If you like old baseball cards and you've ever visited one of the main card shops in Japan you've probably asked yourself "where the vintage stuff at?"
The three big stores here in Nagoya don't stock vintage (except a tiny handful of 1970s Calbees at Mint Ponyland and 80s Calbees at Bits). And looking around at write ups of card shops in other cities by Dave and Ryan it seems this is pretty common at card shops elsewhere too (with the occasional exception).
Its always seemed to me that most card shops here view things like menko, bromides and even early Calbee sets as something that simply doesn't belong in their stores. Like its a completely different kind of product and you might as well be asking if they stock watermelons or something if you ask if they have anything from before the 90s.
This doesn't however mean that there aren't stores that specialize in vintage baseball cards. It just oddly means that those stores aren't baseball card stores. Rather they are vintage toy stores, which in my opinion are a million times more fun.
In recent months I've become an active online follower of one such store, Kinkizu (キンキーズ）which is in Osaka. Sadly I've never been to the actual store before (its not easy to get to from where I live), but I really do want to make the pilgrimage out there some day. It doesn't seem to feature at all on the radars of foreign collectors who are more accustomed to the likes of Mint (and others), which is a situation I hope to remedy with this post. If you are into vintage Japanese cards, forget about the big baseball card stores in major cities, they won't have what you are looking for. Instead, look for shops like Kinkizu.
Kinkizu advertises itself as a store specializing in cards and toys from the Showa era (which lasted from 1926 to 1989, though for practical purposes it really just covers post-war stuff up until and including the 1980s). Its got a huge selection of vintage vinyl, comic books and toys from that era. But for our purposes its most interesting feature is their massive stock of vintage baseball cards.
This here is a good video tour of the store on Youtube which is worth a watch.
These screen grabs I think do a good job of demonstrating why I'm so intrigued by this store. They've got showcase after showcase full of vintage Kabaya Leaf and Calbee cards nestled together with Sofbi toys from the 60s and 70s, which is just absolutely the best way to display those cards.
They've got a blog here which details their new arrivals each month, which I like to follow because its cool to see the new piles of vintage Calbee cards they keep getting in.
As you can see from the video, and pictures like this one below, they don't just stock baseball cards but also a wide range of other vintage, non-sport cards. The thing they have in common is that they all come from the Showa era, and they are all awesome.
You can kind of detect a cultural difference at work in the Japanese hobby which doesn't have a parallel in the American one - vintage cards are part of a broader "vintage toy" category of collectible, while modern cards are in a category of their own. Shops that specialize in one are completely different from shops that specialize in the other.
I'm using Kinkizu as an example in this post because I think its the best such shop I've found so far, though its by no means alone. Mandarake, a nationwide chain of stores that started off 40 years ago as a used comic seller which expanded to sell all kinds of vintage toys also sells vintage baseball cards. In fact here in Nagoya its the only store I know of that has a decent selection of vintage 1970s Calbee cards available. I've never been card shopping up in Tokyo but I wouldn't be surprised if there were shops like that (in addition to their Mandarake locations) which also had that vintage toy/ old baseball card mix of stuff for sale.
Just to further illustrate my point, its not just about what they stock, but what the shops are like. Here are two photos, one of the interior of Kinkizu, the other the interior of Mint's Shinjuku store which I am stealing from Dave's blog.
Which of the above two places looks more fun to explore? The one where everything is kept in uniform rows of plastic shelving that looks more sterile than a dentist's office, or the one where you've got massive piles of awesome looking vintage cards and albums chaotically scattered about the room under a ceiling made of giant, inflatable red monsters?
I could see myself breezing into and out of that Mint location in about 30 seconds and never going back. I could also see myself spending a whole afternoon in that Kinkizu shop just trying to take everything in. I wish there were more shops like that around.
