Collecting 2023 Calbee is Frustrating

 

I made a bit of a fuss on here in April when the first Series of Calbee cards/potato chips failed to materialize on store shelves on schedule.  

They ended up appearing about a month later than the announced release date, mainly a result of increased demand due to Japan's WBC win and Calbee's apparent prioritization of Amazon over brick and mortar retailers,  

Thankfully for about two months after they finally came out - roughly late April to late June - I was able to obtain a regular supply of them at my local supermarkets and would stop to buy three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids) on the way home from work several times a week.  This ritual is by far my favorite baseball card collecting activity ever.  We were able to slowly put together most of the set, we're about 10 cards short of the base set now and still need about half of the (harder to find) Star Card and Legends card subsets.

I picked up some cheap albums from the 100 Yen shop, and we also hit a Lucky Card which we redeemed for another album, so we've been putting them in those.

Frustratingly though at the end of June all of the stores pulled Calbee baseball card chips from their shelves.

This is actually normal because late June is when Series 2 comes out and replaces Series 1 on the shelves.

Only this year Series 2 is yet to be seen.  

A few weeks ago Dave had an email back and forth with someone at Calbee who suggested that Series 2 might not come out until August 21st (or perhaps even October 9th, the message gave these two dates but was a bit cryptic about what they meant).  Series 3 might be a write-off completely.

So here we are, the middle of the season - in fact this is exactly the All Star break - when demand for baseball cards is usually at or near its peak and yet there are no baseball card chip bags on store shelves like normal.  And it seems we won't see them again until the season is nearly over and interest in collecting them is likely to be waning considerably.  

The worst part is that my kids like them so much that they are actually asking me to go and buy more because they miss opening them!  Even my daughter, who is five and not a big baseball fan, gets excited about them (she was the one who got the Lucky Card and that really got her into it.  Whenever she gets a shiny star card she proudly shows it off to her mom and then gives it to me to put in the album if we need it).  

So this is all very frustrating.  I wish Calbee would get its act together, having their baseball card chips in stores is a key part of the "being a baseball fan in Japan" experience and the season really just isn't as fun without them (especially with my Dragons in last place. Its not a coincidence that I haven't been posting as much as usual for the past few weeks....)

Interesting 1951 Osato Gangu Set Find

 

Some neat 1951 Osato Gangu set stuff recently sold on Yahoo Auctions and has sparked my curiousity.

The set (which Engel catalogues as JGA 11) contains 48 cards and was originally sold as a set that came in a very cute little box.  I bought this set a few years ago, before the pandemic boom caused prices to rise.  They used to sometimes show up on Yahoo Auctions but its been a long time since I saw one.  The box is notable for the hamfisted attempt to spell baseball cards in English on the side:

The set is somewhat rare (Engel rates it R1) and is popular for having Wally Yonanime's rookie card in it:

I had always though this set was only sold in those cute "base boll card" boxes, and Engel indicates as much in his description of the set as well.  But last week an interesting item sold (for 62,000 Yen, unfortunately too much for my budget) on Yahoo Auctions. It was a taba of 120 baseball cards.  Taba are little envelopes, each containing one card, that were bundled together with a string. Anyone wanting to buy a card could simply pull a taba off of the string.  It was a common way for cards to be sold in Japan from the 1950s until as recently as the 1990s.  

What caught my eye about this taba was that it had a card from the 1951 Osamu Gangu set on the front of it.  

As you can see the envelopes from this taba were made of discarded newspaper.  This was a common practice in the early post-war years when Japan was still poor and recovering from the war.  Later taba - such as the postcard sized Yamakatsu cards from the 1970s - were sold in taba made up of tailor made envelopes rather than scraps.

It seems that each of the taba in this one had a card from the Osato Gangu set in it, with four prize cards (redeemable for something, not sure what in the case of these) and the rest being regular cards.  

Photos of the prize cards suggest that the backs were blank except for a prize symbol, which is unusual since the Osato Gangu cards are not blank-backed (they have a blue design with a picture of a lion on them).  I'm not sure if the pictures are the back of the cards though or rather simply specially made prize cards.

Since the Osato Gangu cards were a game that was meant to be played as a set (it comes with instructions, though I have to admit I haven't read them and have no idea how to play), I suspect that these taba weren't created by the original maker of the cards but rather by a third party who might have gotten their hands on some unsold "dead stock" of them or something.  

Its a very interesting item either way, and the price works out to less than $4 per card which was a real steal (depending on how many Yonamine rookie cards are in there it could be worth quite a bit more than that).  I wish I had been able to afford it, 62,000 Yen (about 450$ US) is a pretty cheap price to pay for the equivalent of an unopened box of early 1950s cards!  

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). 

Isao Harimoto Menko Gallery

 

I've picked up a few more Isao Harimoto menko cards recently.  I'm a big Harimoto fan, for reasons I outlined in this post here so I won't repeat them.  Suffice it to say that he's one of Japan's greatest players of all time, holder of NPB's career hits record, and he has an incredible personal story.

His career coincided almost exactly with that of Sadaharu Oh (they both debuted in 1959 and Harimoto played his last game in 1981, just a year after Oh).  This means that most of the menko sets that have Oh cards also have Harimoto in them, as did all of the Calbee sets of the 1970s (though there are more Oh cards in those).  

Since his cards are way cheaper than Oh's, I'm still able to collect them which is cool, though they don't show up in auctions too often.  These ones I bought in a lot for about 5,000 Yen (like 35$).  The same seller had a lot of Sadaharu Oh menko that sold for 345,000 Yen (about 2500$) on the same day, so you can see why I've shifted away from collecting his early cards!

Some more Menko Discoveries

 

Another interesting recent pick up (from my guy in Hiroshima with the shampoo from the 70s) is this two card menko panel, featuring Hankyu Brave Akiteru Kono and Motoshi Fujita of the Yomiuri Giants.

This is from a very rare set that Engel catalogues as JCM 133, easily identified by the pictures of animals and the three digit number on the backs:

Engel gives these an R5 rating (fewer than 5 known copies of each in existence) and doesn't list a checklist since too few cards have been discovered.  The guide is also unclear about whether the set was released in 1956 or 1957.

I think the discovery of these cards clears up the latter question.  Fujita made his debut with the Giants in 1957, so the set most likely dates from that year rather than 1956.  

Kono was a speedy base runner who led the league in stolen bases three times  (1956, 1957 and 1962 with the Dragons) in a career that lasted from 1954 to 1967.

Fujita is a Hall of Famer, elected both based on his playing career (119-88, 2.20 career ERA) and his managerial career with the Giants in two stints, 1981 to 1983 and 1989 to 1992, each of which netted a Nippon Series championship.  

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.

Lamp Sale! No Dads Allowed.

 

I picked up three cards from one of the many oddball sets from the 60s the other day - the 1960 JBR 230 set ( referred to as "Toshiba Matsuda Lamp Coupon Bromides" in Engel).

This was a set of 25 cards issued to promote the 70th anniversary of......well, that is a hard question to answer but I'll give it a go here.

There are three issues with this set.  First, what is the name of the product at the heart of the sale being advertised?  Second, what is this 70th anniversary thing commemorating?  Third, why were dads excluded from the celebration?

Lets start with the name.  The Japanese spelling of the name of the product on the card is マツダランプ. Engel uses the correct conventions to turn that into the English "Matsuda Lamp", but on looking it up online it seems this might actually be a mistake.  According to the Japanese Wikipedia entry  the product in question was, bizarrely, actually an American rather than Japanese one.  In 1909 the Shelby Electric Company in Ohio released a lightbulb it called the "Mazda Lamp", which through licensing agreements would later end up being produced in Japan by Toshiba.  So I think "Mazda Lamp" is the correct name for these.

Now, what was celebrating a 70th anniversary in 1960? If the Mazda bulb was invented in 1909 it would have been only 51 years old in 1960 when these cards came out, not 70.  

Likewise Toshiba itself wasn't turning 70, it had been created as a result of a merger of two other companies in 1939 and was thus just 21 years old.

One of its two predecessor companies (of the two which had  merged to create Toshiba) - Tokyo Denki - had been founded in 1890 however, which makes the math work and thus these cards likely mark the anniversary of Tokyo Denki's founding, rather than the invention of the Mazda Lamp or the founding of Toshiba.

That leads us to the third issue, which arises from the back of the cards.

Look at all that blank, wasted space - you'd think you were looking at the back of a 2023 Topps NPB card.

The interesting thing is that little bit of writing at the bottom.  The bottom part of the card was a cut off entry form that you could mail in to Toshiba in order to win a prize.  

It appears however that dads weren't allowed to enter this contest.  The columns are divided into two groups, one of which lists prizes for mothers (diamond ring, pearl necklace, perfume, cosmetics case, etc), and the other lists prizes for children (baseball glove, bicycle, tennis racket, etc).  It doesn't specifically say that dads aren't allowed to enter, but there are no prizes for them listed so we can infer that they were de facto excluded.  

If you are familiar with how tightly Japanese society still defines gender roles today, and then subtract 63 years of minimal progress on the gender equality front from that, the existence of this is not surprising.  Moms go shopping for Mazda Lamps, kids come with them, dad goes to work and has nothing to do with that, so why even bother including him in a contest he's never going to see?  Logical, but also kind of an odd piece of social history to see primary evidence of on a baseball card.

I should perhaps mention the players I got.  Junzo Sekine, Katsuya Nomura and Minoru Murayama. All hall of famers!  Not a bad group.  The cards themselves are kind of neat - they are about postcard sized only more elongated.  Definitely going to be a pain in the butt to figure out how to store them, but otherwise I'm happy to add them to the collection.