1953 Kobai Caramel Wally Yonamine

 This is another one of my Wally Yonamine cards.  Its from the 1953 Kobai Caramel "Red Square Corners" set (JF 18).  The cards from this set are very similar to the JF 11 set also issued by Kobai Caramel which I wrote about here.

My Yonamine card has probably seen better days.  These things are small and fragile and its amazing any of them survived the years though, so I can't complain!

There are 27 known cards in the set, Yonamine is one of the "key" cards along with Dick Kishiwada, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Jun Hirota. Everyone played for the Giants, which is a problem with the Kobai Caramel cards in particular - they never put players from other teams in their sets (though other makers like Kawakami Caramel did).

So its not a set I'll ever try to collect but I do like having this in my Yonamine player collection!

Stamps on Baseball Cards

Here is something you don't see every day: a baseball card with a big red stamp with some archaic Chinese characters on it obscuring the player's image.

This is a card of Tetsuharu Kawakami, Japan's "God of Hitting" and first member of the 2,000 hit club.  It is from one of the 1953 Kobai Caramel sets (catalogued as JF 11, noted for the L shaped border) which is pretty rare (R3).

Kobai was the biggest maker of caramel cards in the 1950s, putting out dozens of sets.  Like my Kawakami caramel card, Kobai ones were small and printed on paper.

According to the back, they were meant to be collected and then sent in to the company to be redeemed for a set of bromides signed by the players.

Not all of the cards had the big red stamp (which I think is the company's official seal), so there are versions of this Kawakami card out there which don't have it.  I think the idea was that you would collect the cards with the stamps on them and send those in to be redeemed.  You had to collect ten of them which consisted of at least the manager (Shigeru Mizuhara), a pitcher a catcher, an infielder and an outfielder and then send those in.

Engel has identified only four cards from this set (Kawakemi, Takehiko Bessho, Shigeru Chiba and Wally Yonamine) but likely there were quite a few more out there back in the day, including Mizuhara who is mentioned on the back but does not appear in Engel.  Their fragility and the fact that they were meant to be redeemed probably contributed to there being so few left in existence.

I kind of like having the seal on this one, it gives the card such a unique and archaic look.  No mistaking this for a modern card, or an American one!

1952 Kawakami Caramel Yoshiyuki Iwamoto

 In addition to Menko I've been getting interested in some of the caramel baseball cards that were released in Japan, mostly in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  This is a card of Hall of Famer Yoshiyuki Iwamoto from the 1952 Kawakami Caramel set (JF 38 in Engel).

Iwamoto was one of the Japanese game's earliest power hitting stars, though like most of his generation the war robbed him of several years during his prime - after he left for the war following the 1942 season he didn't return until 1949, a 7 year gap.  On his return though he did accomplish two things for the record books. When baseball was reorganized into the modern NPB for the 1950 season, on opening day he hit the first home run (a grand slam) in Central League history.  He also became the first player to hit four home runs in a single game that season.

These caramel cards are super rare, this set is rated as R4 in Engel (fewer than 10 copies of each card known to exist) and most of the dozens of sets issued by caramel makers during that time period are about the same.  Another copy of this Iwamoto card sold at Prestige Collectibles in 2011.  When you have the cards in hand its not hard to understand why there are so few of them.  They are small (a bit smaller than 1950 Bowmans for comparison) and printed on extremely thin cardboard (it would be more accurate to describe it as thick paper really).

Another reason they are so scarce can be seen on the back.  The front of each card from this set has either a 1, 2 or 3 in a round circle with "Catcher", "Batter" or "Pitcher" written in Japanese katakana on it (my Iwamoto is a "3 Batter" card).  The back says that if you collect all of these and send them in to the company, they will send you a commemorative present of some sort.  So probably a lot of these were redeemed back in the day and disposed of by the company rather than saved.

In relation to that I should note that there might be an error in the Engel catalogue on this.  It says that there are 3 cards in the set and they come with either a "2 Catcher" or "3 Batter" designation on the front.  But the text on the back of the cards also clearly refers to a "1 Pitcher" type of card which Engel doesn't mention.  It also refers to a "Hit Ticket" card which doesn't have a number.  So there might be more cards from this set out there which exist, unless I am missing something.

I think this is a pretty good looking set.  Kawakami wasn't one of the major makers of caramel cards (Kobai made the most) but it did a good job with these!