Masaichi Kaneda Menko: The Last Surviving Copy?

I've decided to get back into blogging a bit.  It really does help with the grieving process, mainly because Japanese baseball cards are one of the few areas in my life where I have no memories associated with my sister.  She didn't even know this blog existed.  Right now pretty much anything - like just listening to a song that she liked - gets me crying, everything is too new and I'm not emotionally adapted to life without her yet.  So Japanese baseball cards are kind of a mental safe haven, something I can distract myself with and not worry about that stuff.  I also really appreciated the friendly comments everyone made on my previous post, they do help!

Anyway, back to the business of this blog.  This is a menko of Masaichi Kaneda that I'd been wanting to post about for a while (even though I just posted about another one of him a few days ago).  Its from the set Engel lists as JCM 133.  They are identified by the backs, which have a picture of an animal (a mouse on Kaneda's) and a three digit number.

The set is kind of an enigma since so little is known about it.  Engel's guide identifies it as a set, but doesn't actually provide a checklist of it since "not enough of these cards have been discovered."  It was likely issued in either 1956 or 1957 and other than that there isn't much known about it.  A couple of other  sets (JCM 131c and JCM 132), which seem to have been issued by the same maker around the same time are also so hard to find that their existence is known but not enough have been found to create a checklist.

I love finding cards from sets like this where the card I have might be the only one left - its not clear if Engel or anybody else has seen a copy of this Kaneda.  They certainly might have, but the mere possibility that they haven't is kind of neat.   Its gives you that "Hey, this might actually be an important card I discovered" feeling.  And this card came in a lot of 5 cards that I only paid 1000 Yen (about 10$ US) for.  It was the only card from this set in the lot and the others aren't as rare, but I was pretty psyched at finding out what this one was.  Again demonstrating the ways in which collecting vintage Japanese baseball cards offers excitement that the US hobby hasn't been able to in about 40 years!

As a parting shot I just want to mention that I'll probably be putting the blog on hold again for a couple of weeks as I go home for the funeral and helping out my parents (and them helping me out too).  I'll probably be back towards the end of October though.

Blogging and Grief

A couple years ago I wrote a post about the baseball card store my dad and I opened back in the early 1990s.  The above photo was from opening day.  My dad is on the left, I'm in the middle behind the counter, and some guy I don't know is in the foreground wearing a red shirt and looking into our showcase.

On the right is my little sister, also looking away from the camera.  This here is a better picture of the two of us, from about 1980.

My sister wasn't too big into baseball cards at the same time I was, but she did give it a try.  I remember in 1990  she tried collecting the Fleer set, basically because it was one that I wasn't collecting.  We also went to Expos games together and she would sometimes join me at the dugout trying to get players' autographs.  She lost interest pretty quickly though and switched to collecting basketball cards for a bit but also kind of lost interest in that by the end of the year and never returned to card collecting.

She had other interests and didn't really have a "collector" personality which, if I'm honest, I always admired about her. She loved animals and swimming and hanging out with friends.  Doing actual stuff you know!

We were attached at the hip growing up, my dad being in the army and constantly moving around, so we were the only constant presence in each other's lives.  As adults we kind of moved our separate ways after my parents retired, me ending up in Japan and her in Calgary, but we kept as close as we could, she even spent almost a year living with my wife and I over here in the early 2000s.  After that she went to law school and, having watched her go through the application process while she was staying with us, I decided to give it a try too and ended up following in my own little sister's footsteps.  She was a trailblazer for us both.

Then one day a few years later, around the same time my wife became pregnant with our first child things were about to get really good in life for my little sister.  She had a successful career and was in a loving relationship with a great guy who she was about to start a family with.

And then just when it was all beginning for her my little sister was diagnosed with cancer.

She went through chemo and surgery.  And for a glorious little while we thought she had it beat and would be an inspiring story of a cancer survivor.

Then a few months later it came back.  Aggressive and spreading.  They had no cure.

My son was born, and then so was my daughter.  They loved her and she loved them.  But nobody could do anything.  Just constant streams of exhausting treatment to keep this thing from killing her and buy her a bit more life each time.

She and her husband lived the life they had to the fullest, seeing the world and never feeling sorry, or at least never showing themselves to feel sorry, about the hand they had been dealt.

Then this past weekend, they had some friends over for dinner.  She didn't feel too well, the effects of the cancer spreading to her lungs had become overwhelming in the last few weeks. She went to her room to lie down.  And she never got back up.  She was gone.

I've gotten to know a lot of other bloggers since I started this one, and I've noticed that a lot of us post stories of loss like this on our blogs.  Something about the distraction helps, and a sense that writing can be a useful part of the grieving process.  Also, of course, its a shout out for people to give you some much needed empathy.

I've been posting way more than ever before recently and part of that has I think just been driven by me knowing that this day was coming and me just needing something to do to keep my mind off of that.  Now that it is here....I just miss my sister.  

I'll try to get back to posting about cards again sometime, but might be away for a little bit. Or who knows, maybe I'll be back at it tomorrow, its kind of therapeutic.

Masaichi Kaneda 1958 Marukami With a Weird Back

 This is Masaichi Kaneda's card from the 1958 Marukami black and white borderless set (JCM 31D).

Kaneda is Japan's winningest pitcher by far, with 400 career victories (in a league where 200 rather than 300 wins is a de facto ticket to the Hall of Fame, a standard that Kaneda himself established for entry into his own version of the Hall of Fame, the Meikyukai).  Along with Oh, Nagashima and a few others, his cards are among the keys to the tobacco era menko card sets of the late 50s and early 60s.

The card is a hand cut menko and as you can see from the scan its got a bit of the card next to it on it. The miscut carries over onto the back, which has some additional odd things of its own:

First off, the back is for the Lions, while Kaneda played for the Kokutetsu Swallows as correctly noted on the card front.  When I bought it I thought it must be a wrongback, but in his guide Engel notes that this is not unusual for this set, as the team name on the back rarely correpsonds to the player's actual team.

So its not a wrong back.  But then I looked up that number, 639712, which is how Engel lists cards in this set.  That number doesn't belong to Kaneda, whose cardback number is 333333. Rather it belongs to Yoshitaka Kosaka of the Hiroshima Carp.

So that means this is either a wrongback, or a variation, or perhaps cards from this set were issued with random backs not just in terms of team but also in terms of number. Engel lists this set as being quite rare (R3) and doesn't seem to have a complete checklist (he lists 45+ cards, indicating there are unknown ones out there) so he likely didn't have a huge number of examples to draw from when cataloging it.

Anyway, its kind of an interesting thing to find so I thought I'd put it out there!

Complete set of 1947 JCM 75: The Film Noir of Baseball Cards

 This is my oldest complete set, an uncut sheet of JCM 75 from 1947 featuring all 8 cards.  This is kind of cheating since I obviously got the set all in one go, but it still counts!

The set has a lot of star power, more than half of these guys *5 out of 8) are hall of famers.

The artwork is quite striking.  The images are a bit crude, not unlike other menko from the late 40s, but what is really interesting is the exaggerated shadows on all the players.  It makes them look like characters from a film noir detective thriller from the same era.  Especially Takehiko Besho:

Another interesting thing about this sheet is the backs.  7 out of 8 of the cards feature a "Baseball" back with a batter and math equation.  But one card, that of Bozo Wakabayashi, features Tarzan and an elephant for some reason.  I'm curious about why his card has a different back!

Kind of a cool set that currently sits in my ultra exclusive pile of "things I want to display if I ever move into a house big enough to display stuff in and also is not full of toddlers constantly covered in blueberry jam".

Kansas City Royals 1981 Japan Tour Chirashi

 In 1981 the Kansas City Royals went on a tour of Japan, playing games against NPB teams across the country.  The tour didn't exactly go well for Kansas City, which dropped the first five games before pulling off a 1-0 win over the Giants, though they did eventually eke out a winning record (9-7-1) in their 17 games here.  The tour is sometimes cited as evidence that the level of the NPB was catching up to that of MLB at that time. The Royals team was pretty decent (they had about an even record in the strike shortened 1981 season, but had just come off one in which they made the ALCS) yet it barely broke even in its games against Japanese teams. It stood in stark contrast to some earlier tours by MLB teams which had completely dominated their series here.

I have a chirashi of the tour in my collection.  A chirashi is basically a flyer or handbill, about the size of a standard piece of A4 paper.  Japanese chirashi since the 1960s have been pretty high quality and there is an organized hobby of chirashi collectors out there.  Mostly these focus on movie chirashi, which feature amazing artwork advertising films made only for their Japan release (I have a lot of these, they are awesome), but they also make them for other events like concerts (I have a pretty good Rolling Stones one from a 1970s tour they did) and exhibition baseball games like this!

This one is pretty cool, prominently featuring Hall of Famer George Brett front and centre.  It isn't actually a chirashi for the whole Kansas City tour, but rather from the leg of the tour which brought the Royals through the Kansai area.  The back advertises games they played against a mixed Giants/Braves squad at Nishinomiya Stadium, an all Japan all star team at Koshien Stadium, and a mixed Hawks/Buffaloes/Giants team at Osaka Stadium.

The text on the top draws particular attention to the fact that George Brett had recently come close to being the first Major Leaguer since Ted Williams in 1941 to bat .400 (he hit .390 the previous season).  Dan Quisenberry, Willie Wilson, Frank White and Willie Aikens also get name-checked in it, but the vast majority is about Brett.

Kind of a neat piece of US-Japan baseball history!

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!

Some Really old Uncut Sheets!

 This is another antique dealer find: 3 uncut sheets of baseball menko cards from 1949-1950 (the set Engel catalogues as JRM-8).

The set was issued in three sheets featuring cards that have diagonal red and green stripes as background, though they come in various sizes.  I bought them as one lot, and all of them came framed. The frames are falling apart but I am keeping them in for now since I don't have any better way of protecting them.

The sheets are massive (I almost immediately regretted buying them when they showed up at my very little and very crowded house).  Two of them are horizontally oriented.  One of them features relatively small (2 and 3/8 inch diameter) cards of stars like Noboru Aota, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Osamu Mihara.  There are only 8 cards in the set and this sheet has 120 cards on it, so there are a LOT of doubles:

Close up:

The second horizontal sheet features both really big and really small cards.  I think its my favorite of the three, the big cards really display nicely.  Some of the players are repeated from the previous sheet, but the big cards also feature Kaoru Betto and Takehiko Beshoo among the stars.  

The third sheet is vertically oriented and features small cards (slightly bigger than the ones on the 120 card sheet) of baseball players.  The frame on this one is really broken and the sheet doesn't sit very well in it:

This is the only sheet that also features some non sport menko, very small cards on the margins featuring Popeye, Mickey Mouse and some other characters. Engel notes this in his description of the set and my sheets certainly confirms it, the non sport menko are kind of cut off along the edge of the sheet, so finding fully intact ones must be near impossible:

A few of these sheets seem to have survived the years, a set of them sold at an REA auction last year and Prestige Collectibles had some at the National Convention a couple years ago too. Its not unusual for menko sheets to survive in general, but these are notable since they are quite a bit different from your standard menko sheets since they obviously weren't intended to be sold in uncut form like this (unlike some sets which were) - they are too huge and contain too many duplicate cards for that to have been practical.  These must have been factory leftovers or something like that.

Anyway, when I get wealthy enough to move into a large house, I'll buy better frames for these and find a nice piece of wall suitable for displaying them.  Until that happy day, they are going to be spending their existence in the back of the closet which they were photographed in front of for these pics!