We need to have a word about Eiji Bandou

If you collect old Japanese baseball cards from the 60s you've probably got a fair number of cards of Eiji Bandou in your collection.  Bandou isn't a hall of famer and isn't really a hall of very-gooder either.  In an eleven year career with the Dragons from 1959 to 1969 he compiled a respectable 77-65 record and was a solid starter for a few years.  He never led the league in anything.  His best season was in 1967 when he went 14-6 with a 2.55 ERA and made the All Star team.

If you live outside of Japan you probably have no idea who this guy is and based on his career and his almost empty English Wikipedia page you'd probably consider him a common card.

But if you live in Japan, you know this guy probably as well as you know Sadaharu Oh.  Actually, probably better than Oh.  He is a household name whose face is instantly recognizable to almost everyone in the country.

If you take a look at almost any baseball card he appeared on, he has a huge smile on his face (like he does on the above, his rookie card from the 1959 Marukami JCM 31c Type 1 set).  I don't think I've ever seen a card of him without that huge smile.

He was able to parlay that smile into a post-retirement career as a TV celebrity ("talento").  Despite his modest pro-career, he was quite famous in Japan from his high school days.  In 1958 he set a record at the Koshien tournament by striking out 83 batters, a record which still stands and which made him a household name (high school baseball is big here, like college basketball in the US). This helped him break into showbiz after hanging up his spikes.

Over the years - until 2012 -  he was the host or appeared in dozens of variety shows and TV dramas.  He was the host of Sekai Fushigi Hakken (Discover the World's Mysteries), a weekly program that debuted in 1986, for more than 25 years. It is hard to under-state how prevalent he was on TV here, his Japanese Wikipedia page lists dozens of TV shows that he was a regular on, which is insane. Japanese TV isn't like American TV, most of the programming consists of a mix of variety or quasi-reality  programming in which panels of random famous people sit and make amusing comments about whatever the topic of the show is.  On pretty much any day of the week between the 1980s and 2012, you were likely to find Bandou either hosting or sitting on the panel of one of those types of shows (which usually have nothing to do with baseball).  No other ballplayer has come close to matching him as a TV star.

Then 2012 happened.  He was appearing on so many TV shows and splitting his time between Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka as he rushed between the cities to appear in various local programs that he....uh.....forgot to pay his taxes.  Or something like that - the TLDR version is that the Nagoya tax office (his main residence is here) found that he had failed to declare about 75 million Yen in income.

He didn't go to jail or anything, but this was a big scandal.  This was made all the bigger by the fact that the...uh...PR posters used by the tax authorities to encourage people to go to the tax office to file their tax forms featured....uh.....a familiar smiling face:

Ha!  Irony, gotta love it.  (Incidentally these posters are kind of collector's items now, you can buy them on Yahoo Auctions).

This put a pretty huge dent in his TV career as most of the shows he was on dumped him.  In a familiar pattern that most celebrity scandals in Japan follow however, after about a year in exile it was deemed that he had showed proper contrition and was allowed back into the celebrity TV circuit, though he isn't as dominant as he was previously (of course he's also getting old, he turned 80 this year).

As part of his comeback he started a YouTube channel where he does stuff like have a pitching contest with a woman about 50 years younger than him:

He seems to have moved on from that though as the last upload was in 2017.  At any rate, you can see what he looks like now in it!

So anyway, next time you are flipping through a stack of menkos from the 60s, take a look out for that smiling face as its probably the most famous one in the bunch!

Some Wally Yonamine Baseball Cards

I am not a player collector, but if I was I think I would be a Wally Yonamine collector.

He is just such a cool figure.  He was the first American baseball player to come to Japan after the war, arriving so early that the post war occupation hadn't finished yet (edited to note: first American player to arrive after the war, but not the first American to play in NPB).  His feats have been described elsewhere numerous times so no need for me to go much into them.  But they are impressive.


Perhaps less than his playing accomplishments I like the fact that he was a nice guy.  Sadaharu Oh recalled a story about when he was a kid going to Korakuen Stadium and being in a crowd of kids trying to get autographs of Giants players.  The other kids had placards and regular baseballs, but Oh was a poor kid and all he had was a rubber ball, which the players ignored.  Yonamine noticed this, came over and signed Oh's ball.  Years later when Oh was a rookie team mate of Yonamine he mentioned this to him and Yonamine said he remembered.  He couldn't figure out why all the Japanese players weren't signing.  Because nobody else would, he gave the big eyed kid, who he of course didn't know was Oh at that point, an autograph.

These cards, from the 1958 Marukami set (JCM 31b) and the 1958 Marumatsu set (JCM 32a) which feature him as a Giant.  He also played for and later managed the Dragons here in Nagoya, which gives me another level of interest in him.

I'm not sure how many cards are out there of him, being a star for the Giants he appears on a lot of the tobacco card style sets from the late 50s and early 60s.  But he doesn't appear in as many of the more colorful menko sets from the early 50s, which is a shame because those are awesome.

When I see his name in a Yahoo Auction search for old cards, I usually buy them.  This has become a bit more difficult recently though.  Yonamine is not a common name in Japan. In fact its not a name used in the Japanese main islands, Yonamine's father was Okinawan and the name uses kanji characters that are more commonly used there (my mother in law is from Okinawa so I know this from that half of the family).

So until a couple of years ago if you put the kanji for his name into a Yahoo Auction search it would only turn up stuff related to him.  Now unfortunately there is a garbage J-Pop boy band of some sort that has a member named Yonamine, so when you do a Yahoo Auction search its about 95% J-Pop boy band merchandise, which is a hellish thing to have to browse through.

Just a word for the wise!

Sadaharu Oh 1977 Pepsi

I've been focusing a bit on my 1970s Pepsi collection recently.

Ah, that's kind of a lie, I really haven't been focusing at all recently and just picking up random stuff as I find it and coincidentally a lot of that has been 1970s Pepsi stuff.  But I need to rationalize my purchases, so lets just say I've been focusing on 1970s Pepsi stuff recently.

In 1977 Pepsi released a couple of round menko sets (JRM 31 and JRM 40, very similar except one is larger than the other).  As with their previous sets these mainly featured players from the Chunichi Dragons, but unlike those sets Pepsi also landed Sadaharu Oh who is shown on 3 cards in each set.  My recent random pick ups include his three cards from the JRM 40 set.

These are some of the coolest Oh cards out there, the images on each of them are really well chosen and composed.  Each features a gold embossed signature and the 1970s Pepsi logo which looks pretty cool  The backs seem to have been printed in three colors judging from the three I have:

As the top of each indicates, these were in some way connected specifically with 300ml bottles of Pepsi, but otherwise I'm not sure how they were distributed.  Engel rates them R3 (less than 100 copies known to exist) which seems about right, they are pretty scarce, and makes me wonder if that is a result of them having been distributed in a really limited area or simply because everyone threw them out long ago.

An interesting thing to note is that these cards seem to have been issued at slightly different times during the 1977 season.  The one with the green back asks "Will he be the first to hit 756 home runs?" and then notes that as of July 14th he had 22 home runs (which would have given him 738 for his career at that point, he came into the season with 716).

But then the blue back one notes that this year he had been the first person to hit 750 home runs (presumably in NPB).  So it must have been released after the green backed one, but probably before the end of the season since he broke Aaron's record in September of that year and it would have been odd to not mention that.  Maybe it came out in August, after he hit #750 but before he hit #756?

Anyway, these are some of the cooler cards released in the year Oh broke the record.  They would release some more in the following couple of years as Oh extended his record.  I've picked up some of those recently too and will be doing a post on them in the near future.

Masaichi Kaneda 1958 Marukami With a Weird Back

 This is Masaichi Kaneda's card from the 1958 Marukami black and white borderless set (JCM 31D).

Kaneda is Japan's winningest pitcher by far, with 400 career victories (in a league where 200 rather than 300 wins is a de facto ticket to the Hall of Fame, a standard that Kaneda himself established for entry into his own version of the Hall of Fame, the Meikyukai).  Along with Oh, Nagashima and a few others, his cards are among the keys to the tobacco era menko card sets of the late 50s and early 60s.

The card is a hand cut menko and as you can see from the scan its got a bit of the card next to it on it. The miscut carries over onto the back, which has some additional odd things of its own:

First off, the back is for the Lions, while Kaneda played for the Kokutetsu Swallows as correctly noted on the card front.  When I bought it I thought it must be a wrongback, but in his guide Engel notes that this is not unusual for this set, as the team name on the back rarely correpsonds to the player's actual team.

So its not a wrong back.  But then I looked up that number, 639712, which is how Engel lists cards in this set.  That number doesn't belong to Kaneda, whose cardback number is 333333. Rather it belongs to Yoshitaka Kosaka of the Hiroshima Carp.

So that means this is either a wrongback, or a variation, or perhaps cards from this set were issued with random backs not just in terms of team but also in terms of number. Engel lists this set as being quite rare (R3) and doesn't seem to have a complete checklist (he lists 45+ cards, indicating there are unknown ones out there) so he likely didn't have a huge number of examples to draw from when cataloging it.

Anyway, its kind of an interesting thing to find so I thought I'd put it out there!