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.
In a lot of ways it's better that menkos and old bromides aren't considered worthwhile enough for card shops to carry them, because if that happens it means there's suddenly a demand for them and they get priced for far more than they should (ie like pretty much every T206 common or no-name in the Goudey sets).
ReplyDeleteAnd while I'm sure there are card collectors in Japan who collect old menkos and modern stuff, I'd assume it's a mere fraction of the general people interested in either category on their own. There's just isn't any overlap unlike how in the states where everything falls under the same umbrella of being cards no matter how old or new it is. For the most part the mindset is more that menkos are supposed to be old toys of people you've never heard of that isn't worth anything, while actual baseball cards are supposedly worth tens of thousands of yen and exist to be flipped on Mercari.
I agree, I'm happy with demand for older cards remaining moderately low so that they remain affordable. Actually the one thing I've hated more than anything about collecting for the past couple of years has been seeing the price of vintage cards (particularly anything with Sadaharu Oh on it) go through the roof. Pretty sure 90% of that is being driven by overseas buyers rather than domestic ones though.
DeleteIts a good point about that lack of overlap. Its sort of like "baseball cards" are something that were only made in Japan after BBM started making them in 1991, and all the other things before that, even when they are obviously baseball cards, are "something else". I'm OK with that, to each their own, but as someone who grew up in North America where like you say cards are cards no matter how old they are, its always struck me as an interesting distinction.
Personally I think the arbitrary line for when "baseball cards" (that fits the context of what it means for westerners) started existing in Japan is roughly around the time cards of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima start existing. Those two WERE baseball for an entire generation of Japanese people and elevated the popularity of the game to a whole different level compared what came before them, and in many ways hasn't been replicated in the years since everyone good going to Kyojin shifted to everyone good going to the majors.
DeleteYeah, but I don't think we need the line to be arbitrary, or focused on what westerners think. The problem with setting it at the Oh/Nagashima line (1958/1959) is that there isn't really anything different about the cards themselves before or after that time - 1957 menko aren't much different from 1958 ones (Nagashima's rookie season) or 1959 ones (Oh's rookie season).
DeleteFor me, so long as something meets the basic definition of a baseball card (which is a bit fluid, but basically is something recognizable as a "card" with a picture of an identifiable baseball player on it), its a baseball card, regardless of when it was made.
>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?
ReplyDeleteWell, it depends on what I'm looking for. If I'm going in with a want list of specific cards, give me the organized store that allows me to find what I'm looking for relatively quickly without having to search through a lot of other stuff. On the other hand, if I'm just browsing around, looking to be surprised, then a store like this is great. In most of my card shop visits, I've been doing the former, so I've preferred stores like Quad Sports, Wrappers and the Mint chain.
Not that I wouldn't enjoy a place like this - I'd just have to make sure I had enough time to explore it. The last card shop I stopped in on my last trip to Japan was G-Freak, a disorganized mess of a store in Okachimachi, Tokyo. I had a blast looking through boxes of cards that were just organized by team but since I got there in early evening on a Sunday, I didn't really have as much time as I would have liked to dig into stuff.
Cool seeing Kabaya-Leaf cards in a store in Japan.
Oh yeah, my point wasn't that being organized is bad, but rather more that presentation is also important. As a collector I like a card shop to look enticing - like I'm going to find stuff I wasn't expecting in there. All these mall type shops fail miserably at that - they mostly look the same (like a dentist office waiting room) and you more or less know what they have (packs of this year's stuff, recent BBM singles, etc) before you even walk in because all of them have the same stuff (though of course there are some exceptions).
DeleteFor some businesses that uniformity is great - like if I go to an office supply store I want to know in advance that they sell printer paper and that its going to be in an easy to find location on a shelf and I don't really care if its kind of a boring looking place. But I view card shops differently - I want to find stuff I wasn't expecting, am going to be pleasantly suprised by, and will have fun finding them. I just don't get that experience at many card stores here, but I've had it quite a few times at old toy stores.
I don't know why Calbees wouldn't be treated as baseball cards, but menkos really are literally toys. The American equivalent would be something like pogs, which did, sometimes, feature baseball players, and which, as far as I know, baseball card collectors have zero interest in.
ReplyDeleteI see your point, but I think there are some problem with using pogs as an analogy.
Delete1) Chronology problem: while pogs of one sort or another have existed for a long time, they only became a big thing in the 1990s, long after the baseball card hobby was established. Interest in them clearly formed outside of the baseball card hobby, so its not surprising that card collectors viewed them differently.
Menko in contrast had their heyday long before baseball cards existed in Japan, and for a long and important period in Japanese baseball history - from the 1930s to the 1960s - they were the main thing resembling baseball cards that existed.
This means its pretty easy for American card collectors to ignore pogs - its not like there aren't a million different baseball card sets that were released in the 1990s for them to collect. But if you want a collectible, cardboard baseball item from the 50s or 60s in Japan, menko are at the top of a very small menu.
This makes it harder for me to understand the lack of interest in menko by Japanese card collectors - its like they are foregoing any interest in collecting things from the golden era of Japanese baseball.
2) Menko are toys, yes, but then again so are baseball cards - something meant to be flipped, traded, stuck in bicycle spokes, etc.
3) Menko come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but many of them are physically quite similar to baseball cards. Most menko are about the same size and appearance as tobacco cards and thus easily recognizable as "baseball cards" to most collectors. Pogs in contrast are circular (not a shape baseball cards usually come in), much smaller in size and sometimes not even made of cardboard. This physical difference probably makes them much harder for baseball card collectors to accept than menko.
Wow, that store looks amazing! Admittedly, the toys would be of more interest to me than anything else, but those piles of non-sport cards would definitely have to be gone through too.
ReplyDeleteIf I ever make it across the Pacific... I'll be looking to check out some cool toy stores as much as the card shops.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great store! I spent a lot of time going through their 'online' store and wish that they would ship to the states...I could fill major gaps in my 1980's sets at a very economical price.
ReplyDeleteI do like browsing his online store, they have a lot of stuff and I might place an order at some point.
DeleteIf you need 1980s Calbees I have quite a few doubles from some years (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1988). Not many short prints, but if you have a want list I might be able to help out.