1978 Yamakatsu Box

In addition to my giant 1977 Yamakatsu boxes, I also recently picked up a partial box of 1978 Yamakatsu cards.

I actually completed the 1978 Yamakatsu set a couple of years ago. Its one of the more popular ones owing to the fact that out of the many sets Yamakatsu made over the years its the only one whose cards are more or less normally sized. All the others are either huge , like those 1977s, or tiny like the 1979 and 1980 mini sized sets.

Until I bought this a few weeks ago I had never seen unopened packs of 1978 Yamakatsu before. The box I bought had 13 unopened packs in it, each of which seems to hold only one card.

In addition to the regular packs, the box also contained two packs with jumbo cards in them, which would have been given out as prizes to those who pulled winner cards from the regular packs. 

And it also had an envelope with two grand prizes, a card album and a giant sized card with a whole bunch of printed signatures on it. The need to accommodate these prizes explains why the box is so big despite the regular cards being standard sized. 

Since I already have the set, I’m going to keep these sealed. I’m not generally an unopened box or pack collector, but I’ve put together a pretty decent collection on unopened Yamakatsu stuff from the late 70s mostly through “that is just too good a deal to pass up” type impulse purchases (this box cost me about 40 bucks with shipping). 

Local collector attempts to move 1977 Yamakatsu premium cards by himself, dies.

Yesterday the writer of this blog made the foolish mistake of trying to carry some 1977 Yamakatsu Premium cards unassisted. He is survived by a wife and two young children.

Just kidding, I survived the experience with only a minor back injury as a result of trying to carry these absolutely massive cards around on my own.

The reason I was moving them around is that I picked up a couple of unopened boxes of 1977 Yamakatsu Jumbo cards recently, which I think are quite neat . 

The regular cards in this set, which came one card per pack in 30 pack boxes, are very large themselves, but the premium cards, which came three per box and would be given out to anyone who pulled a winner card from one of the regular packs, have got to be some of the biggest things that could be described as “baseball cards” ever made.

A few years ago Dave gave me a couple of these giant premiums when he visited Nagoya, and I have wanted to complete the set (of 6) ever since. I have now done so! 

I also have 60 packs of regular cards which I haven’t opened yet and am unsure if I should. 46 year old unopened packs don’t grow on trees, so I feel I should leave them in there. But its also a huge temptation and I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself….

The premiums, which came loose in the box, don’t present that problem. But they do pose a giant (literally) storage problem which I’ll have to work out.

I completed a set and its forced me to deal with a storage nightmare

 

I made an exciting purchase over the weekend - the 1978 Yamakatsu Isao Shibata!

This is exciting because it is the last card that I needed to complete that set.  I've been stuck on just needing Shibata for 3 or 4 years now after putting almost all of the set together from a couple lots I bought back in 2017 or 2018.  

I think the Shibata card might have been short printed because my friend and fellow 1978 Yamakatsu collector Jay was also stuck on just needing his card for a long time too.  And like I said it took me several years of searching to finally land my own.

Now that I have the Shibata I have a strange problem.  I can't find the rest of my 1978 set!

Its a small set (42 cards) and I don't have them in a binder.  They got put into a box with other random cards which then got mixed up with other boxes filled with random cards and then squirrelled away somewhere in the impenetrable labyrinth of boxes organized according to no known principles of geometry that constitutes my storage system. 

Basically its somewhere in here:

This is a problem I have with several sets that are kind of on the "back burner".  With my 1975-76-77 Calbee set I know exactly where it is because its an active collecting project.  But with other sets that have fallen to the wayside as collecting projects over the years.....I know that I still have them somewhere in my house but have no idea where.  The 1978 Yamakatsu set fell into that category since I got so frustrated with trying to find that Shibata I just stopped paying attention to where the set was because I never had the need to add anything to it for such a long time!  And now that I've suddenly landed a Shibata its the only card from the set I currently know the location of!

A Checklist for the Yamakatsu Blue Train Set

A couple of years ago I picked up an unopened box of Yamakatsu Blue Train Cards from the 1970s. I love trains, especially in Japan where pretty much every trip I've taken for the past 20 years has been by train.

I didn't open that box, but last week I found another one for a good price and decided to crack it open.  There is basically zero information about this set on the internet - no checklist, no year of release no nothing (including stuff in Japanese) so I thought doing so might provide a good opportunity to fill that void.  So this will be my first box-break post. And unlike most box breaks this one will serve the purpose of actually figuring out a bit more about what is in this set.

To begin, this is what the box looks like:

 Open it up and you've got 30 packs of cards with 2 cards per pack for 60 total.

 There are 3 prizes that also come with the box.  One is a little album that can hold 14 cards.  The other two are giant erasers shaped like trains.  There are 3 cards randomly inserted in packs which have a little red stamp on the back entitling anyone who pulls them to claim one of these prizes from the store where they bought them.

Then comes the fun part, opening the packs! As an added service to posterity, I have decided not to video myself opening the packs and will simply cut to the chase.

I got 60 cards, consisting of 37 different cards and 23 doubles. Since no checklist exists I have no idea how close this gets me to the set, but at least we now know there are no fewer than 37 cards in the set.

These are the cards I got:




This is what the backs of some of the cards look like (note the one in the lower right, which has the red prize stamp on it):

These are not just cards of random passenger trains.  All of them are long distance sleeper trains (called "Blue Trains" since the first one was Blue, but over the years they came in a variety of colors).  These trains have since been replaced by the Shinkansen, the last of them retired in 2015, but in the late 1970s when the Shinkansen network was a lot more limited they were at the peak of their popularity.  Each card depicts a different train which ran a different route and the back features each trains logo (which appears on a plate on the front of the engine).  Some train lines appear on more than one card (three of the ones I got appear on two different cards).  The cards aren't numbered but I think it makes sense to create a checklist based on the train names, so here goes in alphabetical order

Aizu
Amagi
Ariake
Asakaze
Akatsuki
Azusa
Fuji
Ginga
Hakuchou
Hakutsuru
Hayabusa
Hitachi
Hokuriku
Izumo
Kamome
Kii
Kinboshi (2)
Michinoku
Midori
Mizuho
Myoujou (2)
Nichirin
Okhotsk
Sakura (2)
Sazanami
Seto
Shinsetsu
Shiosai
Shirane
Shirasagi
Suisei
Toki
Tsurugi
Yamabiko

(the ones with a (2) after the name appear on two cards with different photos)

I really like these cards, the photography on some of them is really great and makes me want to go on a train trip.

I really wish there were more sets out there like this from that period.  As I said above, these are just long distance sleeper trains, which represent a tiny fraction of the overall variety of passenger trains in Japan.  There were a lot (and still are a lot) of local commuter trains done up in very vibrant colors which would have looked great on cards, but it seems such cards were never produced.

Anyway, there you go internet, your first stab at a checklist for the Yamakatsu Blue Train set.  I might try to pick up another box if I can find one cheap and break it open to see if I get closer to a set.  I'll update this checklist if I do!

My 1976 Yamakatsu Purchase is Confusing the Hell out of Me

 The above is a box of Pro Yakyu "DX" cards produced by Yamakatsu in 1976.  As the red numbers near the bottom indicate, it contains 20 cards which sold for 50 Yen back in the day.  The cards are pretty big so its not a bad deal.

Open it up and you find a couple of bonuses.  There is an extra card, of Sadaharu Oh no less, pasted to the inside flap, so you've got 21 instead of just 20 cards.  Plus there are two albums.

The albums (they are the same) hold three cards each and are specifially "Oh Albums" for storing your Sadaharu Oh cards in.  As is so often the case with cards from the late 70s, recent HOF inductee Koichi Tabuchi makes a prominent cameo behind the plate in the photo.
Spill it all out and this is what you've got!

Its pretty easy to date the set to 1976 thanks to this card, which shows him celebrating his 715th home run (note Tabuchi again making a cameo appearance), which he hit that year.

 There are some other cool cards of hall of famers in the set, like Sachio Kinugasa:

 And Katsuya Nomura:

I like this set a lot, but I'm very confused about what set it is.  Looking at the Engel guide, I'm pretty sure it is the set he catalogues as JY1.  The checklist matches up nicely with the cards I have, the description matches them perfect and the Oh card Engel uses a picture of as an example is identical to the one glued to the flap of the box.

But Engel gives this set the nickname "Blue Box". Because it came in a blue box.  My box is green.

There is another set, JY1c, which is similar and Engel says it came in a green box.  But the checklist for that one is definitely different from mine (the 715 home run Oh card only appears in the checklist for JY1 for example).

There are a few other Yamakatsu sets listed but none of them match this one either. It has to be JY1, but again - green box!

In writing about the late 70s Yamakatsu issues Engel notes, accurately, that "these sets are among the most confusing issues in history" and also acknowledges that there may be some mistakes in the way they were catalogues owing to limited information.  I think my confusion over these would be resolved by recognizing that the JY1 "Blue Box" set was also released in green boxes.

Anyway, this is a cool set either way!

1949 Yamakatsu are also cool

Yamakatsu is well known as the maker of some of the nicer (and odder) baseball card sets of the late 1970s, briefly rivalling Calbee as the main card maker in that stretch.  Prior to that though it also made a lot of really great menko sets over a lengthy period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

One of the earliest of these is the above, a round menko set issued in 1949 which Engel catalogues as JRM 51.  According to Engel the set has cards with three different sizes (small, medium and large I guess), I have the card of Giants catcher Tetsunosuki Fujiwara which is one of the medium sized ones.

I kind of like this set.  It seems every time I do a post about old menko cards I mention the bold colors being what I like about them. So its kind of trite, but once again I like the colors.  The team name in bold lettering also looks really cool.

You can tell it is a Yamakatsu card thanks to the logo printed on it:

This is a pretty cool logo, basically its the two kanji for "Yamakatsu".  The first kanji is Yama (山) which is one of the first kanji any Japanese student learns since its a pictogram.  It means "mountain" and it looks like a mountain.  Yamakatsu's logo makes it look even more so.  The second kanji is 勝　which means "victory".  They don't really do anything stylistic with that one, its an idiogram rather than a pictogram.  Anyway, Yamakatsu means "Mountain victory" which ....I have no idea where that comes from.  But its a cool name.

This particular set is one of the rarest Yamakatsu isses out there, Engel lists it at R4 (fewer than 10 copies of each card known) and this card of Fujiwara is the only one I have.

Yamakatsu: The Most Remarkable Card Maker You've Probably Never Heard of

 In addition to Calbee cards from the 70s and 80s, recently I've been focusing my collecting efforts on Yamakatsu cards from the 70s.  They are a nice compliment to a Calbee collection since they are so.....unpredictable.  Yamakatsu only produced baseball cards for a six year stretch between 1975 and 1981 and in that time period they produced 19 sets (according to Engel).  Do you know how many of those 19 sets are standard sized baseball cards?  One! The JY 6 set issued in 1978 is their only set made up of cards with anything close to standard card dimensions, an occurrence so unusual for Yamakatsu that Engel actually makes note of it in his description of the set.

The other 18 sets?  Well you've got:

Huge postcard size sets like this one.

Even Bigger card sets the size of 8 by 10 photos like these beauties.

Yet bigger still  sets whose card size is comparable to the landmass of some of the mid-sized 19th century pre-unification German principalities, like these which are probably the biggest regular baseball cards ever made.

Cards with metal badges in them like this baby that my scanner had a bit of trouble handling but I can assure you is totally awesome:

Then you've also got the tiny cards like the 1979 and 1980 sets where they made the unusual choice of going from making the largest cards in history to the smallest almost overnight.

There really is no parallel for a card maker experimenting with such a wide range of card sizes and designs in such a short period (or over a long period for that matter).

This also gives anyone collecting Yamakatsu an interesting point to brag about: These are the most difficult cards in the world to collect by far.

That isn't to say that they are the rarest or most expensive: they aren't.  But they are the most difficult in terms of the one thing card collectors fret more about than any other: how to store them!

Its so cute to see American card collectors constantly struggling to figure out how to store their pre-1957 cards because they are a fraction of an inch larger than post-1957 cards.  Ha!  The Yamakatsu collector has to worry about how to store cards so widely varied in size that the largest is about 40 times bigger than the smallest, and many sets fall somewhere between those.  Also some of them have jagged metal badges protruding from them which will damage any cards placed next to them in a stack or box.

Its the perfect collector's storage nightmare really.  Which is why I haven't jumped into Yamakatsu collecting with both feet yet.  In terms of set collecting I'm focused on the "Post card sized or smaller" end of things, with a smattering of the larger stuff as part of a type collection.

I just picked up the card at the top of this post, which is a 1978 Choji Murata from the set Engel catalogues as JY10.  Its postcard sized and I've decided to start working on this set because its actually quite beautiful - there are some really great photos in it and the bigger size and glossy surface of them gives them a striking appearance that my beloved Calbees of the same era don't quite match.

The fact that it is Choji Murata is also significant.  He was a popular pitcher (inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2005) who famously was the first Japanese player to have Tommy John surgery.  The story is recounted in Robert Whiting's excellent book You Gotta Have Wa.  From a card collector's perspective though its important because Murata played for the Lotte Orions.  Calbee refused to feature players from the Orions in its sets in the 1970s and early 1980s because their owners, Lotte, were a competitor with Calbee in the food and snack industry.  Murata, who debuted in 1968, thus didn' t have his Calbee rookie card until 1985!  So if you want cards of Murata and other Orions players from the 70s, you have to turn to Yamakatsu or some of the other short term makers of the era like Nippon Ham.

The backs of the cards from this set are also kind of cool.  They feature a little write up about the player and the bottom half is then some sort of a baseball lesson, Murata's demonstrating the difference between pitching over arm, side arm and under arm.

For more info on Yamakatsu sets you can check out Dave's excellent overview post on his blog here.  I'm going to try doing some more posts on my recent Yamakatsu pick ups in the near future.

Puzzle: Why are Yamakatsu cards always minty while Calbee ones are always destroyed?

I am currently trying to put together the 1978 Yamakatsu set (along with the 1979 and 1980 ones).  Jay, a member on Net54 who I have a trading relationship with (I send him Japanese cards, he sends me American ones, mostly Expos), kind of got me started on them a couple of years ago when he was putting his set together and asked me to find some.  Looking for cards for him got me into them as well and now I sit here exactly one card short of finishing the set.

If you ever work on that set, the last card you will need to get is of Isao Shibata.  That was the last card Jay needed too and it took him forever to find one.  Now its my white whale, I guess it was short printed as they are quite hard to come by.

The thing I want to talk about in this post though is an odd detail I've noticed as I collect both Yamakatsu and Calbee cards from the late 70s.  When buying Calbee cards from that era the vast majority of the ones you find are in low to mid grade condition.  They are almost all "well loved", with rounded corners, creases and sometimes even kid's names written on them.  I'm not a condition sensitive collector so this doesn't bother me much, all my pre-1990s Calbee sets probably average between vg and ex on the condition scale.  If you were the PSA registered set builder type though you'd probably go mad trying to put together a vintage Calbee set - even the ones with sharp corners usually have some discoloration on the back (the result of existing in an extremely humid country!)  The surviving cards are probably similar in condition to the population of surviving American cards of the 1950s.

Yamakatsu cards on the other hand are the exact opposite.  Almost all of my Yamakatsu cards are in the ex-mt to near mint or even mint range.  This isn't because I've been picky about buying them, its just because almost all of the Yamakatsu cards I've come across are still in pretty pristine condition compared to the Calbee cards I've found.  Without risk of exaggeration I think I could describe my 1978 Yamakatsu set (minus 1 card) as being in near mint condition, with nothing below exmt.

I find this to be kind of mystery.  My Yamakatsu and Calbee cards come from the same era and depict the same subject matter, yet they were obviously not collected by the same people back in the day.  Calbee cards got a lot of love back then from kids, while Yamakatsu cards seem to have been treated much like adult collectors treat their cards today - in a way that preserves their condition.  Which itself is odd since the modern hobby didn't exist in Japan (and barely existed in the US) back then.

With Calbee cards, it isn't until the late 1990s that you notice an uptic in the number of cards that have been treated with care, and even with more recent cards from the 2000s its not unusual to buy a lot and find that half of them have obviously spent some time in someone's pocket getting their corners rounded.  But even in the 1970s Yamakatsu collectors weren't doing that.

I haven't come up with a convincing theory as to why that is.  Yamakatsu cards were definitely marketed towards kids and not to adult collectors back in the day.  The main difference between them is simply that Calbee cards came with bags of chips while Yamakatsu cards were sold as a stand alone product not attached to anything else.  But that doesn't get us very far in explaining why they have survived so well in comparison to their Calbee contemporaries.  Another thing is that some of the Yamakatsu cards on the market today are probably the remains of "dead stock" packs that nobody bought back in the day and thus they survived well.  Some Calbee card packs also survived that way but probably in much smaller proportions than Yamakatsu ones.  That is probably a partial explanation for why there are a lot of minty Yamakatsu cards around, but it doesn't tell us why there are almost no low grade ones, surely somebody bought some of these cards and played around with them back in the day?  So where are those cards?

Anybody have any clues as to what is going on here?

Yamakatsu DX cards are pretty cool

 I got something new in the mail the other day:  4 of the big sized Yamakatsu DX cards from the 70s.You can read up a bit more about these sets on Dave's post here from a few years ago.  As you can see from the above photo, with some 1979 Yamakatsu cards for reference, they are pretty huge.

 I particularly like the above one of Kintetsu's Shimamoto Kohei.  The fact that his uniform is almost the exact same color as the bleachers, which are almost the exact same color as the sky, gives it a kind of cool look.  I am also a huge fan of cards with pictures that show a lot of the stadium in the background, which this card does well.

This card of Chunichi's Yazawa Kenichi, a member of the 2000 hit club, is also pretty cool.  I note that there are several different Yamakatsu cards of several different Chunichi players spread across several different sets which feature them batting in front of the same green netting.  I'm not sure why but it kind of works as a backdrop.

 The other two cards feature my least favorite aspect of some Yamakatsu cards from the 70s: the background having been cropped out and replaced with a boring blue (or sometimes green) backdrop.  I have no idea why Yamakatsu did this (seems about 1 in 5 or so of their cards from this era feature this) but it give the cards a very boring and generic feeling. It reminds me a bit of the 1958 Topps set which did the same, resulting in a truly boring set.

Otherwise though I think these are pretty cool cards.  Of course they are a double edged sword:  on the one hand they are great display pieces (at least the ones without the boring blue background) given their size.  On the other hand they are a huge pain to store!  I've already dinged the corners on two of them!

My New Favorite Thing: Yamakatsu Blue Train Full Box!

 I was browsing around Yahoo Auctions last week looking for Yamakatsu baseball cards when suddenly something I had never seen before showed up in the list - a full box of Yamakatsu Blue Train cards.  In addition to baseball I am a huge train fan and I just love it when something has interdisciplinary appeal across my various hobby interests so I put a bid in and won.

"Blue Train" is a generic name that describes all long distance sleeper trains in Japan, whose cars are blue (though sometimes the engines that pull them are not).  They used to be extremely common sites, even as recently as the late 90s when I first arrived in Japan.  The spread of the Shinkansen network to almost every corner of the main islands from Kyushu to Hokkaido has basically made them redundant and the last one, the Hokutosei, retired in 2015 to much bittersweet fanfare.

 The box is great, it shows a picture of the "Fujii" - each blue train has its name and distinctive logo on the plaque on the front of the engine.  Inside the box you find right on top you find a mini album which would have been given out to recipients of atari cards.  The one I got features the Hayabusa, which looks similar to the one on the cover of the box but is actually a completely different train.

Two other recipients of atari cards would get these beauties, erasers shaped like Blue Train engines.

 The packs are wrapped in paper, very similar to the 1980 Yamakatsu baseball packs I have, and are stapled shut at the top.  The box contains 30 packs with 2 cards each, which retailed for 20 Yen back in the day.  I'm not sure what year the set was released in but I am guessing late 1970s.  The cards are small size, about the same as 1980s era Calbee baseball cards (or 1950 Bowman baseball cards for American collectors). The packs with atari cards in them are wrapped in plastic so the store owner could know which ones they were.

 I decided to open a pack.  These would be extremely easy for unscrupulous collectors to search through if there were any valuable single cards to chase, since the staples can be easily pried off the pack without damaging it and then resealed.  Not that I plan on doing that, but I wanted to keep the pack looking nice.

 Inside, there they are, about to see daylight for the first time in their 40 years or so of existence.

 Score!!!  I got the Myoujou (the red engine) and the Suisei!

 The backs of the cards show you the train's logo that appears on its engine, how far it travels (967.4 km and 965.9 km respectively), how long it takes (16:23, 15:43) and its average speed (59.3 kmph, 65.6 kmph).

It doesn't actually tell you where the train went from, but a little research reveals that the Myoujou went from Osaka to Kagoshima until the line was discontinued in 2008 (shortly before the Kyushu Shinkansen was introduced).  The Suisei went from Kyoto to Miyazaki and was discontinued in 2005 (ridership having fallen from 93% in 1989 to a mere 30% in 2004 - quite the rapid decline).

I'm not too sure how big the set is or how close I am likely to get by opening the box, but I am quite motivated to find out more.  The Japanese language internet doesn't turn up much information on them, save for this blog entry by someone who, like me, just bought a box and was quite excited by them!

Jackpot! Unopened Box of 1980 Yamakatsu!

 As I mentioned in a post last month I have recently developed an interest in Yamakatsu cards, particularly the 1979 and 1980 sets which are a bit smaller sized.  I was browsing Yahoo a couple weeks ago for acquisitions and came across the coolest thing: an unopened box of 1980 Yamakatsu packs.

I've seen the odd unopened pack of these pop up from time to time but have never come across a whole box of them before, so I put a bid in and ended up winning by a hair.

The box is not quite complete.  As it says on the front, originally there were 60 packs for sale at 20 Yen each.  My box has only 50 packs, so whatever store this sat in back in the day must have sold the other 10.

 The packs come with 3 cards each so I now have 150 cards (in addition to ten that I already had).  There are only 64 in the set so I likely have all or most of the set already!  

The packs are made of paper and decorated with the team logos.  They are stapled shut at the top end.  This looks like it would invite cherry-pickers to try to pry open the tops and have a peak at the cards but its not possible to do this (I tried, they are in there pretty good)!

 You may have noticed in one of the above photos that there appears to be three baseballs in the box.  That is because there are three baseballs in the box.  On the cover of the box it says ライナーボール当て which means "Win a Liner Ball"!  These would have been prizes given out by shopclerks to kids who pulled "当たり" (atari) winner cards.  I am not sure if the boxes came with just three or if there were originally more and some were already given away, though it doesn't appear that you could fit any more into the box so I'm guessing three is complete.  Each Liner Ball has a picture of a player on it.  I haven't taken the time to figure out which three players I got but one from the Carp, Tigers and Giants.  The balls are made of soft rubber and are pretty neat, I've never seen them before and I assume since most of them have long since been played with they are probably considerably harder to find than the cards themselves.

 According to the seller there were also two atari winner packs of cards in the box.  I assume that those were these two packs, which being wrapped in plastic are the only ones distinguishable from the rest.  The seller said there were originally three of these but one is missing, presumably claimed by a kid back in the day.  I'm not sure how the atari winner card system worked, perhaps kids could choose between getting a liner ball or a pack of cards, or maybe the atari winner cards themselves state that?  A subject for future research (unless any of you can tell me).

 The 1980 Yamakatsu box comes with all you see here (and ten more packs):

So there you have it, probably this is the coolest vintage thing that I have in my collection now.  I have not opened any of the pack in this nor do I intend to - they've survived almost 40 years in this condition and it would be almost sacrilegious to open them, given how few probably are out there. Also the cards themselves are, while not super common, definitely obtainable for a reasonable price.

I do really want to open them though.  It just feels weird trying to leave packs unopened.  I am going to have to work hard at this.

For a great write up about all of the Yamakatsu sets of the late 70s-early 80s, see NPB Guy's article here.
http://japanesebaseballcards.blogspot.jp/2012/04/yamakatsu.html