2023 Calbee Found

 
In typical fashion, as soon as I complain aloud about not being able to find something, I immediately find it.

After writing yesterday's post about not being able to find any 2023 Calbee, I decided to take another hunting expedition to try to find them while on my way home from work.  

Things didn't get off to a good start - I hit three separate convenience stores (Family Mart, Lawson, 7-11) and came up empty at each.  I was about to give up when I decided to try one last place that I viewed as a long shot.  In Ozone station near the Nagoya Dome, which I was passing through anyway, there is a little place called Bellmart Kiosk which sells snacks and is basically a convenience store.  Not being one of the major chains though I didn't think they would have any, but I would be walking right past it so I decided to duck in and take a look. 

To my surprise, they had them!  They were 116 Yen per bag, which is more than they usually cost. I'm not sure if this is due to inflation, or just due to how they price stuff at Bellmart Kiosk.  Anyway, I gladly bought three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids).

I got home just as the Dragons game was starting on TV so I sat down to watch the game with the kids and we each opened a bag. This was what we got:

The Oshima Star Card was a great find, and we actually saw him get a hit just a few minutes after pulling it which was a nice touch (even better was watching the Dragons beating the Swallows 3-1, breaking a four game losing streak).  

Being able to buy Calbee chips in stores like this has become a very important ritual of my life in Japan (which started off as just a one year stint as an English teacher looking for an overseas adventure in a new country and somehow evolved into me having spent more than two decades of my life here).  There are three things that mark the start of spring in Japan for me: 

1) Cherry blossoms coming into bloom;

2) NPB regular season starting;

3) Buying bags of Calbee baseball chips

Not being able to check off that third one had been bugging me for a while, it was almost like without being able to do that  winter would not be over in my mind.  Now that it is, I feel much better.

Anyway, this year's set is pretty much the same as every Calbee set for decades.  Same design, same predictable photography, etc, so I won't repeat my criticisms about those elements.  The one new thing, which Dave noted a few weeks ago, is that unfortunately the set this year is smaller than usual - just 60 regular cards rather than 72 as has been the norm in recent years.  That means that they feature just five players per team on regular cards.  Assuming they keep this up for Series 2 and 3, they'll end up with only 15 players per team on cards, way fewer than the full roster.  So likely my kids and I are not going to be able to get cards of a lot of Dragons players who we like, which is a bit of a bummer.

Hopefully now that I've confirmed that they are in fact starting to appear in some stores they will soon start appearing in others. In fact that is going to be a pre-requisite to us collecting the set via bags of chips again this year - that Bellmart Kiosk is a bit too out of the way for me to regularly stop there for chips so I'll need one of my local supermarkets to get their act together ASAP!