Yahoo Auctions Japan is a lot Busier Now than it was in 2013

I was browsing through some of my old blog posts the other day when I stumbled onto this one from 2013.  In that post I compared the number of Calbee cards from the 1970s which were available on Yahoo Auctions to how many Topps cards from the 1950s were available on Ebay in an attempt to get a rough idea of the relative abundance of each.

Looking back at the post seven years later what really caught my attention were how few listings there were for 1970s Calbee cards back then compared to now.  I hadn't really sensed any trend towards more Calbee cards being available, but perhaps that is because it happened too gradually to be noticeable.

To compare, I just made this table with the listings I found for Calbee cards from 1973 to 1977 back in 2013, and then how many I could find today (June 1st 2020).  The numbers have gone up a lot.

Calbee Year	Listings in Sept 2013	Listings in June 2020	Percent increase
1973	126	508	403%
1974	171	489	286%
1975	252	1045	415%
1976	264	1994	755%
1977	123	811	659%

I have to mention an important caveat though.  To check the numbers today I just took the shortcut of looking at how many listings there were under the category for that year (which has problems that I've written about before).   Back in 2013 according to what I wrote I manually searched through the whole site using keyword searches. I don't remember why I chose that cumbersome method, its possible they just didn't have the categories back then since I think if they had them I would have used them (I don't remember when they introduced categories for individual card years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 2014 since there are no categories from 2015 onward).  Anyway, the different methodology I used creates a problem since my 2013 method might have undercounted  (by missing cards that didn't turn up in my keyword searches) while my current method might overcount (by including cards erroneously categorized), which could mean the changes aren't as drastic as they look in the above table.

That noted, I think its probable that a large part of the change is due to more cards actually being available rather than just the result of methodological error.  And it is quite a bit.  Calbee cards from 1976 and 1977 (which are comprised of more than one set) in particular seem to be way more abundant on Yahoo Auctions now than they were then.

I'm kind of curious about why this is.  Yahoo Auctions wasn't new in 2013, it had been around for years and was well established at that point, so it wasn't like it was a brand new market that had just jumped onto the scene and there were fewer cards simply because people hadn't taken it up yet.

One possibility (which I like) is that collecting vintage Calbee baseball cards has become more popular in Japan over that time and this is a result of that.  I do get the feeling this is the case, while I hadn't noticed the trend towards more cards being listed, I have noticed a trend towards more people bidding on cards (and bidding them higher) than they used to.  The higher prices may also be attracting more people to putting cards up for sale than used to be the case.

Another related possibility is that brick and mortar store dealers are putting more cards up than they used to.  The number of such shops has thinned out a bit (at least here in Nagoya) in recent years, and probably Yahoo Auctions has played a big role in that.

Anyway, whatever the reason its kind of cool to see that there are more vintage Calbee cards available now than there used to be.  If I'm still maintaining this blog in 5 years I'll probably revisit this post to see what the numbers are like then!

1953 Kobai Caramel Wally Yonamine

 This is another one of my Wally Yonamine cards.  Its from the 1953 Kobai Caramel "Red Square Corners" set (JF 18).  The cards from this set are very similar to the JF 11 set also issued by Kobai Caramel which I wrote about here.

My Yonamine card has probably seen better days.  These things are small and fragile and its amazing any of them survived the years though, so I can't complain!

There are 27 known cards in the set, Yonamine is one of the "key" cards along with Dick Kishiwada, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Jun Hirota. Everyone played for the Giants, which is a problem with the Kobai Caramel cards in particular - they never put players from other teams in their sets (though other makers like Kawakami Caramel did).

So its not a set I'll ever try to collect but I do like having this in my Yonamine player collection!

1977 Calbee is Confusing

 1977 Calbee is very confusing.  They put out about a dozen sets that year, many of them rare regional issues that are too expensive for me to even contemplate going after.  The only ones I'm actively collecting are the series at the end of the 1975-76-77 Calbee set which just happen to have been issued in 1977  but are really part of that monster (as opposed to the other sets which were released solely within the 1977 calender year).

I did, however, accidentally get a decent start on one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the "Grey Border Star Back" set of 216 cards of which the above, featuring Isao Harimoto, is an example.

When I first started work on the 1975-76-77 Monster, I just knew that the backs of the cards had a star patterned border, like this:

So my early collecting strategy was to just buy up as many cards like that as I could find. When I finally accumulated enough to start organizing them in a binder and getting serious about completing the thing, I realized that for some of the low numbered cards I had (up to 144) there were two cards with the same number.

It took me a while but I eventually learned that the extra cards were actually from the 1977 Grey Border Star Back set which is visually almost identical to most of the 1975-76-77 Calbee card backs.

To add to the confusion, about half of the 1977 Calbee Grey Border Star Back set cards do not have grey border star backs.  From 144 to 216, the borders have more of a vine like border that looks like this:

OK, as I am writing this I realize it is making no sense because no matter what explaining these sets in an easy to follow manner is just impossible.

TLDR version: I accidentally collected cards from the wrong set because they looked the same as cards from a set I was collecting.

I'm actually thinking though that maybe this one 1977 Calbee set might be another project for me to work on.  I already have about 40 cards from it so I have a bit of a start.  And unlike the super rare regional issued sets from that year (where single cards go for hundreds of dollars each) they aren't too scarce (at least by 1970s Calbee standards) and you can sometimes find them for a couple hundred Yen each.

There is also a certain sunk cost that I'm looking to put to use here.  While these sets are extraordinarily confusing at first, once you've spent some time learning about them it actually is possible to gain a full understanding of what they contain and how they are different from each other.  With this set in particular I have already made that investment when I had to disentangle them from my 1975-76-77 set, so my brain has been trained to identify them on sight. And they are pretty cool cards, like any Calbees from that era.  So why not?  1977 Calbee, here I come.

The Patient Collector: My 1975-76 Calbee Set Proceeds at a Snail's Pace, but it Does Proceed

I am still plugging away at the 1975-76 Calbee monster set.  A dealer put four cards from the rare series that was only issued in Nagoya  (which runs from card #37 to #72 in the set) up for auction last week.  I put bids on three of them which I needed but only walked away with one, card #43 featuring Dragons slugger Tatsuhiko Kimata.  Kimata isn't a Hall of Famer but is a pretty decent Hall of Very Gooder, in a 19 year career, all with the Dragons, he made eight all star teams and finished up just 124 hits shy of the 2,000 mark.

The addition of Kimata gives me 22 cards from the Nagoya series, which is more than half of them, so I am making progress.  It was a bit disappointing to lose the auction for the other two though as the cards from this series (and the other two rare Hiroshima only regional issues in the set) are getting harder to find and almost never seem to pop up in auctions anymore.

Its also challenging to be working on a 1472 card set in which every card remaining on my checklist is one I have to devote a lot of time and effort to tracking down. The 1987 Calbee set, which has about 1/3 as many cards and is less scarce took me seven years of solid effort to finish.  I think the most realistic timeline for me to finish this one, barring some miracle, is about 15 more years.  Which is not a timescale most set collectors are willing to contemplate.  But this is Japan, where perseverance is a trait valued above all others.  So onward I go with this! A snail's pace is still a pace.

Card about a guy's hair and also a guy is looking at the hair guy's butt and the hair guy is kind of floating and its a weird card and you need to buy this card

You want my advice?  You need this card in your collection.

This is a 1975 Calbee card of Takenori Emoto, ace pitcher for the Nankai Hawks.

The card isn't so much about Emoto as it is about his hair.  The title on the back of the card says "With adequate resolve, he cuts his long hair!"

Emoto is a man who likes his hair.  And can you blame him?

But it almost cost him his career in 1975.  Japanese baseball teams have pretty strict rules on haircuts.  These days a lot of NPB teams have relaxed them, but on high school or college teams its like being in the military: everyone gets a buzz cut.

So back in the 1970s Katsuya Nomura was managing the Hawks and banned long hair.  Emoto wasn't about to let go of his splendid hair and rebelled (nobody else on the team joined him).  I did some looking around and found this archival footage of Emoto giving a press conference to explain the reasons for his rebellion.

The long and the short of it is that Nomura threatened to fine him 500,000 Yen, a massive sum back then, and Emoto backed down and got a hair cut.  The scandal that it caused rocked the nation (well not really but it made the news) and elicited a lot of commentary.  This baseball card is devoted to that incident.

The text on the back says:

"With Adequate Resolve, He Cuts His Long Hair!

Nankai's ace pitcher Emoto.  His long hair became the subject of much discussion and attention even as he was breaking records.  He announced that he would cut this long hair into a new short cut and devote himself completely to baseball, making his manager and team mates say "Ah".  He hussles in the middle of training camp in Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture."

Inspiring stuff.  I guess. The record it (probably) refers to is perhaps a backhanded compliment, he set the NPB record for balks in 1973.

I like the fact that this card once again demonstrates how ahead of their time these Calbee sets from the 1970s were.  Remember in 1991 when George Steinbrenner and Don Mattingly got into that big public argument over Mattingly's hair?

And then do you remember how Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck all made cards about that in their 1992 sets?

Me neither.  Because they didn't.  Because American baseball cards kind of suck in that regard.  Actually Japanese cards kind of suck in that regard today too, no way they would make a card about a similar hair scandal today.  But back in the 70s it was anything goes!  The most glorious card sets ever made.

Also I like this card because there is a guy on it who seems to be totally checking out Emoto's butt, which is also  not something you often see on a baseball card:

Also, if you look at the card photo you have to wonder what is Emoto doing exactly?  He seems to be levitating, with a crowd of people surrounding him.  He is in a baseball pose, but he is standing in front of a hill and I don't think he is on a pitching mound since it is too high relative to the guy looking at his butt.

Anyway, this card has a lot going on in it, all of it fascinating.  Even though Emoto's hair didn't cost him his career, his mouth eventually did.  In 1981 after getting yanked early from a game he publicly suggested that his manager was stupid.  The blowback he received from that (Rule #1 in Japan: Never insult your boss.  Rule #2: no matter how awful something tastes, always say its Oishii even as you are gagging on it) caused his forced retirement shortly thereafter.

Kids and Scissors

This is my 1961 Maruya (JCM 57a) card of Sadaharu Oh.  Its a pretty scarce card from early in his career.  It has a book value of $450.

One of the downsides of menko is that their condition today is highly dependent on the skill level of a 7 year old kid with scissors 60 years ago.  The sheet my Oh was on fell into the hands of a kid with very very low scissors skills.  So low that it is hard to figure - this must have been done by a 4 year old who hadn't yet developed the hand-eye coordination thing.

The downside is that my Oh card is kind of ridiculously miscut.  The upside is that this is my Oh card. If it was cut correctly I probably wouldn't have bought it, but with this cutting I picked it up for almost nothing :)

Confusing the Kids: What Color Uniform do the Giants Wear Anyway?

One of the cool things about Japanese baseball menko cards from the late 50s to early 60s is that most of them featured black and white photographs that had been colorized.  I like this because whoever was doing the colorizing in most cases either didn't know what color the player uniforms of a given team were supposed to be, or they knew and just decided to make up their own anyway.

I have a stack of about 40 menko from that period sitting next to me right now and I just pulled out all of the cards featuring Yomiuri Giants players, which are in the scan above.  They all come from either Marusho or Marukami sets from the early 1960s.  The Giants uniform colors were (and are) black and orange. But you wouldn't know that from these cards.

Just look at the headwear.  Everybody has different color schemes.   Basically a kid with these cards who had never been to a Giants game could imagine them having hats with:

Black hat, green bill
Blue hat, red bill
Brown hat, brown bill
Blue hat, blue bill
Green hat, green bill

And the color scheme on the rest of the uniform is equally confused.  Its important to note that some of these cards come from the exact same set (all three cards on the top row are from the Marukami JCM 14 sets).

This holds true not just for Giants players, but also for those of other teams.

This gives these sets a lot more "oomph" than they otherwise would - the actual Giants color scheme is fairly drab and boring.  A lot of these ones look way better - green hats with orange letters?  Love it!  Everybody wearing maroon long sleeved shirts under their jerseys?  Great!