Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Wednesday, January 8, 2020

2006 Yomiuri Giants Lenticular Cards

The Yomiuri Giants have issued a lot of sets over the years, using several different methods. This is the first lenticular set I've seen:
My scanner does this card no justice. The backs are similar to other Giants sets I've seen. All in all it's a pretty cool card!

Thank you to Dan for sending it my way! More from him will be coming soon.

Until then...

7 comments:

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    1. I totally meant to link to you, especially because your scans are so much better!

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  2. Very cool card. Did the Giants misspell his first name or did Topps and MLB misspell his name all of the years he played in the US?

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    1. No.

      When it comes to Japanese names, it's quite complicated, but essentially his name is 上原浩治, which if changed to phonetic hiragana, is うえはら こうじ (note that family names come first in Japanese writing). If you change this to English characters (romaji) using what's called kunrei-shiki, it's u-e-ha-ra ko-u-ji. So the u is correct. Kunrei-shiki was developed for Japanese speakers to better-show Japanese grammar and pronunciation, and it can be kind of confusing for non-Japanese speakers. Technically it's the legal romaji, though it's not always used even by Japanese governmental offices.

      However, in Hepburn romanization (which is made to help westerners properly pronounce Japanese syllables), the -o+u has become combined to make an -ō. Thus jou becomes jō, rou becomes rō, and kou becomes kō. Technically, the US cards should say Kōji Uehara. And Ichiro's name is really Ichirō. But typing the ō isn't that easy, so they usually just use o. So, they're both right, kind of.

      Another notable example of this is Tokyo. 東京 is とうきょう (to-u-kyo-u). But we don't write Tōkyō, though some signs in Japan do have this.

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    2. I struggle with foreign languages... but I think I kinda get it. Truly appreciate you taking the time to write out this information.

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    3. I tried to be as simple as I could, though something like this is just really complicated! I'm considering turning this into a whole post of its own at some point.

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