PSA's Japan Problem

If you've been following certain baseball card forums like Net54 recently, you'll be familiar with the current round of PSA related scandals.   Some of these revolve around sloppiness, like grading reprints as the real deal, while others involve inadvertently  grading high value trimmed cards as though they were unaltered.  The latter in particular is a serious problem as the apparent flaws in PSA's grading process that let trimmed cards skate through created the perfect environment for a cottage industry of fraudsters to spring up. The result is that lots of people have spent money on trimmed cards, particularly through PWCC auctions, which are only worth a fraction of what they paid for them.

This has obviously strained the trustworthiness of the PSA brand with some collectors.  And from a Japanese perspective these scandals probably couldn't come at a worse time since just last November they opened an office in Tokyo and started to offer their services in Japanese.  This expansion makes sense from PSA's perspective as Japan is probably the world's #2 market for sports cards and, as I've talked about before, PSA and other graders until now have had almost no presence in this country, where the hobby is significantly less obsessed with minor differences in condition compared to the US. So the Japanese market represented a pretty sizeable piece of unpicked fruit for PSA and its not surprising they've come ashore here to try to convince the Japanese collecting world of the value of a PSA holder.

The scandals themselves are probably not going to dent PSA's expansion into Japan since almost nobody here  follows Net54 or other US forums.  But they do bring up something which might be way more problematic for PSA, which is that the quality control issues which the current scandals have raised in the US also apply to their grading of Japanese cards.  And one of these might be too big for the Japanese hobby to ignore.

The problem is that even though PSA only recently opened an office here in Japan, they've been grading Japanese cards for years.  And while I'm sure they made the best use of the expertise on Japanese cards available in the US while they did so, that expertise wasn't always deep enough to get stuff right.  And the mistakes they made are in some ways more embarrassing than the ones that have landed them in hot water among American collectors recently.

A prominent example of this is the 1929 Shonen Kurabu Babe Ruth.  This is a well known card among Babe Ruth collectors since its actually one of the more affordable cards issued during his playing days out there.  Its probably more famous outside of Japan than it is in.

PSA used to grade that card as a "1928 Shonen Kulubu."  They got just about everything about that card wrong. I did a post about it 3 years ago and made a list of the things PSA screwed up on it:

"Year: PSA says 1928, actual year is 1929;
Name: PSA says Shonen Kulubu, actual is either Shonen Club or Shonen Kurabu;
Set: PSA says it was a "multi-sport premium", actual set was not sport specific and contained a variety of other subjects.
Photo: PSA says without qualification that it is Babe Ruth hitting his first home run of the 1926 season, Old Cardboard notes that while this is what it is commonly described as it has not been confirmed.  Not sure which is correct but given how error-riddled the PSA entry is and how accurate everything else in the Old Cardboard one is I give greater weight to the latter until evidence confirming it surfaces.
Organization: PSA seems to imply that this was the magazine of an organization called "Youth Club".  "Youth Club" is an accurate English translation of "Shonen Kurabu", but as far as I can tell that is just the title of a magazine and not necessarily the name of an actual club."

While they now get the information correct, there are still copies of this card floating around in older PSA holders with all of these basic mistakes - wrong year, wrong name of set - right on the holder like this:

That mis-step could probably be overlooked though, since that card is very much on the perhiphery of the Japanese collecting world's radar.  Also, as I mentioned in my earlier post on it, even here many collectors aren't certain about the details like the year it was printed  (though the incorrect name is immediately recognizable).

The much more serious miscue for PSA is that they stepped on a huge landmine with the 1994 Calbee Ichiros.  In 1994 Calbee issued their first ever cards of Ichiro - three of them in (#37 to 39) in a rare set only distributed in the Hokkaido, Kyushu and Sanyo regions.  While all the cards from that set are hard to come by, the Ichiros are even harder, they seem to have been added to the set late in its print run and are short printed cards in a set that was rare to begin with. There probably aren't more than a few dozen, maybe a hundred,  of each of them out there.

These three cards are among the most famous and sought after in the Japanese hobby.  Technically they aren't his rookie card (BBM issued a card of him the previous year) but they are his earliest and rarest Calbee cards of (arguably) the most famous player in Japanese history.  Its hard to come up with an analogous card from the US hobby that would evoke the same recognition, but imagine a cross between a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr (recognizable iconic card of superstar from same generation) and a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle (most coveted and valuable "modern" card).  Now imagine if only a hundred copies of that card existed.  That is roughly where the 1994 Ichiros exist in the Japanese hobby:  cards that are instantly recognizable to all serious collectors.

Unfortunately for PSA, back in the 1990s a forger flooded the market with fake 1994 Ichiros.  The fakes are really convincing, I even got suckered on one myself a while back.  And so did PSA.  There are a huge number of fake 1994 Ichiro Calbees in PSA holders out there available for sale.  As with the Ruth, PSA has learned from that mistake.  They no longer slab fake Ichiros, so one in a recent holder is likely the real deal.  But the damage is already done.  Go on Yahoo Auctions, the Japanese equivalent of Ebay, and you'll find several copies of these cards in PSA 9 or 10 slabs.  All fake (identifiable from the coloration on the backs, see this guide here) .  This is a fake in a PSA 10 slab available right now.

This is a huge issue for PSA since the existence of these slabbed fake Ichiros is hard to ignore.  It'd be like if in their early days in the US they had slabbed a bunch of fake 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles which were still floating around on Ebay, easily identifiable as fakes by anyone who knew what to look for.  How would any serious collector trust a grader that could make such a basic mistake on such a key card?  This is super serious in an industry like grading, where consumer trust in the brand is absolutely paramount.

I should note that these two examples are not alone, PSA has improved a lot in their knowledge of Japanese cards in recent years but there are other examples of older PSA slabs containing incorrect information on Japanese cards (though I should also note that as far as I know the Ichiros are the only examples of outright fakes finding their way into PSA holders).

I'm not sure if this is necessarily fatal to PSA's success in Japan, but it means that they are going to be swimming upstream against a legacy of grading Japanese cards based on less than perfect information which might significantly complicate their efforts to gain acceptance here.

Collecting in a World Where Nobody Cares About Condition

Should one of these be worth more than the other?

Should these cards be worth the same amount?

One of the things that drives me nuts about the American card market is the insane obsession with condition that has gripped it in recent years.  I've become a bit of a regular on Net54 and it seems about half the posts there are people expressing an opinion related to card condition.  Some hate the obsession with it.  Some are wondering if they should try re-slabbing a card to see if they can get a higher grade.  Some are mad that a card they bought was listed as Ex but is more like Vg-Ex.  Some find the distinction between a PSA 8 and a PSA 9 to be completely arbitrary.  Some can't believe that some people can't see the difference between a PSA 8 and a PSA 9.

And don't get them started about them PSA 10s.

Never in human history has so much (digital) ink been spilled discussing an issue of less import to the world in which we live.

Its not that I don't share a concern about card condition: like any collector I like my cards to look nice.  But at the same time I can't really bring myself to care about it that much.  Are microscopic differences in card centering really worth so much of the collecting world's attention?

In the Japanese hobby, refreshingly, these conversations never happen.  Nobody seems to care much about condition.  I'd like to devote this post to exploring this aspect of the Japanese baseball card hobby in a bit more detail.  I'll do this by first demonstrating this fact empirically by looking at the complete absence of grading services like PSA in the Japanese collecting world.  Then I'd like to further that discussion by looking at the complete absence of any comparable sort of grading standard (outside of grading services) in the hobby in general - the terms "vg", "Ex" or "Mt" are unknown here and have no Japanese equivalent.  Finally I'd like to devote a bit of time to considering both the positive and negative consequences of this difference in the Japanese hobby world: put simply, its not as awesome as you would think.

1. Grading card services are non-existent in the Japanese hobby

To demonstrate how much Japanese collectors don't care about grading services like PSA, I'll do a little experiment on Yahoo Auctions (Japan's Ebay) right now as I type this post.  The baseball card category currently has 180,119 listings.  That is a pretty sizeable amount, and includes everything from commons to cards with BIN prices in the 10s of thousands of dollars.

How many of those cards are graded?  Running a search for "PSA" in that category gives us a whopping:

49 results!

So 0.002% of cards available on the biggest Japanese market for cards have been graded by PSA (a search for PSA's rival SCG gets zero hits).

But even this is an exaggeration in terms of measuring how many Japanese cards are graded.  Out of those 49 cards, 26 of them are actually American (mostly Topps, Bowman, Donruss or UD)!

So we have just 23 Japanese cards graded by PSA out of 180,119?

Yes. But if we are going to narrow this down to how many of these are targeted to Japanese collectors even this is an exaggeration of the relevance of PSA.  Of those 23, 16 of them are cards of Ichiro (mostly his Calbee and Tommy ID rookie cards) which, judging from the listings, are being targeted towards American collectors of Ichiro (given away by the fact that they use English in their listings, which is extremely rare on Yahoo Auctions).

So that leaves us with 7 graded cards for the Japanese collector?

No, 5 of those cards are of Shohei Ohtani or Hideo Nomo, also targeted towards Americans for obvious reasons.

So just 2?

Yes, there is a 1967 Kabaya Leaf card of Yoshinobu Yoda and a 1992 BBM card autographed by Sadaharu Oh which could be of interest to Japanese collectors.

Shigeo Nagashima, the most popular player in Japanese history and the #1 guy with Japanese collectors doesn't have a single graded card for sale at this time.  Oh just has the one.  Most other members of the Japanese hall of fame also have zero (in fact....EVERY other member of the Japanese hall of fame has zero).


2. OK, no grading services, but people can still care about condition, right?

Of course, before grading services entered the US market collectors already had a fairly well developed system of grading cards (which PSA just copied) from poor to mint and assigning differential prices based on grades.  Doesn't the Japanese hobby do something like that?

In a word, no.

This can also  be seen in the way cards are listed on Yahoo Auctions.  Basically everything (except those 49) are "raw" cards, which American sellers on Ebay will almost always tell buyers what condition it is in - VG, EX, Nmt, etc (often with a caveat about them not being pro graders, etc).

These terms basically do not exist in the Japanese hobby, nor is there any Japanese equivalent.

Individual card listings on Yahoo Auctions almost never mention condition at all.  The Japanese hobby doesn't have a universally accepted grading system like in the US.

This isn't to say that condition is 100% absent from listings.  Some sellers use a 3 tier grading system which is as complex as it gets here:

美品　(bihin) = "Beautiful item"
並品 (nami hin) = "Average item"
ジャンク品 (janku hin) = "junk item"

A "beautiful item" could probably fall anywhere Ex and up, an "average Item" would be more like mid-grade, and a "junk item" would probably be in the p/f/g range.  But these categories are extremely subjective and not widely recognized as having a specific meaning, only a few sellers use them.

For the majority, at least with vintage cards, the only mention made of condition is a boilerplate disclaimer that you see everywhere which roughly translates as:

"These cards are old, they may have wear and tear on them.  Buyers expecting the item to be like new please refrain from bidding."  

This applies even to high end items.  Here is a 1987 Calbee complete set for sale right now:

This is an extremely rare and valuable item: its asking price is 145,000 Yen (about 1200 US$), which is a bit on the high side but not outrageous.  

 But look at that listing. You've got 3 grainy pictures in which you can't tell anything about the condition.  And the description of the condition, in its entirety is this:

"画像でご確認ください。良い状態のが多いですが、2枚ほどマジックで落書きがあります。折れているカードもあります"

"Please confirm (the condition) by looking at the pictures.  There are many in nice condition, but two have been written on with magic marker. There are also cards with creases."

This description is so vague for all the buyer knows they could be getting a set that is 90% Nrmt with a few lower grade, or one that is almost entirely mid grade with some in poor condition, or even one that is mostly lower grade with a few that are extremely low grade.

This isn't, I hasten to add, a bad seller - ALL listings on Yahoo Auctions look like this.  Japanese buyers collect cards for the cards and not for the condition. This isn't to say that condition is irrelevant to the hobby,  nobody likes cards that are creased and a new one looks nice, but the insane nit-picking of minor stuff differences in grade that dominates the US hobby is completely non existent in Japan.

3. Great!  Of course this is a good thing, right?  Right?

You'd think so, right?  As I said at the start, I absolutely hate the obsession with condition that dominates the American hobby that I grew up with, so shouldn't I be thrilled that I collect cards in a market where nobody cares about that?

The answer to that is that kind of sort of I am a bit.  And the reasons for that are I guess self evident - one of my pet peeves is not here so I am not annoyed by it.  Which is cool....but not as cool as you'd think, hence the equivocation in my answer.  There is a real disadvantage to this lack of insanity which I have also discovered.

That disadvantage lies in one of the beneficial side effects of the American hobby's obsession with condition.  It has created an affordable niche market for the "mid grade" collector.  Since all the big money in the hobby goes to  high end stuff, there are plenty of bargains around for guys like me who don't care about condition and just want to put sets together.  A card that sells for $1,000 in PSA 9 can probably be had for 10-20$ in an attractive mid grade, which means that putting sets from the 60s and 70s (or even earlier) remains an affordable option.

That steep "mid grade discount" doesn't exist in Japan.  If a card is expensive, then its expensive no matter what condition it is in (unless it is absolutely destroyed).  You can't find bargains on the sought after stuff just based on the fact that it is lower grade like you can with American cards.  For example, I've been trying to find a cheap copy of card #1 from the 1973 Calbee set featuring Shigeo Nagashima for the longest time.  Every copy that goes up on Yahoo Auctions however always gets bid up into the hundreds of dollars.  Even if its got a crease in it, or well rounded corners, people here are bidding on the card rather than the condition (again, except for true beaters) and will pay the same money for a copy that would probably grade around vg as they would for one that would grade exmt.  

So the grass is sort of greener on this side of the fence in some respects, but there are a few brown patches as well!

Sports Market Report does Japanese Baseball Cards

As Dave over at Japanese Baseball Cards recently posted, the current Sports Market Report (PSA's magazine) is almost entirely devoted to Japanese cards, which is really cool to see.  Kevin Glew wrote most of the articles and interviewed me (and some other much more established people in the hobby, including Dave) for this one that is mainly about Calbee cards which has a few quotes of mine sprinkled in it.

Its great to see the Japanese card hobby getting this kind of exposure and the articles do a good job of outlining the basics of the hobby and comparing it to that in the US.  There is also a great article by Mark Holt about the 1967 Kabaya Leaf set which had a lot of tidbits of information I didn't know about it (I have 2 cards from the set, so pretty early in putting that one together).

As a Calbee collector I have my biases which I've elaborated on here before.  I wonder if this might spur some mutual recognition between PSA and Calbee collectors.  Their Population Reports indicate that almost nobody gets Calbee cards graded - the iconic 1973 set which is mentioned in the article for example has only had 46 cards graded according to their listing, and they only identify cards which have been graded so they don't even seem to have a complete checklist of the set (other sets are similar, the only exception seeming to be some Ichiro and Nomo Calbees from the early 90s for obvious reasons).  I'm not a collector of graded cards, but I do use PSAs website as a useful resource and it would be nice to see the Japanese side tidied up a bit!

Calbee Cards on Ebay: 1975-76 Calbee Sadaharu Oh

Every once in a while I go on Ebay to see what Calbee cards are listed, mainly just out of curiosity since the prices are usually more than what I can get cards for here in Japan.

Everytime I do, the above card of Sadaharu Oh is usually near the top of the list that Ebay displays and has been for years.  The current asking price is $280 US, which is on sale from its usual price of $350.  The seller has 100% feedback and seems to have been an Ebay seller for a very long time with a lot of satisfied customers.  But there are a few things that kind of bother me about this listing.

For starters, this isn`t a particularly rare card.  The listing prominently notes that it has a PSA population of only 2, but that statistic is meaningless since almost nobody ever gets Japanese cards graded (there are only a handful of Calbees from the 1970s even listed on the PSA registry).  I have a copy of the exact same card in roughly the same condition which I think I paid  about 400 Yen ($4) for a few years ago, which I think is close to the market price.  While the 1975-76 Calbee set is a bit hard to find cards for, the pink bordered series which this Oh card belongs to isn`t one of the short printed ones and can be tracked down without too much difficulty.  Even giving a bit of leeway for the fact that I may have gotten a good deal on mine and that this copy is graded, offered by an Ebay seller who needs to pay fees and had to import it from Japan I don`t see how this gets to be anywhere near a $280 card.

There seems to be an interesting disconnect in baseball card hobby logic that might be at work here.  In the US the most valuable cards from any vintage set from the 1970s are always the big name hall of famers, particularly if it is a rookie card.  In Japan though there is this odd thing which I think actually makes the cards of hall of famers worth less than those of common players (at least sometimes).  Since Calbee in the 1970s was in the habit of stuffing each set with multiple cards of star players like Oh (and Harimoto, Nagashima (manager), Kinugasa, Yamamoto, etc) its actually way easier to get a card of Oh than it is for some journeyman middle infielder who played for a less popular team in the Pacific League, who might have only had one card issued in his entire career.  So demand for that one guy`s card might actually be more than it is for some random Oh card from the same set.  With the exception of short printed cards of common players, I don`t think this same dynamic ever really existed in the US, so taking a fairly common card of Oh and asking a ton of money for it kind of makes sense by US vintage collecting logic, but not by Japanese vintage collecting logic.

Anyway, I`m not accusing the seller of doing anything wrong here, though I do think the card is overpriced.  My point is more just that I think it provides an interesting example of how applying the logic of the American card market (placing importance on PSA population reports and big name stars) produces strange results when applied to Japanese cards.

And one more thing I want to mention about this card: PSA lists it as a 1975 Calbee, but the pink border cards in this set were actually released in 1976.  As I`ve mentioned before, PSA doesn`t seem to know much about Japanese baseball cards. 

1928 Shonen Club Babe Ruth: A Definitive Guide to what we Don't Know/ Get Wrong about it

(Edited to note: some of the info in this post has been updated, to get the gist of everything scroll down to "Update 3" at the end of the post)

I just picked up my new most-expensive-Japanese-baseball-card-in-my-collection.  Move over 1974 Calbee Frank Howard, the 1928 (maybe) Shonen Club Babe Ruth is now here!

This was kind of an impulse purchase, I had never heard of it until I saw one up for auction on Yahoo Japan last week.  I did a bit of research into what it was, liked what I saw, and decided to splurge (a lot, admittedly).

This is a really amazing card for a number of reasons.  Babe Ruth, despite being the most famous baseball player in history, had his career fall into a relatively inconvenient period of American baseball card history.  He came up with the Red Sox just a bit too late to have gotten cards in the classic tobacco issues, then hit his peak in the 1920s when there were hardly any particularly big name sets out.  The only really major sets he appears in are the Goudey ones in the 1930s which just caught the tail end of his career (and nonetheless managed to miss out on him in the 1934 issue for some reason).

So its kind of interesting that one of the most attractive cards of him from his peak years in the 1920s is actually a postcard issued in Japan.  Having looked around the English language internet though it is surprising how little seems to be known about this card, and how much what everyone thinks they know about it seems to be either wrong or at the very least not clearly established as fact, so I thought I would use this post  to clear up a few things.

What is the card called?
This is a really basic problem and, to put it mildly, almost every "official" catalogue has screwed that up.  According to the PSA classification this is the "1928 Shonen Kulubu Babe Ruth Postcard." SCG uses the same name and  I think the use of it probably goes back a while.  It is really obvious that whoever came up with that name is not familiar with the Japanese language, since the word "Kulubu" is not an accurate romanization of the original Japanese "倶楽部".  The sound of the letter "l" doesn't exist in the Japanese language so no known method of romanizing Japanese words uses  it.  The only two accurate romanizations would be either "Kurabu" (based on the Hepburn method of romanizing Japanese) or "Club", the English loan word on which the Japanese is based.


Therefore "Shonen Club" or "Shonen Kurabu" would be accurate names for this card.  "Shonen Kulubu" is just plain wrong.  I prefer to use Shonen Club and refer to it as such.

What does the Text Say?
A Second thing that the English language internet is a bit sketchy on is what the text of the card actually says.  In comments here and there people say the photo depicts Babe hitting his first home run of the 1926 season.  I assume these comments are based on knowledge of the photograph from another source and they might be accurate, but the card itself doesn't say anything to that effect.  The text is a bit interesting since it uses a lot of archaic characters that are not in use today.  The written Japanese language was radically revised after the war, so pre-war text looks quite a bit different than contemporary written Japanese. My rough translation of what is says is as follows:
 
"The moment that Babe Ruth, hailed as the world home run king, swings his bat with all his might.   It looks like the ball quickly flew over the fence for a home run, as the catcher and umpire look up and the Babe's face beams with pleasure.  The fans packed in the stands watch awestruck."

Kind of a nice little blurb, but it doesn't give us any detail about what the card actually pictures (besides the obvious).

When was it released?

 Every English source says it was released in 1928 and that might be accurate, but just by looking through Japanese language internet sources I am having trouble understanding where that specific year comes from.  In every Japanese auction or other source I could find they do not say it was issued in 1928 (or Showa 3, the Japanese equivalent), but rather refer to it simply as a "pre-war" card.  It seems to be well accepted that the card was inserted in Shonen Club magazine, which was a monthly magazine aimed at children which was published monthly between 1914 and 1962 (with the exception of the war years). As I note above the text on the card clearly identifies it as having been issued pre-war, and the phrasing also clearly suggests that it was issued during Babe's playing days, but whether or not it was specifically isssued in 1928 (as opposed to say 1927 or 1930 for example) I really can't say.  I don't have copies of the magazines so I haven't been able to phsyically examine them, but I haven't found any Japanese sources which identify which issue of the magazine the card came in.  The above photo is the March, 1928 issue.

This site here gives an incomplete view of the covers of Shonen Club magazines from 1927 to 1930.  We can only see two of twelve from 1928 so its by no means conclusive (and the covers themselves don't give us much written info on what is inside), but the only one with a baseball related cover is the September 1930 issue.  I'll have to do a bit more research into this and try to track down which issue the card actually came from.  Suffice it to say that it isn`t something that can be determined by a simple internet search even if you can read Japanese.  Copies of Shonen Club from the pre-war era are pretty hard to find and expensive when you do so it will take a lot of luck on my part to be able to physically track down the one that contained this card.

1928 may in fact be accurate, but my concern is that if  the hobby's semi-official catalogers haven't even able to get the name of the card correct I don't have much confidence that they got the year right either.  They would have to have physically  tracked down and gone through a pile of very old and rare children`s magazines that can only be located in Japan and are all written in a language they cannot speak to be confident of that date, and it is pretty safe to assume they did nothing of the sort.  I think it is reasonable to say that the card probably dates to the late 1920s or early 1930s, but haven't seen anything to justify stating with certainty that this was from a 1928 issue of Shonen Club.

(edited to note: I did just find this description on an old Ebay auction which states it came from the August, 1929 issue of Shonen Club.  I haven't been able to track down any images of that issue to confirm, and no Japanese language source I have looked at refers to that issue, but at least someone has apparently gone out on a limb to identify a specific issue it came from.  If accurate that would mean that not only the name, but also the year by which this card is catalogued are wrong).


Conclusion
Anyway, these are just a few of the surprisingly simple things which the English language collecting world seems to have either misunderstood or simply not known about this card.  Its a terrific card of the Babe with a beautiful action picture, but beyond that I think a lot more research needs to be done to confirm its origins.  At the very least, if you had one graded by PSA you might want to write them to complain about that name and year.

UPDATE:  This and that....

While doing some more perusing on the internet I discovered an interesting variation that might exist with this card.  This is what the back of my Ruth card looks like.  Basically it is a standard postcard with `Carte Postale` written in French at the top and some Japanese writing elsewhere (just standard stuff identifying it as a postcard, etc).

 Looking around, most of the other examples I`ve seen in auctions have the same back.  But I found this copy of it that was sold in a Sterling auction a few years ago. The front is the same, but it has a completely different back.  The writing is entirely in English and seems to be based on an American postcard back template.

 I`m not sure what to make of that. Looking around the scant information on the Japanese net, it seems that Shonen Club postcards issued across different years did have different backs, but none of the ones I can find have all English backs like that (though admittedly this is just from a few quick Google searches on my part).

I guess there are three possibilities here.  One is that there exists a variation of the Ruth card which may have been issued in a seperate format and came with an English back.  Second is that the Sterling auction site might have accidentally matched the wrong photos in that listing.  Third is that the Ruth card in that one has been altered, though I have no idea how/why someone would do that.

My hunch is that the second option is most likely.  Nowhere else have I seen Shonen Club cards with this type of back and it seems unlikely that they would have used an American postcard back which, among other things, states the price of postage in Cents.

Another interesting thing which I have found out thanks to the above linked blog post is that these cards seem to have been issued in sets that came in specially designed cardboard envelopes that were themselves quite nice to look at.  That post doesn`t include the Babe Ruth one but does have some cards with the same back as mine.

Looking at the envelopes they came in I am a bit unsure if these were actually distributed with a specific issue of the magazine.  I had previously assumed they were distributed like cards are in modern magazines, inserted directly into the pages of the magazine.  These envelopes don`t seem like they would have been distributed like that since putting them into the magazine pages would likely have crushed the envelope.

In my day job I have actually had the chance to do some research on the history of the Japanese retail trade and in the 1920s these magazines would probably have been distributed either through subscriptions or through very small retailers.  One possibility is that the postcards might have been given to retailers (likely small candy/toy/book stores) separately from the magazines and distributed by hand to customers as they bought the magazine (as opposed to coming physically attached with the magazine).  This would explain why the Japanese collecting world has no idea which issue these cards came with - they might not have been distributed with a specific issue but rather as a promotion that might have spanned several months.

Some other pre-war postcards issued by Shonen Club, including some with the same backs as the Babe Ruth, can be found here. 


Update 2

Actually it seems like these postcards probably were issued with a specific issue rather than having been distributed separately over several months like I speculated they might have been above.  I haven`t been able to find the sports related card set that the Ruth came in, but in 1936 Shonen Club issued a 40 card postcard set titled Our Great Navy (rough translation). This came in its own specially designed envelope seen at the top of this picture here:

Importantly if you look at the lower right side of that cover it clearly says (in the green colored print) that it came with the August, 1936 issue of Shonen Club.  So it seems they were in the practice of issuing these with individual magazines after all!  Given that these pre-date the use of plastic wrap and other modern ways of attaching things to magazines, I think my speculation that these would have been distrubted by hand to people buying the magazine rather than coming attached to the magazine itself may still be correct though.

This navy issue seems to be quite a bit more common than the one the Ruth postcard came in as there are quite a few cards from it available from different sellers on Yahoo Auctions at the moment.  It seems the key to tracking down which year and month the Ruth card was issued in lies with tracking down the envelope that the set came with (or possibly tracking down the magazine itself, but since we don`t know which one it came with that poses a challenge).  This is a bit complicated though since I don`t even know the proper name of that set in Japanese.

Another interesting thing I`ve gathered is that Shonen Club issued a pretty wide range of give-aways for their magazines, not just postcards.  Booklets, paper models of ships, posters and other odds and ends were also given away.  Its kind of neat when you consider that Japan was a pretty poor society in the 1920s and 30s, yet their children`s magazines were way cooler than the ones I read as a kid in the 1980s (Boy`s Life, etc) which never came with anything that cool.


UPDATE 3

Mystery solved.  Not by me, but by the good folks over at Old Cardboard with input from Michiko Webb and Robert Klevens who seem to have already more or less answered every question about this card which I raised in this post a few years back.  To be honest it is a bit embarrassing that I didn`t find that earlier, I was concentrating so much on Japanese sources that I only did a cursory search for English language ones and missed the most important one!

They were able to definitively trace it to the August, 1929 issue of Shonen Club, which has Napoleon on the cover.  It came as part of a 40 card set, which  depicted a variety of landscapes, animals and other subjects.

So basically if you want accurate information about this card, Old Cardboard`s listing lists the correct name (Shonen Club), the correct year (1929), the correct background information about the card and a correct translation of the text on the front (which is similar to the translation I provided above).

If you want inaccurate information about this card then PSA is your source.  Their description of this set contains the following errors:

Year: PSA says 1928, actual year is 1929;
Name: PSA says Shonen Kulubu, actual is either Shonen Club or Shonen Kurabu;
Set: PSA says it was a "multi-sport premium", actual set was not sport specific and contained a variety of other subjects.
Photo: PSA says without qualification that it is Babe Ruth hitting his first home run of the 1926 season, Old Cardboard notes that while this is what it is commonly described as it has not been confirmed.  Not sure which is correct but given how error-riddled the PSA entry is and how accurate everything else in the Old Cardboard one is I give greater weight to the latter until evidence confirming it surfaces.
Organization: PSA seems to imply that this was the magazine of an organization called "Youth Club".  "Youth Club" is an accurate English translation of "Shonen Kurabu", but as far as I can tell that is just the title of a magazine and not necessarily the name of an actual club.

Sadly the internet seems to almost entirely base its knowledge of the Ruth card on how PSA mis-describes it while the vastly superior Old Cardboard entry with its excellent research (they even have scans of the original magazine) is largely overlooked.

At the end of this all I can say is my biggest mistake in doing research on this card was starting with what PSA said and working from there.  It gave me a vastly misleading picture of the history of this card which could have been easily remedied had I consulted Old Cardboard first.  Next time I have a question about an old card like this I know where I'll look first.