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.  

Why so Glum?

 

I picked up this menko recently, it features Hall of Famers Shigeru Mizuhara and Kaoru Betto.  I don't know what set it is from, it might be an uncatalogued one (anyone out there know?)

What struck me about the card is just how glum and sad the artist made both players look.  They both seem to be frowning and have eyes that look like they are about to well up with tears.  

This seems odd to me.  This is not a photo, somebody deliberately drew them that way.  Why not put a smile on their faces?  Maybe the artist  was feeling a bit down and put a bit of himself into his work? Or maybe he was trying to give them a more stoic look and it just turned out looking sad and he didn't feel like doing it over again?

Anyway, has anybody out there ever done a card collection based on the emotions being displayed by the players depicted?  Happy faces, sad faces, bored faces, irritated faces - seems like there is a lot out there you could work with. 

New Betto and Kawakami Menkos

 

I got these two cards a couple of weeks ago.  They came in the same lot of round menkos as my Takashi Eda card that I posted about last week.  

They really jump out at you with those vibrant colors and vivid patterns in the background.  They remind me a bit of 1935 Diamond Stars, at least in the impression they leave.

On the left is Tetsuharu Kawakami and on the right is Kaoru Betto, both pretty big name Hall of Famers from the 40s and 50s.  

I've never seen cards from this set before and they don't appear in Engel so I think they count as "new discoveries".

The only identification mark they have is the kanji 天　("heaven") in a circle.  I'm not sure what the significance of that is (and would appreciate if anyone knows!).  It might be a maker's mark.  There is one card/toy company called Amada which uses that kanji in its name (天田) and these might have been put out by them, though I didn't know they made menko back then.  They put out a set of baseball cards in the 1980s featuring Giants players which Dave did a write up about a few years ago.  They are a bit more well known for non sports cards which they put out in the 80s and I think they were responsible for some Famicom (the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System) related menko that were released that decade too. 

Another possibility is that it isn't a maker's mark, but some sort of game related symbol, though I don't know of any games that use that kanji for that purpose.  The cards don't have the usual paper/rock/scissors symbols or number associated with menko games either, which is a bit odd too.

Anyway, I like these cards a lot :)

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!

Bullseye!

 Here are a couple of cards from the set Engel catalogues as JRM 52, noteable for their bullseye background!

Issued in 1949 they are quite rare (Engel classifies them as R4, less than 10 copies known) and I have two of them, Tigers slugger Kaoru Betto and Giants star Noburo Aota!

The Aota one is particularly interesting since its a previously unknown "new discovery" that isn't listed in the guide.  I really love finding stuff like this,  maybe this is the only copy of this card which still exists (though its unlikely)!

I really love the design of these, the colorized portraits which show most of the player's body instead of just a headshot look great against the colorful background.

Both these guys are in the Hall of Fame.  I've written about Betto before, but Aota is also interesting. He was a five time home run leader and at the time he retired in 1959 he held the career record for most home runs with a grand total of ......265.  So slightly more career home runs than Pete Incaviglia?  Well, the league was still pretty new at the time and his reign only lasted 4 years!

Kaoru Betto Discovery

 

A little pile of old menko I picked up recently unexpectedly turned up this treasure: a new Kaoru Betto card!  By "new" I mean uncatalogued and thus until now unknown to the hobby.

Betto is a pretty big Hall of Famer who I did a small write up about a couple of months ago, so I won't say much more about him in this post.

The set this card is a part of is catalogued in Engel as JCM 132.  He lists it as R5, meaning fewer than 5 copies of each card are known and its one of the few sets that they haven't got enough cards of to actually provide even a partial checklist for, so with this find I can contribute the fact that Kaoru Betto has a card in the set and this is what it looks like.

The set is one of the "animal back" type issued in 1957 which are among the hardest of the tobacco era menko sets to find.  The name comes from the back, which looks like this:

I love the photo used on this card, its a magnificent shot of Betto with the stands packed full of people creating a perfect backdrop.  The resolution is quite good for a 1950s menko card, which is one of the benefits of the black and white ones over the colorized ones!

I just love making little discoveries like this!

Kaoru Betto 1951 Osato Gangu

In an earlier post I mentioned getting some cards from the hyper rare 1952 Osato Gangu set.  I also picked up a small lot of cards from the 1951 Osato Gangu set, which is almost identical except the pictures are in black and white instead of color. One of the cards in the lot was the above featuring Kaoru Betto.

Betto is a Hall of Famer who played for the Tigers and Orions in a relatively brief pro career that spanned from 1948 to 1957, the start of his playing career having been interrupted by the War (he was already 27 years old when he made his debut).  His best season was in 1950 when he led the league in most offensive categories, just missing the batting average title that would have won him the triple crown.

In the US he is probably best known by the fact that Jeff Bridges has a T-shirt of him that he kept wearing in movies back in the 1990s:

In Japan on the other hand his famous bespectacled look allowed him to transition after retirement into a cushy gig as the public face of Hoya, a major glasses maker.

In addition to featuring black and white rather than color images, the other big difference between the 1952 and 1951 Osato Gangu sets is rarity.  While less than 5 copies of each card from the 1952 set are known to exist, the 1951 set is more common.  Engel classifies it as R2, which means somewhere between 100 and 250 copies of each card are known to exist.  That makes cards from that set more affordable, hence my ability to acquire a hall of famer in this set while my 1952s are all commons.

Kind of weird that cards where less than 250 copies are out there are the "easy" version, but that is vintage Japanese cards for you.

Major Find! Hoard of 1940s Menko!

This is definitely the most satisfying purchase I think I've ever made.

I remember back in my teenage collecting days in the early 90s reading an interview with Al Rosen, "Mr. Mint", about some of his big finds in the 70s and 80s when the hobby was taking off.  He described once going to someone's house and the person bringing out stacks upon stacks of mint 1952 Topps cards, thousands of them, and piling them on a table in front of him.  Back then people still had these hoards lying around and sometimes didn't know what they were worth so guys like him could make a killing buying them up and then selling them to the collector's market.

These were kind of legendary tales by the early 90s since by then all those finds had dried up and everyone knew what cards were worth.  Get a call from somebody saying they had a hoard of old baseball cards to sell in 1992 and chances are you'd drive out to discover that they had a monster box full of 1988 Donruss commons that they thought were worth big bucks (I worked at a card store then, this happened all the time).  But oh what a legend it was to me reading that interview.....

Now almost 30 years later living in Japan, I'm discovering that you can still be the equivalent of a 1970s American collector gobbling up hoards of rare vintage stuff that people just don't seem to appreciate anywhere near as much as they should! In fact I made my own (very miniature) version of Al Rosen's 1952 find the other day.

An antique dealer put a hoard of 1940s round menko up for sale on Yahoo Auctions, broken up into several lots, a couple hundred or so in total.  Perhaps I shouldn't be giving away this secret, but antique dealers who don't specialize in baseball cards are the best dealers to follow on Yahoo Auctions for incredible baseball card finds.  The known card dealers all have established followings so when they put stuff up, everyone bids on it.  Antique dealers though are off of most collector's radars, so when they put incredible stuff up it can sometimes slip by without attracting the attention of other bidders, which I think is what happened here.

Sometimes, of course, antique dealers get junk.  In fact, probably most of the time they do.  But this wasn't one of those times.  I looked at the cards and all the ones pictured were rarities - stuff ranging from R1 (less than 1,000 copies known to exist) to R5 (less than 5 copies known to exist) in Engel.  Sometimes you will find old menko lots that have a lot of cards from sets like JRM 19, JRM 20 or JRM 26 which the market was flooded with a few years ago thanks to big finds of "dead stock" of those cards in mint condition.  But none of those were in it, these were all rare ones.  And most of them looked like they were in decent condition, another hard thing to find with menko of this era which were thrown around a lot back in the day.

So I bid high on all of the lots and ended up winning every last one of them. And oh what a joy were they to  receive!  A huge pile of unsorted beautiful, colorful vintage menko to go through!!

THIS is what makes a hobby fun!  Discovering something new and exciting (and being able to afford it because it isn't insanely expensive).

And you know what makes a hoard of 200 or so vintage menko even more fun?  Sorting them and putting them into binder pages!! Yay!!!

Just to add to my satisfaction level, I had a few dozen 12 pocket binder pages lying around.  I bought these a couple of months ago intending to put some of my 1980s Calbee cards in them but discovered they were too small for that (Ultra Pro 12 pocket pages are the right size, but these were from a different maker and designed for slightly smaller stickers of some sort).  But they were the perfect fit for round 1940s menko so I made my own album!

Sorting the cards proved to be a fun challenge since recognizing which set each belonged to took some getting used to (I had menko from about 20 different sets, including some uncatalogued ones).  Let me take you through some of the highlights of my new favorite baseball card album.

First up: 1947 JRM 22

This is a 16 card set featuring some of the top HOFers of the era like Kawakami and Ohshita.  The easiest way to identify them is the little math question along the bottom border.  I have 15 out of 16 cards from this set now (12 are pictured, the other 3 are on the next page of the album), so just 1 more to go for the complete set!  And look how colorful they are!

Next Up: 1950 JRM 21

This is a smaller set at only 8 cards, and features stars like Michio Nishizawa, Kaoru Betto and Takehiko Bessho.  As you can see, I have 7 of them, which was a bit disappointing.  I found those 7 really early in the sorting process and thought for sure I'd have a complete set in there, but unfortunately, like the JRM 22, I came up one short.  The cards are recognizable by the menko number contained in the diagonal box along the front of the card.

And then there was: 1949 JRM 7

This was one of the more distinctive sets thanks both to the strong contrast in the colors used on the fronts and the backs, which have a unique design (most of the others were blank backed).  The set commemorated the 1949 Seals tour of Japan and features both Japanese and Seals players.  It is a 16 card set and I only got 9 so I'm not as close to the set as with the other ones.  But I do have the key card: Lefty O'Doul!  In fact I got doubles of him!

And lets not forget about: 1947 JRM 24

This set is pretty cool too, its distinguishable by the math problem in the little circle (either red or yellow) on the card front.  I only got 9 out of the 24 cards but that included the key cards of Bozo Wakabayashi and Tetsuharu Kawakami so not bad!

And of course 1948 JRM 46

I only got one card from this set, of HOF pitcher Hideo Fujimoto (career 1.90 ERA, the all time NPB record).  This is notable though since it was the rarest card in the lot, that set is listed as R5 by Engel, so less than 5 copies of each are known to exist.  Engel only lists 5 cards in the set, but its one of those ones that is so rare that there may be some more undiscovered ones out there.

There were a few other sets in there where I now have 4-5 cards each of.  Some of these were uncatalogued, which is quite interesting.  Some more goodies:

These ones, which I think are uncatalogued, caught my eye.

The top pair are cards of Kaoru Betto, the bottom pair of Noboru Aota, both HOFers.  The cards use the same image, but seem to be from different sets - the ones on the left have numbers in the round red circle, while those on the right have letters.  Also the ones on the left have rock/paper/scissors symbols, while the ones on the right have X/O symbols.  Kind of neat!

The uncatalogued sets are still only semi-organized in my binder pages so that is sort of an ongoing project.  Hopefully when Engel puts out the new edition of the guide some of them might be in it!

Now that I have all of these sorted into binder pages I have a collector's problem. I am hugely motivated to collect more of these and finish off those sets.  But I can't buy any of them.  These cards are so rare that not a single one of them is available for sale on Yahoo Auctions or anywhere else that I can find.

Its kind of hard coming down from a major "find" high like this, but its nice to at least be able to experience highs like this, which is what I am loving about collecting old Japanese cards.  Now the wait begins for the next antique dealer to put some huge lot of old menko up.....

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. 

An Amazing Treasure Trove from the 1940s

I had one of the most satisfying moments of my Japanese card collecting career the other day.  I came across a seller on Yahoo Auctions who had listed some cards from the early post-war era which were pasted onto black album pages.  The cards were fantastic - many with beautiful action photos of big name hall of famers, ranging in size from small Calbee sized cards (roughly the same size as 1950 Bowmans for American collector reference) to large postcard sized ones.  The album pages had been removed and were being auctioned one by one, each with between 4 and 6 cards on them.

They had a low starting bid and with one day left on the auctions when I found them, each already had one bid.  I put a bid on all of them for the minimum increment (10 yen) above the existing bid and immediately became the number one bidder.  I anticipated a bidding war would break out during the last hour or so of the auctions as they usually do for stuff like this and carefully calculated my max bid on each, depending on which cards they had and how they looked.  I then upped my max bids on all of them, hoping that the other person bidding on them wouldn't drive them up too much.

Then the weirdest and most magnificent thing ever happened.  The other bidder must have forgotten about them and nobody else noticed them, because they received no further bids and I won all of them for just 10 Yen (about 10 cents US) over the lowball starting bids. Hooray!

They came in the mail the other day and I was not disappointed with them actually in hand.  Check out these beautifes:

Victor Starffin, Japan's first 300 Game winner (with the Stars, which would date this at between 1948 and 1953):

 

Hall of Famer Kaoru Betto taking a swing with the Hanshin Tigers (which would date this between 1948 and 1949):

Hankyu Braves pitcher Rentaro Imanishi (not a Hall of Famer but I like the picture on this card):

 Takahiro Besho, another 300 game winner and Hall of Famer. This pictures him with Nankai, which would date it to no later than 1948:

 The "God of Batting" Testuharu Kawakami, who appears on several cards in the lot:

 And here are some more highlights, many of these are also hall of famers. I LOVE the photography on these, the in action shots are just as good as the ones you see on my beloved Calbee cards from the 1970s, but with these you have the added interest of seeing very early postwar stadiums in the background.

 

 

 

 

 This is what they look like altogether, the cards were pasted onto the backs and fronts of each album page:

The cards obviously come from different sets, but judging from the player team affiliations these probably date from the immediate postwar years, no later than about 1948.  From what I have been able to see from peeling them away from the album pages a bit, the backs are blank, though they are all printed on standard baseball card-thick cardstock.  I am guessing these have been catalogued, and they now provide me with yet another excuse to finally buy a catalogue.  I think I will keep them on the album pages for now, they actually seem to display better like that.

This is yet another thing I am starting to love about collecting cards here - if you are a budget conscious collector (ie not rich) you will never find something this neat, this rare, from this era featuring so many big name hall of famers selling for a reasonable price (total cost to me including shipping was less than 50$ US) in the United States.  In Japan though its still possible.  This is the type of find that makes collecting so worthwhile. 

1950s Baseball Menko are Neat

 I noticed the other day that I have been blogging about Japanese baseball cards for 3 years now without once having done a post about the most charming type of Japanese baseball cards: menko.  So I thought this would be a good time to remedy that oversight.

I love vintage menko, they are so colorful and child-like it is hard not to be charmed by them.  They are also one of those things that clearly distinguish the history of Japanese baseball cards from that of cards in the United States where no similar item ever existed. 

While most of them are rectangular and look a bit like baseball cards, some are given unique shapes (especially the beautiful early sumo cards). 

This particular set is the favorite of my current collection.  It dates from the 1950s and features likenesses of some of the top players of the era (from top left: Betto, Sugiura, Noguchi, Aoda, Beshho, Kawakami, Uchihori, Doi, Chiba and Yamamoto). 

The artwork is extremely crude but in a really appealing way - the players are easily recognizable and their uniforms are so colorful - look at Kaoru Betto`s Tigers uniform and tell me you don`t think those stripes are awesome!