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. 

Third of its Kind: 1930 Shigeru Mizuhara Menko

I picked this card up a while ago and have been meaning to do a post about it.  This is a Menko featuring Hall of Famer Shigeru Mizuhara as a pitcher for Keio University.  Its from the 1930 Round Menko set catalogued as JRM 41, which is one of the rarest sets out there.

Another copy of this card appeared in a 2013 auction on Prestige which listed their copy as only the second one ever discovered.  No other copies have shown up there since, so I think I can say that my copy is the third copy known to exist.

Unfortunately mine is probably the worst of the three in terms of condition.  It actually doesn't have much wear, but somebody has gone and poked a bunch of holes in it for some reason!  Damn 1930s kids!

This is actually my second find of a rare pre war Mizuhara menko, so I've got a decent little collection of his going!

Stamps on Baseball Cards

Here is something you don't see every day: a baseball card with a big red stamp with some archaic Chinese characters on it obscuring the player's image.

This is a card of Tetsuharu Kawakami, Japan's "God of Hitting" and first member of the 2,000 hit club.  It is from one of the 1953 Kobai Caramel sets (catalogued as JF 11, noted for the L shaped border) which is pretty rare (R3).

Kobai was the biggest maker of caramel cards in the 1950s, putting out dozens of sets.  Like my Kawakami caramel card, Kobai ones were small and printed on paper.

According to the back, they were meant to be collected and then sent in to the company to be redeemed for a set of bromides signed by the players.

Not all of the cards had the big red stamp (which I think is the company's official seal), so there are versions of this Kawakami card out there which don't have it.  I think the idea was that you would collect the cards with the stamps on them and send those in to be redeemed.  You had to collect ten of them which consisted of at least the manager (Shigeru Mizuhara), a pitcher a catcher, an infielder and an outfielder and then send those in.

Engel has identified only four cards from this set (Kawakemi, Takehiko Bessho, Shigeru Chiba and Wally Yonamine) but likely there were quite a few more out there back in the day, including Mizuhara who is mentioned on the back but does not appear in Engel.  Their fragility and the fact that they were meant to be redeemed probably contributed to there being so few left in existence.

I kind of like having the seal on this one, it gives the card such a unique and archaic look.  No mistaking this for a modern card, or an American one!

A Cool Shigeru Mizuhara Find

 The above card features Hall of Famer Shigeru Mizuhara from the 1930 JRM 42 Menko set.

This is the second card I have from that set, after my Saburo Miyatake which I wrote about a few weeks back.  Its an extremely rare set, one of the first baseball menko card sets ever made in Japan, and Engel gives it a rarity factor of R5 (less than 5 copies of each card known to exist).

As with my Miyatake, this Mizuhara seems to have a couple of variations.  The one I have features a "K" (for Keio University, where he played at the time) against an orange stripe, with a red background on the top and bottom.

In Engel though they have a picture of the same card which is identical except that it has a solid red background.

Looking on Prestige they've auctioned off two copies of the card before. One which sold in 2016 has the solid red background, and another which sold in 2018 which has the orange stripe like mine.  According to their listings there were only 3 copies of the card known, now there are four!

Mizuhara is a pretty interesting guy (who, strangely, doesn't even have an English wikipedia page).  He was a star pitcher for Keio University in the late 1920s. He also played against the MLB all stars that toured Japan in 1931 and 1934, then joined the Giants, as a third baseman, in 1936 and became one of the first star players in Japanese pro baseball.

The war disrupted his career more than most, he went to fight as a member of the Japanese Imperial Army on the Asian mainland after the 1942 season (in which he won the League MVP award but it seems wasn't able to actually receive it) where he was later captured by the Soviet army and ended up spending several years as a prisoner in Siberia.  He didn't return to Japan until 1949 by which time he was too old to resume his career.  The following year though he took over as manager of the Yomiuri Giants and led the team throughout the entire decade, winning four pennants and becoming the first pro manager of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima towards the end of his tenure.  He had later stints as manager of the Flyers and Dragons before retiring in 1971 with 1586 career victories.  He was selected to the Hall of Fame in 1977 and passed away in 1982.

One interesting thing I'm interested in researching is that he was married to Junko Matsui, who was a very famous movie actress from the 1930s.  Menko makers also used to put out a lot of sets featuring film stars and I'm curious if there are any of her (haven't been able to find any so far, but haven't looked much either, non-sports menko are basically all completely uncatalogued).  It would be kind of neat if both husband and wife appeared on cards from this vintage!