I just picked up a couple of sheets of very colorful menko!
The above are two sheets of 8 cards each from the 1958 Mitsuwa set (JCM 129) which, as you can see, have a pretty distinctive look to them.
I like these a lot. The set has 16 cards and I thought I would get the whole set when I first saw the two sheets for sale, but actually there are three cards which are duplicated on both sheets. Strangely the duplicate cards appear at completely different positions with completely different neighboring cards on each sheet so I'm not sure how they organized the printing of these, but its an interesting observation.
The card backs have both a playing card and a military themed image on them. According to Engel the ink used to print the backs varied and as you can see, my two sheets use different shades of brown.
The key cards in the set are two featuring Giants slugger Shigeo Nagashima and Tigers hall of famer Yoshio Yoshida. A lot of the cards in the set feature odd pairings of players from different teams like this. Being issued in 1958 these cards would count among Nagashima's rookie cards (though I'm not sure what Yoshida being on them might do to that status). Luckily for me one of them is among the three cards that were duplicated across both sheets, so I have doubles of a Shigeo Nagashima rookie card now!
400 game winner Masaichi Kaneda also appears on a couple of cards. One of them is his alone, the other he shares with Dragons pitcher Tsutomu Ina.
Awesome, those are vivid fronts for sure. Love the look on them. There is an equivalent sumo set as well, M583- 1958 Mitsuwa Trump 20. The M583 sets comes in both a blue and brown ink version. Would be interesting to see the baseball set with blue backs.
ReplyDeleteI thought I remembered seeing some sumo ones that looked like these! I think they also came in green ink backs.
DeleteCool, would love to see the green backs!
DeleteIIRC Engel says that this set pairs fronts and backs randomly, but my Aramaki also has the ace of spades on it. (Or course I might not RC.) Maybe there's a limited range of front/back combos?
ReplyDeleteThere very well could be, and it would make sense that way. I guess nobody has ever collected enough of these to know yet!
DeleteIt think it probably isn’t more than 2 backs for each although they are rare so hard to tell for certain.
DeleteIt'll be fun trying to find out anyway!
DeleteThings like this are why I sometimes wish that I would've learned about Menko when I was younger, because if I had, there's a good chance that I would've started collecting them. And I don't think that I have the capacity to learn everything that I would need to know now, so I've got to live vicariously through yourself, and the couple of other bloggers who post about them on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteWith the guide its not too hard to keep track but yeah, I completely understand what you are saying. I'm 43 years old now and there are a lot of hobbies out there where I think "If I was 20 years younger I'd be all over that, but now......."
DeleteLove the vibrant colors! These are gorgeous!
ReplyDeleteYup, the colors make the cards!
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