I am currently trying to put together the 1978 Yamakatsu set (along with the 1979 and 1980 ones). Jay, a member on Net54 who I have a trading relationship with (I send him Japanese cards, he sends me American ones, mostly Expos), kind of got me started on them a couple of years ago when he was putting his set together and asked me to find some. Looking for cards for him got me into them as well and now I sit here exactly one card short of finishing the set.
If you ever work on that set, the last card you will need to get is of Isao Shibata. That was the last card Jay needed too and it took him forever to find one. Now its my white whale, I guess it was short printed as they are quite hard to come by.
The thing I want to talk about in this post though is an odd detail I've noticed as I collect both Yamakatsu and Calbee cards from the late 70s. When buying Calbee cards from that era the vast majority of the ones you find are in low to mid grade condition. They are almost all "well loved", with rounded corners, creases and sometimes even kid's names written on them. I'm not a condition sensitive collector so this doesn't bother me much, all my pre-1990s Calbee sets probably average between vg and ex on the condition scale. If you were the PSA registered set builder type though you'd probably go mad trying to put together a vintage Calbee set - even the ones with sharp corners usually have some discoloration on the back (the result of existing in an extremely humid country!) The surviving cards are probably similar in condition to the population of surviving American cards of the 1950s.
Yamakatsu cards on the other hand are the exact opposite. Almost all of my Yamakatsu cards are in the ex-mt to near mint or even mint range. This isn't because I've been picky about buying them, its just because almost all of the Yamakatsu cards I've come across are still in pretty pristine condition compared to the Calbee cards I've found. Without risk of exaggeration I think I could describe my 1978 Yamakatsu set (minus 1 card) as being in near mint condition, with nothing below exmt.
I find this to be kind of mystery. My Yamakatsu and Calbee cards come from the same era and depict the same subject matter, yet they were obviously not collected by the same people back in the day. Calbee cards got a lot of love back then from kids, while Yamakatsu cards seem to have been treated much like adult collectors treat their cards today - in a way that preserves their condition. Which itself is odd since the modern hobby didn't exist in Japan (and barely existed in the US) back then.
With Calbee cards, it isn't until the late 1990s that you notice an uptic in the number of cards that have been treated with care, and even with more recent cards from the 2000s its not unusual to buy a lot and find that half of them have obviously spent some time in someone's pocket getting their corners rounded. But even in the 1970s Yamakatsu collectors weren't doing that.
I haven't come up with a convincing theory as to why that is. Yamakatsu cards were definitely marketed towards kids and not to adult collectors back in the day. The main difference between them is simply that Calbee cards came with bags of chips while Yamakatsu cards were sold as a stand alone product not attached to anything else. But that doesn't get us very far in explaining why they have survived so well in comparison to their Calbee contemporaries. Another thing is that some of the Yamakatsu cards on the market today are probably the remains of "dead stock" packs that nobody bought back in the day and thus they survived well. Some Calbee card packs also survived that way but probably in much smaller proportions than Yamakatsu ones. That is probably a partial explanation for why there are a lot of minty Yamakatsu cards around, but it doesn't tell us why there are almost no low grade ones, surely somebody bought some of these cards and played around with them back in the day? So where are those cards?
Anybody have any clues as to what is going on here?
Good question, but you're right. The only PSA 10 card that I own is a 1979 Yamakatsu.
ReplyDeleteHere's one theory: most of the people who originally owned the Calbee cards didn't care about the cards. They wanted chips. The kids who bought Yamakatsu cards, however, were guaranteed to like baseball cards. So even if they're kids, they're going to be more careful with them than the people who originally owned the Calbees who probably mostly regarded them as junk, or, at best, as potential bookmarks. I suspect that a whole bunch of Calbee cards simply got thrown away.
That probably explains some of it too - if they were just a thing attached to a bag of chips for free, a lot of people wouldn't see them as having value and would discard them or treat them as junk.
DeleteBut that doesn't quite get us to answering why so many Yamakatsu are in great shape - kids in the US bought cards back then and played around with them. I've never seen Yamakatsu cards that look like they've been played with at all.
I've got the Shibata - I need the Tabuchi. And I've been looking for it for a while now.
ReplyDeleteI think the truth probably involves both your thought about a lot of the Yamakatsu available being recently opened vintage packs (I've seen much more unopened Yamakatsu material than Calbee from that period) and nat's thought that many buyers of Calbee were buying them for the chips and not the cards but no one bought Yamakatsu cards except for the people who wanted to collect them.
I've got the Tabuchi, that was a good score with getting the Shibata, I've never seen a copy of it!
DeleteMy usual rule of thumb for vintage stuff is that the better the condition is, the more likely it is that the original owner was largely apathetic towards them. Perhaps Calbees were more "loved" or something people gravitated towards more because they were more easily accessible by the virtue of being sold with food? Iono, just flinging sh!t at the wall and seeing what sticks here.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it does seem like kids were a bit more apathetic towards the Yamakatsu cards. I do wonder what kind of shops sold them back in the day, it might have been harder for kids to find them than Calbees which (today and probably back then too) are available in most supermarkets.
DeleteMy guess is that there is a ton of deadstock of Yamakatsu cards out there. Plus, they came with Albums, or at least it was easier to obtain albums for the cards through kuji. While Calbee were issued with snacks and had less of a chance to make their way into an album and less chance of protection. Interesting observation though.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about the albums. I've seen a lot of Calbee albums from the 70s floating around out there (more than I have for Yamakatsu, though I've seen a fair number of them too) so they were probably pretty easy to obtain back then.
Delete