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!

1947 JRM 30 Menkos

 

For the first time in a very long time I was able to add some new vintage menko to my collection. These cards are from the set that Engel catalogues as JRM 30 and dates to 1947.  They are identifiable mainly by the little diamond with a triple K in it, and also by the way the text is contained in curved rectangles on the sides.

Engel has catalogued twenty cards in this set, which he rates an R4 (fewer than 10 known copies of each card in existence), so its possible there are more.  As you can see, I have eight of them, including some HOFers like Shigeru Chiba and Fujio Fujimura.

One thing I like about the set is that though crude the artwork is far superior to the photography in contemporary Calbee sets.  You've got players in a variety of poses, doing a variety of things against a variety of backgrounds.  Quite refreshing compared to the monotony of all photos on modern Calbee cards being more or less carbon copies of each other.  

The people who made this set were doing so in a Japan that was economically devastated, suffering from widespread malnutrition and whose cities had just been reduced to rubble by a massive bomber campaign just two years earlier.  If they could make an interesting set in those conditions, Calbee today really has no excuses.

Anyway, the reason I haven't added many vintage menko to my collection these days is simply that the explosion in prices in the US card market has spread to Japan and I've been priced out of the market on most of the stuff that comes up on Yahoo Auctions for the past 18 months or so.  Its been frustrating because there has been a lot of stuff come up for sale that I would have been able to snap up back in 2020, but which these days easily sell for 5 times more than what they used to, sometimes more.  These ones somehow slipped through the cracks and didn't get much attention, so I was able to pay 2020 prices for them.  This might be the last addition to my menko collection for a while, barring either a complete collapse in the market or me winning a lottery (which is a particular long shot since I don't buy lottery tickets).

Also, since I mentioned Engel's guide I should mention that he recently put out a 3rd edition which I recently purchased.  If you collect vintage Japanese cards I'd say it is worth picking up the new edition, he's added a fair number of new cards to it (and if you don't have the old edition you absolutely should get it). 

New Menko Finds

 

I have a couple of recent menko pick ups which seem to be from an uncatalogued set (or sets).

The card on the left features Tigers star and HOFer Fumio Fujimura.  He is one of several Babe Ruth type players who was a star both on the mound and at the plate in his early career, then mainly at the plate later in his career.  As a pitcher he posted a career 34-11 record.  His best pitching season was in 1946 when he went 13-2 with a 2.44 ERA.  Four years later, in 1950, at the plate he set the single season hit record in Japan with 191 (in a 140 game season).  That record would last until 1994 when Ichiro Suzuki broke it.

The card on the right is Takehiko Bessho, another HOFer who I've written about before so won't repeat his biography.

I'm not sure if these cards belong to the same set or not.  The team names are written in katakana on both, which is unlike any set listed in Engel's catalogue.  The style of artwork is also similar, and the rock/paper/scissor symbol is the same.  But the player names are written in different styles as are the menko numbers, so these might be from different sets.  Bessho is pictured as a member of the Nankai Hawks who he played for between 1946 and 1948 so likely the set (or sets) dates to one of those years (Fujimura played his entire career for the Tigers so his card doesn't help with the date).

As you can see, neither of my cards is exactly what you would call high grade.  Anybody know how PSA treats massive vertical gouges across the entire length of a card that are so deep they nearly cut it in half?  I'm guessing they would ding me for that if I were to ever submit them. 

Two of these things are not like the others

The 1948 JCM 26 "Pinwheel" menko set is a bit of an odd and well known one.  It consists of just 6 cards and as you can tell from the above photo I am one short of the set (Noboru Aota, where are you?)

You'll note that there are two sizes, half the set are fairly big (3.5 inches diameter, the one I'm missing is also that size) compared to the other three. This is not uncommon with menko sets from the late 40s and 50s which sometimes came in sets of different sizes.

But the main distinction between the larger and smaller cards isn't their size but rather their rarity.  The smaller ones are quite easy to find, and I got all three of them a while ago.  According to Engel someone found a large lot of them in mint condition a few years back.  This is very easy to believe since they (along with cards from JRM 19 and 20, which were apparently found in the same horde) are constantly popping up on Yahoo Auctions with low prices on them.  They are among the very few vintage menko out there where if you want them, you can easily find them available for sale at any given time.

The big ones though weren't included in that find and they are actually quite scarce (Engel rates them R2 which seems about right).  I'd been wanting to find them for a while and pounced when this lot came up for auction a few weeks back.  It was entirely the two big ones I was bidding on (featuring Noboru Aota/Tetsuharu Kawakami and Fumio Fujimura), the other three were basically just bonus add ons.

I do like these ones since the colorful pinwheel background is just perfect.

One more of the big ones and I'll have this set complete!