These are a fortune. Literally.

 I made a neat new "discovery purchase" the other day: Baseball pull fortunes (Yakyu Hikuji)..

I got a big pile of them, display backing and all!

This are a type of product that doesn't exist in North America but has a long history in Japan. Each of these packs contains ten strips of thin paper which stick out at the bottom (in the above photo the black and white player head shots at the bottom are the parts of the paper that sticks out).  Each strip has a fortune written on it, like you would find in a fortune cookie.  The best one you can get is "Daikichi" which is really good luck.  The worst is "Hazure" which means you are a loser.  And there are a few in between.  So each kid would get one of these packs, then with their friends they would each pull one of the strips out and see who would get good luck and who would get bad.

 If you ever visit a shinto shrine in Japan you'll probably come across something very similar as they sell similar fortunes there. The ones sold at shrines are called "Omikuji" and come in folded pieces of paper rather than being pulled off of tabs like these baseball ones are.

These are a couple that my wife and I got at the Hakozaki shrine in Fukuoka many years ago (the chocolate banana was also purchased there, it was a festival day).


My baseball ones feature colorful wrappers with six different players on them: Senichi Hoshino, Sadaharu Oh, Masahiro Doi (I think), Shigeo Nagashima, Koichi Tabuchi and Koji Yamamoto.   The players whose head shots are featured on the ten strips peaking out at the bottom don't necessarily match the player on the wrapper (The one with Senichi Hoshino for example has a picture of Isao Harimoto on the strips.  Though most of the others do match).

 The backs of the wrappers have some cool color images of various players.

Judging from the fact that Isao Harimoto is featured as a Giant and Masahiro Doi is featured in a Taiheiyo uniform I would date these to 1976.

 I decided to try my luck and pull one of them.  Instead of tearing them off as they were designed I decided to just unwind the wire at the top holding the bundle together so I could put it back without damaging it.  This is what I got:

"Losing pitcher with a 5-10 record, so sad!"  "HAZURE"

Oh no, I got the loser one!

Back in the day these sold for 10 Yen each.  Looking around the internet it seems these "pull fortunes" were pretty popular back in the 1970s as there were similar bundles with various anime characters also sold from around that time.  These seem to have been the only baseball ones made and they are pretty hard to find.  Or at least I think they are, these were the first I've ever seen though I hadn't even known they were something I should be looking for in the first place until I found them!

Kind of a neat thing to add to my collection, they have a strong "Showa retro" look to them which I find appealing!

Holy Rocket Robots!

 I am just two cards shy of completing the "Rocket Robots" set, which is undoubtedly one of the best named sets of baseball cards ever produced.

Its an 8 card menko set released in 1975 (JCM 165 in Engel).  The cards are quite small, a bit smaller than a tobacco card from the T206 set.

Engel seems to have named the set owing to the fact that the backs of most feature pictures of robots (or possibly aliens or Kamen Rider characters?) and the names of various types of rockets printed at the top (though not all, only 3 of the ones I have do, the others say things like "Captain", "M4 Tank" and "Red Cross", which is a bit eclectic).

Interestingly 3 of the 8 cards feature members of the Chunichi Dragons (Senichi Hoshino, Morimichi Takagi and Takamasa Suzuki), which sort of continues an odd theme of the Dragons being over-represented in menko sets of the mid to late 70s (contrasted with the Giants being way over represented in the conventional card sets like Calbee of the same era).

The Sadaharu Oh card from this set is one of his most striking (and that is saying something, he is on a LOT of cards from the 70s).  The background artwork makes it look like he has a halo.  Saint Oh, guardian angel of the long ball or something like that.  The others are a bit more subdued but still cool.  Koichi Tabuchi shares his card with Isao Harimoto in the background.

Its kind of a neat set and one thing I love about 8 card sets is that you can fit them almost perfectly into a single binder page (a 9 card set would, of course, fit absolutely perfectly but they are a bit harder to come by).  So I've got two pockets waiting for the two I need (Takagi and a Koji Yamamoto/Sadaharu Oh combo card)!

The Most Insanely Colorful Set of All Time: 1975 Pepsi Dragons Menko

 Today I present some cards from the 1975 Pepsi Dragons set (JCM 71).  It is the most colorful set of cards....or anything for that matter...that I have ever seen.  I feel I should probably have put a disclaimer at the top of the post warning that these cards may induce photosensitive epileptic seizures in some readers.  They are that insanely colorful.  They make the 1972 and 1975 Topps sets look like 1948 Bowmans.

I fell in love with this set a couple of years ago when I saw the first images of it online, but I hadn't been able to get any actual cards from it until recently.  Its a fairly rare set (Engel rates it R2) and was probably only issued in the Nagoya area (it only features Chunichi Dragons players).  Every once in a while a beat up little pile of them would show up on Yahoo Auctions with a high BIN price, but never anything enticing enough for me to buy one.  I waited so long I was getting tempted to splurge on one of the beat up ones just to have a single from the set though.

Then it happened.  An antique dealer (love em!) put a huge pile of them up for auction last week with a low starting bid and I scooped up an amazing find of these.  72 of them, almost all in minty condition!  What a haul!

 When I received them, most of them were wrapped in bundles of 8 like this:

Its pretty flimsy but I suspect this is how they were originally distributed.  These were given out in selected stores one by one to the purchasers of Pepsi and other drinks put out by Pepsi Co like Mirinda (a Spanish drink that used to be sold in Japan but no longer is).  I assume they had stacks of these by the cash register and just handed them out. That must have been a pretty cool site.  I'm curious if they had any similarily colorful promotional ads for this campaign (posters, etc), as those would be neat.

I mentioned that "almost all" of the cards I got were minty.  One of these bundles had obviously been dropped by somebody as all the cards had the same dinged lower left corner, but otherwise the cards all looked like they had come straight from the factory.

The backs of the cards aren't quite as colorful as the fronts, but then nothing is:

Ah....colors!

 One of the things that surprised me (in addition to the colors of course) about the cards was how big they are.  Looking at them in photos omline I had assumed they were the same size as the tobacco sized menko, but these are actually much bigger, the dimensions are close to those of standard modern baseball cards (just slightly narrower).  And they are on insanely thick cardboard, even for menko, which makes them kind of neat to hold.

 The complete set has 20 cards and guess what? I was able to put together an entire set from the lot!  Here they are:

Its got a few Hall of Famers, the most notable being Wally Yonamine (manager) Morimichi Takagi (who would also later manager the Dragons), Senichi Hoshino and Kenichi Yazawa.  It also has two American players: Ron Woods and Gene Martin.

One enticing thing that eludes me though is that while I have a "complete set" I do not have a "complete master set".

There are quite a few major variations in the 20 cards in the set, basically the same card comes in multiple color schemes.  For example, here are two of the Wally Yonamine cards, same picture but radically different background color schemes (also one has silver embossing while the other doesn't):

According to Engel there are up to four different versions of each card, though it doesn't seem to actualy be known how many variations exist in total.  There could  be as many as 80 cards in the "master set" if each card comes in four different color variations.

Unfortunately my lot wasn't big enough to figure that out, but putting together a master set would definitely be a challenging goal to pursue and one that probably nobody has accomplished to date.  I also have to keep looking for cards from the 1976 Pepsi Menko set which I haven't been fortunate enough to find a major pile of yet.  I'll have to find another big lot to do that.

Just writing this post has made me want to drink a Pepsi, so I can say that they are a pretty effective marketing tool.  For some reason in recent years it has become difficult to find Pepsi in Japan though.  Pepsi Co still sells tons of drinks in Japan, but for some reason they don't seem to sell just regular Pepsi anymore (just crappy versions of it like Pepsi Next or whatever.....)  Its kind of unfortunate as Pepsi put out a lot of really cool baseball promotional items in Japan over the years, the most recent that I recall being in 2001 when they put little Ichiro figures onto bottles of Pepsi.  I have a set of those somewhere that I actually put together in 2001, I'll have to dig them out for another post!

Key Cards for the 1975-76 Calbee Set

 My 1975-76 Calbee project took a major leap forward last week with the above two cards, which were Yahoo Auctions wins.  Both depict Hall of Famer Senichi Hoshino during his prime days as a pitcher with the Dragons.  I'm a huge Hoshino fan and was extremely sad when he passed away last year.  If for no other reason than his being the leader of the anti-Giants resistance, I had a lot of respect for him.

These two cards though were tops on my want list because they are among the "key cards" in the whole set. Both of them (57 and 69) are from the rare Nagoya only regional series and, since they feature Hoshino, are the most valuable cards from that series (according to my copy of SCM anyway).  In fact, they, along with the Hiroshima Municipal Stadium cards in the Hiroshima only regional series, are the most valuable cards in the whole set (again according to my copy of SCM).

They were a lucky find.  A seller I had never dealt with put a dozen or so cards from the Nagoya regional series up for auction with 1 Yen starting bids.  The other cards were commons in various conditions (from about fair to ex or so) and I put 1000 Yen bids on most of them, to see if I could get them for the same price I scored my Hiroshima regional issues for the other day.

Something came over me with the Hoshinos though, I just felt I HAD to have them.  I'd never seen them come up for auction before.  So for those I put 5000 Yen bids on each and walked away from my PC.

When I came back the morning after the auction had finished I found that I had been outbid on all the commons, but the Hoshinos were mine!!  Yes!

So I think I can say that I am "making good progress" on the Nagoya regional issues too now!  And my set now has two of the keys to its completion, proudly in their pockets!

The only downside is that there are actually three Hoshino cards in that Nagoya regional series, so I still have one more to track down.