According to the back, the photo is not from 1974 but rather from 1960, early on in both player's careers.
This one came up for auction last week and I put a few bids on it but got totally blown out of the water, it ended up selling for 36,501 Yen (about $350 US), way over my budget. This is further evidence that the price of cards has exploded here like they have in the US, a couple of years ago this would probably have been a $50 card.
I really just wanted it for my "weird stuff on cards" collection because this one is a doozy. I mean this is pretty in your face stuff in terms of having a card blatantly depict players modelling bad behavior for children on a product that was meant for children. Hey kids, look at how cool Shigeo Nagashima is when he smokes cigarettes! I mean, I get that this card is old and views about smoking have changed a lot over the past 50 years but I think even in 1974 it should have been obvious that maybe this wasn't a great image to be showing kids. It makes me wonder if Calbee had been producing cards during the PED era if they would have made a topical subset showing candid behind the scenes images of players injecting each other with human growth hormone or something like that.
The card is interesting also because it makes Sadaharu Oh look pretty subservient. It reminds me of a quote by Hiromitsu Ochiai, who was a bit of a renegade player (that I talked about in my previous post). Early in his playing days he quit his university team because he hated the way that junior players were expected to light the cigarettes of senior players and basically dote on them. As he explained: "If I'd wanted to be a nightclub hostess, I'd have gone to work on the Ginza" (quoted in You Gotta Have Wa). Oh came up a year after Nagashima and it would seem from this card that he was expected to perform nightclub hostess related activities for Nagashima as a result, despite not working in Ginza. Ochiai wouldn't have gone for that at all.
Out of curiousity, does anyone know of any other examples of cards (in the US, or anywhere, any sport) depicting players modelling bad behavior for kids?
For reference, here is some other oddball stuff that has appeared on vintage Japanese cards:
