, or the one where you've got massive piles of awesome looking vintage cards and albums chaotically scattered about the room under a ceiling made of giant, inflatable red monsters?
I could see myself breezing into and out of that Mint location in about 30 seconds and never going back. I could also see myself spending a whole afternoon in that Kinkizu shop just trying to take everything in. I wish there were more shops like that around.
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.
Sort of.
What I have completed is Series 1 to 3 - a total of 216 cards. Unfortunately Calbee didn't stop with those and tacked on a 20 card set of Giants cards (217 to 236) to the end of it. Those last 20 cards were short printed (probably only regionally released but I'm not sure about that) and are extremely rare compared to the rest of the set. I only have one of them so am technically still 19 cards short of the complete set.
The idea of spending a ton of money on late 90s cards of Giants players is not particularly enticing to me, which is why I've decided to declare this set "done" without those last cards (though if I ever stumble on any at a good price I'll be quite tempted to buy them, they only show up for sale every once in a while).
I started seriously building this set about 3 years ago when I bought a big lot of them on YJA. Compared to Calbee sets from the 70s or 80s this one was a lot easier and a lot cheaper to complete. I was aided in finishing it off by a seller who had a huge stockpile of late 90s Calbees putting a whole bunch up for sale last week. The key cards in the set are three Ichiro cards (one for each series) and I was fortunate to get all of them in the big lot I started out with. No single card cost me more than 50 Yen, and I think the whole project only set me back about 6,000 to 7,000 Yen total, which is not bad.
One thing I'm debating now is what to do with them. They are just sitting loose in a box along with most of my other Calbee sets. I'd like to put most of them into albums some day, but right now its only a select few (1975-76-77, 1986 and 1987) that get that privilege, mainly because my budget for albums and pages is limited. Over time I'd like to get all the vintage ones into albums (which is tricky for the 1980s sets due to a shortage of 12 pocket pages), but I'm not sure where to draw the line between "sets that are good enough to be in albums" and "sets that stay in boxes". The late 90s seems to be roughly where I'll be drawing that line, but I'm not sure which side the 1997 set will fall on.
There was an interesting lot that sold on Yahoo Auctions yesterday. It was a fourteen card lot of bromides that featured a mix of Japanese players and players from the New York Yankees from the 1950s. The Yankees cards included some very big names - Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Hank Bauer all had individual cards.
I've never seen these cards, which are blank-backed, before. Engel's guide lists some bromides featuring Yankees players from the 50s (like JBR 134), but I don't think these are from that. I'm not super knowledgeable about 1950s bromides though, perhaps somebody else might recognize these? If not, I wonder if they might be "new" discoveries.
Sadly but predictably I was never an actual contender to win this lot and was watching it mainly just out of curiosity. It sold for a little over 1.3 million Yen (about 10,000$ US at current exchange rates). Not being in that class of collector myself I have no idea if that was a good deal or not, but whoever won it got a pretty nice set of cards.
This is not for a lack of effort on my part. Almost every day for the past couple of weeks I've been stopping on the way back home from work at every convenience store or supermarket I can find (and there are a lot of them) and every time I've come up empty.
This is very unusual. I've been buying Calbee baseball chips for years now (first bag purchased was in 2000, though 2004 was the first year I bought them in large numbers to try to complete the set) and this has never happened before. Usually within a few days of the release in late March bags of Series 1 Calbee baseball chips are to be found at pretty much every major supermarket chain in town (convenience stores are more hit and miss).
I was wondering if this was just a Nagoya thing, but on looking it up online, Japanese collectors nationwide have noticed this too and are complaining about it on social media (like here and here). In fact they've done more than complain about it, they've asked their local supermarkets, and some even asked Calbee directly, about what is going on. And the answer they received may surprise you.
The culprit? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.
Ah that gag never gets old (laughs to self).
Seriously though, they indicate that the shortage is the result of the World Baseball Classic. It seems that the demand for baseball cards has shot through the roof and Calbee hasn't been able to produce enough to meet it, which explains why they aren't on sale almost anywhere.
This kind of makes sense, but it also pisses me off. The increase in demand doesn't mean that Calbee is producing fewer cards than normal. Nor does it mean that they are so popular that they are flying off store shelves: rather they aren't even reaching store shelves in the first place.
We can infer from the fact that the only place that has a ready supply of them available is Amazon that what it really means is that Calbee has given most of its production to that outlet and left retail stores in the lurch.
This sucks for a few reasons.
First, Amazon only sells them in cases. Who in their right mind wants to buy bags of plain chips by the caseload? Unless you are a flipper, probably not you.
Second, Amazon prices are a rip off. A case of 24 bags costs 5900 Yen, which works out to 245 yen per bag. That is more than double what they sell for at convenience stores (the ones I bought last week cost me 116 Yen per bag).
Third, kids don't buy expensive stuff in bulk off of Amazon. They can on the other hand buy cheap bags of chips at local supermarkets or stores. This is one of the things I've always liked about Calbee: they make the hobby accessible to kids. Limiting sales to Amazon on the other hand means only selling to grown ups. Hard core grown ups at that: casual collectors who might buy a few bags here and there on their way home from work (like me) sure as hell aren't going to buy massive cases of overpriced chips they can't eat.
And just to reinforce my annoyance with Twitter, in order to find posts by actual Japanese collectors talking about this year's Calbee cards to try to find out what was going on I had to wade through a massive shitstorm of Amazon shill ads (like this one) mocking convenience stores for not having Calbee baseball chips in stock while encouraging us to go to Amazon to buy them. In fact, going through the Twitter storm its notable that Calbee itself isn't doing most of the advertising for Calbee baseball chips anymore, Amazon is. Fuck all of us who don't want to buy Calbee cards by the caseload at double the normal price is the message to us collectors I guess?
Its not clear if this situation is going to be resolved or if this is a permanent thing, - according to Calbee's own website the product is no longer on sale ("休売中") - meaning that this might be the first spring in many years that I've been unable to easily buy Calbee Series 1 baseball chips. This is really frustrating. A few years ago I wouldn't have minded too much since I was getting into the habit of buying the complete sets off of Yahoo Auctions flippers anyway. But last year I really enjoyed being able to collect the sets bag by bag with my kids and I spent all winter quite looking forward to being able to do so again this year. Hopefully by the time Series 2 is released this stupidity will be resolved, though our enthusiasm will likely have waned by then (if the Dragons' performance so far is any indication of how that will develop) and this might be the sort of thing that completely kills my kids' already somewhat frail interest in collecting baseball cards. Well done on that accomplishment, Calbee and Amazon.
