I've picked up a few more Isao Harimoto menko cards recently. I'm a big Harimoto fan, for reasons I outlined
in this post here so I won't repeat them. Suffice it to say that he's one of Japan's greatest players of all time, holder of NPB's career hits record, and he has an incredible personal story.
His career coincided almost exactly with that of Sadaharu Oh (they both debuted in 1959 and Harimoto played his last game in 1981, just a year after Oh). This means that most of the menko sets that have Oh cards also have Harimoto in them, as did all of the Calbee sets of the 1970s (though there are more Oh cards in those).
Since his cards are way cheaper than Oh's, I'm still able to collect them which is cool, though they don't show up in auctions too often. These ones I bought in a lot for about 5,000 Yen (like 35$). The same seller had a lot of Sadaharu Oh menko that
sold for 345,000 Yen (about 2500$) on the same day, so you can see why I've shifted away from collecting his early cards!
あっぱれ
ReplyDeleteありがとう。
DeleteIf it makes you feel any better, those aren't just any Oh cards. The two on the bottom right are from a neat R5 set. For each player it contains a sequence of cards of the player doing something. Looks like Oh is taking a swing, so each card would be a different stage in his swing. There are several Murayama cards from this set on eBay right now with asking prices of around $180. Somebody had some Nagashima cards from this set for sale asking $2k; they don't appear on the sold listings though, so I assume no one was willing to go that high.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm a bit proud of myself. It's been a _long_ time since I studied Japanese, but I can still read what you wrote to Zippy. (I don't know his word though.)
Yeah, those Oh cards in that lot are quite rare. The same seller had a couple other Oh lots with more common Oh's which sold in the 100,000 or so range, but I hadn't added them to my watchlist on YJA so I couldn't link to them in the post!
DeleteZippy's comment is a slang compliment so wouldn't be something that you'd find in a dictionary or be likely to have learned in Japanese class!
Seems like if you've got to pivot to another player, then this ain't a bad player to pivot to.
ReplyDeleteThere is always a backup!
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