2014 BBM Yomiuri TV (YTV) Female Announcer Set Gallery

I knew before coming to Japan that the country not only offered baseball and soccer cards, but idol cards with varying degrees of nudity. And after spending just a little time browsing around the shops, I was introduced to tons of other sports and pop star cards. The same thing happens in America, of course. Hannah Montana and iCarly both had sets for sale in WalMart. PopCards were short-lived but enjoyable. Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears have sets. There are card sets issued by college teams for many sports, including gymnastics and lacrosse.

But have you ever seen a card set that shows images solely of a network's female news anchors? Thanks, BBM.

There are 27 cards in the set released at the end of March, with nine personalities in all; unlike most sets of this nature, each woman doesn't have three cards. Some have only two, while a couple of the younger anchors appear on seven cards.

 The first nine cards in the set have head shots.

 The next nine cards are "candid" images, in an actual setting. Some of them are still essentially head shots, others posed, and that one card below that was meant to look like she was caught off guard at the makeup table.

 There are three cards with groups of anchors together.

 The two women in the above card are in the three-shot before it; those three women are in the four-shot.

 The remaining six cards have two cards each for Hiromi Kawada, Nao Yoshida, and Shinobu Nakatani. Obviously, they are the three "beauties" of YTV.

These images are all cute casual photos, except for Shinobu's pink dress studio shot.

The cards are sold in box set form with a suggested price of 4000 yen, containing the 27 card base set plus one special card from the list below (approximate odds in parentheses):

• each announcer has a solo autograph card, with 90 copies each (1:3.7)
• each announcer has a foil autograph card, with 100 copies each (1:3.3)
• Nao Yoshida and Shinobu Nakatani share a dual-autograph card, 30 copies (1:100)
• the dual-autograph has a foil version, 100 copies (1:30)
• "cheki" candid photos - seven types (one is a dual-anchor photo), 30 copies each (1:14.3)
• "cheki" candid photos with autographs - 7 cards, 20 copies each (1:21.4)
• photo cards - one per announcer, 90 copies each (1:3.7)

3000 sets were produced in all. There's about a 1:3 chance of pulling any autograph card.