Cards you can Wear

 

I think these are two of my favorite cards in my collection. They are from the 1949 set catalogued as JDM 2 in Engel and feature Hall of Famers Kaoru Betto and Hiroshi Oshita. 

They are die cut mask cards which kids could wear on their faces.  The eyes are perforated and can be punched out, and there are little notches on each side near the ears where you can attach a string.  These are a bit easier to see from the back:

The size of the cards are a bit bigger than standard so while these would be very small on me, they might fit OK onto the head of a five year old.

Mask cards were a thing for a brief time in Japanese baseball card history, 5 different sets including this one (which contains 8 cards total) are known and all were issued either in 1949 or 1950.  After that they seem to have fallen out of favor.

The artwork on the cards from this set in particular is quite impressive, the images are much more realistic than what you find on any menko cards issued from that era.  

Pretty much all of the mask cards are quite rare.  This set is listed as R3 (fewer than 100 copies known) while some of the others are harder still.  

This might relate either to them being less popular among kids, or them being very popular among kids but also very fragile for a mask (the thickness of these is about the same as a regular baseball card).  I can't imagine these would have lasted long if a kid actually put them on.

If you think about it though baseball players are kind of an odd choice for a mask.  Watching my own kids they love to dress up in costumes and pretend to be various characters (characters from the Super Mario universe are their favorites these days).  When they do so they like to engage in play that involves doing whatever those characters do.  

My kids aren't really into baseball, but if they were I couldn't see them putting player masks to the same use.  If they want to pretend to be a baseball player, they'll do that by playing baseball.  If they are playing baseball, a mask like this is going to be a major hindrance.  The two activities are mutually incompatible and thus the kids would have little use for these.  

So while not great as a toy from a kid's perspective, they are SUPER AWESOME AMAZING from the perspective of a baseball card collector 70 years after they were made.  

Baseball Cards Worthy of a Book Cover

This is a complete set of 1949 JCM 111 menko baseball cards in uncut sheet form that I picked up a little while ago.

When I saw them in the auction listing I had this feeling that I had seen them before, but couldn't put my finger on it.  Then I realized the Betto and Oshita cards were featured on the cover of Sayonara Home Run, one of the few (only?) books out there about Japanese baseball cards.

I don't have a copy of the book (not on sale in Japanese bookstores and I don't have an Amazon account) but the subject matter is of obvious interest to me.  Anybody out there read it and recommend it?

It must have been tough to chose cards to put on the cover since there are so many really cool menko out there which would have worked.  I can't disagree with their decision though, these cards check all the right boxes in terms of what make baseball menko look good: bold colors, cool design, etc.

The backs of these cards are pretty interesting too, they are basically the same as the fronts just without the color:

The set is also notable for its size.  Most rectangular menko from that era are about the same dimensions of American tobacco cards, but there are bigger.  They aren't quite as large as modern cards, but about halfway between the two.

The player selection ( Hiroshi Oshita, Kaoru Betto, Shigeru Sugishita, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Michio Nishizawa and Makoto Kozuru) is also pretty impressive, all six would end up in the Hall of Fame.

1950 Kagome Die Cuts are Pretty Cool

 I picked up a really nice lot of die cut menko the other day which included these four beauties from the 1950 Kagome set (JDM 6).

This is one of the nicest die cut sets since the artwork is very realistic compared to some others from that time which were quite a bit cruder.  And of the "realistic" looking ones, its one of the few to show most of the player's body rather than just a head shot.  The team logos on the bottom also add a really nice touch, as do the bold colors.

The backs have a circle at the top which say either "Pacific League" or Central League, while the player's name is written in the dark column in the middle.

From left to right I've got Yoshio Tempo, Nobuo Oshima, Kaoru Betto (HOF) and Hiroshi Oshita (HOF).

Engel has catalogued 18 cards in this set but there might be more.  It has an R3 rarity rating which means there are fewer than 100 copies of each known to exist, which seems about right.  This is one set which I really do want to complete since they are so beautiful, but will likely take some work as they don't show up in auctions that often!

The Kamikaze Outfielder

Being on the losing side of World War 2 gives the player biographies of a lot of Japanese players from the 40s and 50s some really unique (often tragic or horrifying) twists.

Hiroshi Ohshita is one of them.  He had a hall of fame career beginning in 1946 in which he won three batting titles, three home run crowns and one Pacific League MVP award.

But the oddest thing about his biography is that in 1945 he was serving in the Imperial Japanese Army and volunteered to join the "Special Attack Unit" (Tokubetsu Kougeki Tai), more commonly known in English as the Kamikaze units.  He actually underwent training in how to pilot your airplane directly into an enemy ship and get yourself deliberately killed in the process.

Thankfully for Ohshita and Japanese baseball, the war ended before he had to go on his suicide mission.  The Japanese military in the last months of the war was actually safeguarding its kamikaze pilots, saving them up to defend against an expected invasion of the Japanese main islands which never came thanks to the surrender. So oddly enough a lot of kamikaze pilots like Ohshita actually survived the war.

That gives Ohshita's career a very odd origins story which is hard to wrap your mind around.  In August he would have found himself sitting in the cockpit of a plane that he planned to die in.  A mere three months later, he signed his first professional baseball contract and five months after that he made his pro debut.  From terrified suicide pilot to happy pro ball player in the span of 8 months.  Crazy, but also kind of an inspiring reminder that sometimes one's fortunes in life can take radical turns for the better even when you don't expect them to.  One minute you think you are going to die horribly, but the next you are saved from that fate and given one that sees you enjoy a long and happy life and career instead (relatively speaking, he passed away in 1979 after suffering a stroke).

The above card is from the 1949 JCM 108 set.  I like that set a lot, all the cards are horizontally oriented which gives them a cool look.  The card has Ohshita holding a yellow bat, but he is famous for having used a blue bat during the 1947 season in contrast to his rival Tetsuharu Kawakami who used a red one.  Their colorful bats were a hit with fans, but were banned after that season so by the time this card came out he would have been using a regular bat, though I'm curious if there are any cards of him out there depicting him holding a blue bat!

Some more cool Shonen Club Baseball Cards

 I made another find of something I didn't know existed until I saw it for sale the other day: a set of Shonen Club baseball postcards.

This is my second Shonen Club addition to the collection after picking up my 1929 Shonen Club Babe Ruth last year (coincidentally exactly one year to the day ago).

I haven't been able to find any information on these (anyone out there know?) and I am not sure if these comprise a whole or partial set, but given the player/team combinations it can be inferred that they date from between 1952 and 1957 at the latest.  Its an extremely impressive lot in terms of player selection, all four of them are members of the Hall of Fame.  From left to right in the above photo we have Tetsuharu Kawakami (Giants), Kaoru Betto (Orions), Hiroshi Oshita (Lions) and Shigeru Sugishita (Dragons).

On the backs they are typical postcards.  On the upper left corner is a box with the player's name and team.  The text in the middle says "Shonen Club Special Photograph Postcard", and on the upper right is a spot telling you to put a 5 Yen stamp here.

I like these a lot, the images are colorized black and white photos which have a kind of cool look to them.  As postcards they also make pretty cool display pieces, I might try having these framed at some point.

I am going to try and find out more about this set.  From what I know from other Shonen Club sets, they usually consisted of more than 4 cards so I suspect there are more from this series out there.  They also were usually issued in illustrated envelopes which are nice pieces in their own right and I'm hoping one with some baseball design might exist. 

Some 1940s Menko Beauties

I have really been getting into the old menko cards from the 1940s-1960s era recently.  It is hard to resist their bold colors and simple designs.

I picked up the above four on Yahoo Auctions the other day and am quite pleased with them. I don't have a copy of Engel's guide (it is on my shopping list....) so I don't know which set they are from but they seem to be from the late 1940s as the one in the upper right corner features Kiyoshi Sugiura as a member of the Chunichi Dragons, a team he played for between 1946 and 1950.

The cards are numbered (I have 3, 1, 7 and 4), are printed on fairly thick card stock (since they were meant to be thrown at the ground) and display varying information about the player.  Sugiura in the upper right is the only one which identifies his team.  The one in the upper left features Toshio Kawanishi, who played for Nankai and Osaka between 1946 and 1955.  The card has his name and "Stolen base king" on it, which is appropriate since he led the league in stolen based three years in a row from 1946 to 48.

I don't know who the player on the lower left card is since it has no name or other information on it, though you can tell from the picture that he is a pitcher.  Next to him is Hiroshi Ohshita, who played for the Flyers and Lions between 1946 and 1959.  He is identified as the "home run king", presumably in reference to the fact that he led the league in homers three times.  He is the biggest star in this group (well, at least among those I can identify), leading the league in numerous categories throughout his career, winning the 1954 MVP award and being inducted into the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame in 1980.

You'll note that each card has a box with some numbers in it just below each player's chin.  It took me a moment to figure out what the significance of those were, they seem to just be math problems that kids were meant to solve.

One interesting piece of social history attached to these cards is that they were (likely) issued during the occupation period (1945-1951), during which Japanese society was at its poorest in modern history and at times bordering on famine.  These pieces of cardboard would likely have been the most valued plaything of whichever kid owned them since all the other materials toys are made of (metal, wood, etc) were being requisitioned for  more urgent needs.

If you think about that, it makes these cards pretty unique in baseball card history.  American kids who collected cards at the same time (say early Bowman or Topps sets) no doubt cherished their cards, but unless they were really poor they probably had other toys to play with as well. The same holds for Japanese kids from the mid-1950s onwards, when the Japanese economy took off and people had money to buy toys for their kids again.

So these cards likely weren't just a plaything to their owner, they were the plaything. 

The closest parallel I can think of would be American cards during the depression, like the 1933 Goudey set, which also might have been the only plaything of the kids who owned them.  But even in the depression American society wasn't facing the same dire situtation that Japan did in the immediate post-war period - where people were literally starving to death on inadequate rations and the economy had completely collapsed.

Related Post:  1950s Menko are Neat