Mr. Tigers

 

After a fairly lengthy drought I was finally able to pick up some cool vintage menko the other day, from the same seller in Hiroshima who was selling 1970s Carp children's shampoo.  

One lot that I couldn't resist, and which fell within my price range, was a three card lot of menko of hall of famer Fumio Fujimura.  

Fujimura is an interesting figure in Japanese baseball history.  He played his entire career for the Hanshin Tigers from 1936 until 1958.  That meant that his playing career encompassed both the very first season of professional baseball in Japan, and also the rookie season of Shigeo Nagashima.  

He was a kind of Shohei Ohtani type talent in that he was both a dominant pitcher and a dominant hitter (something that was more common in the early years of Japanese baseball).  On the mound he posted a 34-11 record with a 2.43 career ERA, most of which occurred in the first half of his career.  

His batting was where he made his biggest mark though.  In 1950 he led the league with a .362 batting average and collected 191 hits to set the Japanese version of George Sisler's single season record.  It was Fujimura's record that Ichiro broke when he had his 210 hit season for the Blue Wave a few years before he broke Sisler's record with the Mariners.

Like many Japanese players of his generation a very large chunk of Fujimura's prime years were stolen by the war.  He entered military service in 1939 and spent most of the war in southeast Asia.  He was present at the fall of Singapore and, if his account is true, was the first Japanese soldier to spot the British raising the white flag.  Other wartime exploits of his include falling off a cliff in a jungle and suffering an injury so bad they almost amputated his leg, and having to spend a day swimming through shark infested waters after surviving the sinking of a transport ship that had been torpedoed.  

Towards the end of his career he served as player-manager for the Tigers.  Though the team played well under him he seems to have had a "difficult" relationship with his players. In 1956 a group of them, led by Juzo Sanada and Masayasu Kaneda, demanded that Fujimura be replaced as manager.  The team sided with Fujimura, who kept his job, and the incident seems to have ended Sanada and Kaneda's playing careers.

The Fujimura cards I have are pretty cool ones.  I particularly like the two round ones which have very striking and colorful artwork on them.  I'm having trouble identifying them as they both seem to be from uncatalogued sets.  The one pictured at the top of this post has a kind of "bullseye" background on it and there are two similar sets listed in Engel (JRM 47 and JRM 52, from 1948 and 1949 respectively).  The coloring and design on those are slightly different though, I haven't seen any with a red and yellow bullseye before.  The other circular one has a quite striking look to it, but it is unlike any round menko listed in Engel's guide.

The rectangular one in contrast is easier to identify, its from JCM 92, issued in 1948.  The artwork is a bit cruder than on the other two but I like it!