They Aren't Baseball: More Non-Sport and Multi-Sport

 Depending on your tastes, you might not like my posts for the next couple of days.

I'm really working hard to finish off several of the sets on my want lists. For US cards, those are basically baseball, but here in Japan, I've come across several non-sport and non-baseball sets that I've been working on tracking down. 

This is no easy task. Finding major-issue singles, like from the 1995 and 1996 BBM sets, is hard enough. But looking for relatively obscure cards from random issues from the same period is even more difficult.

If you don't know what Evangelion is, you probably don't know modern Japanese culture. It's one of the most well-known anime of all time, and after an initial one-series run, has seen multiple movies released over the past 20 years or so. The latest one should be in Japanese theaters this year. When it was originally released, several different card sets, some with multiple series, were rushed out in varying formats. The Death/Rebirth Widevision series might have actually been printed by Topps' factories, though it doesn't carry any logos from them. For the longest time, I've been one card short of a full set, including the SPs. Finally, I made a bit of a revelation. There is a second Widevision set, and distinguishing the two can be a bit tough. But one of my identifiers turned out to be wrong, and after checking that Rei wasn't in the other Widevision set, I grabbed this card as fast I could. One card, one set crossed off the list.

These two cards have holographic backgrounds. It's hard to tell on the white card, but it's there. Sega (yes, the game company) was involved in this issue; it might have been two series or just one, but either way it's a 108-card set. I thought I was missing only three cards: these two and one more higher-numbered card. But after getting these and checking my collection, it seems as though I might be missing four more instead of just one. I believe the three I'm missing are regular cards, and it's possible I have at least some of them in a box back at my apartment (yes, I'm still on the road). 

At least one of these next two cards might look familiar to you.

These two essentially unnumbered cards were included in a 2006 issue of SCM magazine, and were the last two I wanted for my collection. I picked this Reiko Shiota up earlier this year, but I now have  second copy, which came with this:

Kumiko Ogura makes my SCM collection complete. The Shiota card has a #0 on the front, while this has a #11, but I'm not so sure those are meant to be card numbers, as I had first guessed. Instead, I think they might be "jersey" numbers. Eitheer way, I'm happy this multi-year adventure has finally drawn to a close.

While searching for the Tough & Smile cards, I came across two promo cards from the Badminton box set "Be Active" issued in 2008. 

The cards have identical backs. There are two things advertised on each card: a photo book titled "Ogushio!" that was sold for 1000 yen, and the Be Active box set, sold for 3990 yen. I didn't know about the existence of these promos, but I figured they would be a nice accompaniment to the base Be Active set I already have.

While I wasn't able to finish all three sets, two are done, and the other may need more cards, but it needs easier-to-find cards. So, until next time....

It's Just a T-Shirt

 There aren't many American cards I don't know about. I don't mean I've memorized my 2008 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards from cover to cover, and I can't tell you how many cards were in the 1952 Topps set, and honestly the 1990 Donruss set just has way too many meaningless variations. But I know how to find information about sets, cards, and players pretty easily using the multitude of resources available to me. (And I have at least flipped through every page of the Beckett Almanac I bought back in 2003.) 

Japan is a different question. You must think I'm a broken record when I talk about this, and it's definitely become a cliché on this blog. But even for modern sets issued by major manufacturer BBM, there just is no comprehensive guide out there. So I was a little surprised to see this card pop up on Yahoo Japan Auctions:

Rie Tanaka is perhaps the most famous Japanese female gymnast in the past 20 years. She's certainly the most popular. She has appeared in several of BBM's Real Venus sets and even had her own box set issued in 2013. I don't know of any other gymnast who has received their own full set.

This card features a piece of cloth cut from a t-shirt she wore inside a gymnasium. I'm pretty sure she just wore it for the photo, though it comes from the university where she used to teach. It is identified as a "practice shirt", but how often do gymnasts practice routines in t-shirts? Perhaps it was worn during workouts or warm-ups.

The card itself is from the 2012 BBM Real Venus set, but wasn't included in packs. Instead, it is a "Fuji Television Limited" card. I have no clue how it was distributed, nor have I tried to find out. I know there was at least one other year where promotional memorabilia cards were issued. I should note that Real Venus has no memorabilia cards in the regular packs.

This card is numbered 112/200, and has card number RVM-R. There is a patch version numbered out of 20 copies, using the logo found on the front. It is possible there are more promo relic cards out there that I don't know about. But if there are, I don't know about them.

Did I make you laugh?

This isn't my first Rie Tanaka relic card, nor my first Tanaka shirt relic card. The 2013 box set included several relics, and I've found a black shirt, a blue shirt, and a leotard from that issue. There's also a towel and another leotard relic I'm on the lookout for.

Down to One

 A long time ago, there was a magazine called SCM. Well, not that long ago. The last issue came out in 2017. SCM stands for Sports Card Magazine, and it was the Japanese equivalent of Beckett. It had previews of upcoming sets, articles on featured sets or players, and a price guide which rotated through different prices - Calbee sets, BBM sets, soccer sets.

It was issued by BBM, which brings up questions of confict of interest; a card manufacturer produced the magazine listing card values for their cards. But, then, the prices in the magazine were supposedly provided by JSCA (Japan Sports Card Association), which after some research, seems to be the card shop association, or possibly associated with or run by Mint (the major chain of card shops here in Japan). Which, too, brings up several questions about conflict of interest and price fixing.

But that's not the point of this post. Also found in the magazine were cards. Some cards had original designs, but others served as previews for new or upcoming releases. Since the magazine was produced by BBM, the cards inside were also BBM cards. And because BBM produces sets for a wide range of sports, the promo cards also cover the range of sports from baseball to wrestling. NPB Card Guy has a comprehensive list on his blog.

I soon took notice of SCM promos as I visited card shops (and the Weekly Baseball promos as well), and eventually realized that there were more than just baseball cards in those magazines. As a collector of women in sports cards, I made it a goal to get as many as I could featuring female athletes, and eventually, thanks to Dave's list, I was able to have a definitive list of cards to seek out.

There are about 75 cards, and I was able to find all of them except for the badminton cards from Issue 60. Four total cards were found in that set: one soccer card and three badminton cards previewing an upcoming box set. The team card featuring nine players wasn't too tough to track down, but the two single-player cards have been tough.

After setting the two cards on my watch list, I've sat, waited, and watched for over a year, and finally, late last year, Reiko Shiota's card came up in auction. It is number 0, but otherwise has no hint that it came from SCM. 

So that leaves Kumiko Ogura. The hunt remains on, and hopefully it won't take another year to finish it off. Though, perhaps, I should check through that checklist again to be sure I haven't missed anything...

From Event to Hand, and a new NPB Ballpark

Last summer, Japan was hot. Records were broken, and records probably melted, too. An old iPod Touch I used as an alarm clock actually broke open from the heat melting the glue holding it all together (the battery didn't explode, and the iPod was powered down and not plugged in at the time). This was inside my apartment, mind you.

I was in Sapporo, which is in Japan's northernmost prefecture. It's cooler up there, but that didn't stop things from being quite warm. And as I mentioned a few days ago, a lack of air conditioning in my apartment meant that I was staying up until about 3 AM most nights when it was cool enough to actually go to sleep.

That strange sleep schedule and the extreme heat meant I didn't do a lot of what I would have liked to do. I made it to a few touristy places, and I did spend a lot of time walking around the downtown Sapporo area and Nakajima Park. But I didn't take any of my planned day trips or overnight trips, and I didn't get to any baseball games.

I didn't get to any baseball games, but I did end up at Sapporo Dome before a game one day. And like most baseball games here, some of the cheerleaders were performing outside the stadium prior to the game starting. With some time to kill before continuing on with that day's plans, I stuck around and watched a few minutes of the show, where I saw Tomoka:

I caught her name when they did a sort of roll-call/introduction thing after the first dance number. She's cute, of course, but I liked her personality; she was really cheerful (wow, a cheerful cheerleader!) and really seemed to enjoy what she was doing. Other performers often just go through the motions, especially for these smaller performances. So she stood out in the group.

A bit of searching later through the Fighter's website, I could properly get her name, and found this official autograph through Yahoo Japan Auctions. And that's the story of how Tomoka's card ended up in my collection.

Photo credit to whoever took this photo. I have no idea.

Sticking with the Fighters, back in November, the Fighters announced details on building a new ballpark. It will be located in Kitahiroshima, a city on the outskirts of Sapporo, with a retractable roof and big glass wall. The stadium is still about four years away, but if you are interested in seeing a baseball game at Sapporo Dome, I would start figuring that into your plans.

Sapporo Dome is an interesting ballpark, though actual baseball there is unimpressive. The real draw to me is being able to go up to the observation deck to see out into Sapporo, or get a unique view of the field below. The stadium does have some unique features which allow it to be converted from baseball (artificial turf) to soccer (natural grass), but the baseball experience wasn't that special from the stadium perspective. I did like the proximity to Sapporo proper; the staidum could be accessed after a short walk from a subway station.

I do hope that the new ballpark has a lot of good fan experience areas planned, including restaurants and a museum (Sapporo Dome has a small free exhibit area that includes baseball, soccer, and entertainment artifacts). And I really hope the transportation situation is better; traveling further by train means there should be less walking, and they'll have to take frequency/capacity into consideration as well.

Details on the stadium are here including some artist renderings.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

A couple months ago, I picked up a relic card of snowboarder Karen Iwadore. It was a plaid Santa costume, and as I mentioned in the post there are two more cards.

Here's one of those:

This time, I get the red Santa suit!

There is one more card, but it's a dual relic with both costumes, so there's nothing really new there. If I get it, I get it, but I'm happy with just these two!

Until next time...

Quad Signature Wrestlers!

BBM's Woman's Pro-Wrestling card sets have offered multi-signed cards as part of their releases, but none of them have really piqued my interest until this year.

Two quad-signed cards featuring wrestlers from a couple groups have proven to be pretty popular, and with a pretty low print run, they aren't exactly easy to find.

The card I have added to my collection is below:

 Up Up Girls originated as a Japanese idol music group, but has since spawned offshoot groups. One of those is the pro wrestling team of the same name. For what I can tell, only these four girls are in the group, and often just wrestle each other. It also seems that they work in tag team matches at least some of the time.

Up Up Girls actually got their start in 2011, from mega-producers Hello Project (you might have heard of Morning Musume?). They mostly performed as a group of seven, but two members have recently "graduated" and haven't been replaced - the group of five has continued performing as of last fall.

There's not much out there about the groups. It seems that the original idol group (or a recent spinoff?) focuses on having muscles and weightlifting, while the pro-wrestling group sings and dances... and wrestles. It's all quite confusing. And like there's some story-line similar to wrestling in the US. Really, after investing in this card, I should probably do a bit more research. They are still wrestling - I found news summarizing their matches from last weekend.

Anyway, the card is #32/40.

The other group I'm interested in is called Team Date. They've wrestled under the Ice Ribbon promotional group since 2017, and are all MMA artists from 14-21 years old (yes - one member is in junior high school). The members are Hana-Date, Karen-Date, Nao-Date, and Nori-Date; they all appear named along with their group. Date is pronounced in the traditional English way (i.e. "I'm going on a date with Britney tonight.").

Team Date's card is tougher to find. Even so, I hope to add one to my collection soon - I'd rather get the quad-signature card than try to chase down the four single-signed cards!

Until next time...

Finally Answering the Question: What do you put in a snowboarder's relic card?

If you're making a card for the Real Venus set, it doesn't need to be a piece of snowboard.

When it comes to BBM's Real Venus set, there isn't much to expect. There's a base set and insert set, some parallels, and a few variations of autographed cards. Really, BBM doesn't do much with relics at all, which to me says that it's more expensive or difficult to make a relic card than an autograph card. I guess when all of your autographs are stickers, it's pretty simple, right?

In 2013, BBM did make a relic card for one of its Real Venus subjects. Karen Iwadore was the poster athlete for the set, and had some special cards made with her wearing various cute Christmas costumes.

 #FSM is a "Fuji Television Limited" card with a swatch of a felty plaid Santa dress. This card is serial numbered #060/200.

She also had a card in SCM Magazine, wearing a standard cute red Santa dress. This wasn't a relic.

If you're looking for more cards of Iwadore cosplaying as Ms. Claus, there's an autographed card #SA numbered to 30 copies. Relic cards of the red dress are also found in packs, serial numbered to 200 copies; also found in packs is a dual-relic card with both costumes #/20.

I guess the answer to "What do you put in a snowboarder's relic card?" is: a Santa costume. I don't think I want Shaun White's relic card.

If You Don't Know You Want It, Do You Still Want It?

The thrill of the chase is really step two.

How do you figure out what cards you want? There are definitions to any collection. Maybe you only collect Topps cards with three-digit prime numbers whose subjects were born outsde of the continental United States. Maybe you chase acetate inserts, or collect every card issued under the Donruss name. Maybe you have a type collection or player collection. Or maybe you want everything. 

But I'm not talking about definitions. I mean discovery. I want all of Buck Farmer's trading cards. It's no easy task, but at least most of his cards show up on eBay pretty quickly, and I'm thus quickly alerted to its existence. And the Trading Card Database and Beckett's database both have decent records for mainstream stuff.

Japanese cards are another question, though. TCDB is far from complete when it comes to MLB issues, and even farther behind for NPB sets. Even Japanese collecting experts are still figuring out many checklists; modern releases might be easier, but until last year, BBM didn't post reliable information about parallels in its sets.

And then there are promo cards. I would gather that NPB Card Guy's SCM list is the most comprehensive in existence, but gaps still remain. And for all the work he's put in, I still am not sure if my want list for that set is complete.

I found this card last weekend:

This is headed for my Women In Sports collection, namely the big stack of cards from the SCM releases which feature women in sports.

There could be more cards on that checklist that I want which I don't have on my lists. I don't know. Which makes me wonder: should I keep searching SCM stacks if/when I do finally find the last few cards I know I want?

So how do you know what you want? How do you create those lists? I might expand on this myself in a future post.

New Wrestling Autographs

No Hulk Hogan here, so don't get your hopes up.

What you will find, instead, are some of the new Japanese autographs I picked up at last weekend's card show. Because all I ever seem to get these days are Japanese cards... maybe that's because I live in Japan.

It makes sense, after all.

While I was primarily looking for 2018 autographs, I did get two cards from 2013's set for my mini-collection.

 First is Nagisa Nozaki, who essentially scribbled some circles for her autograph. I'm not really sure what she was going with in that signature. Nagisa has been in and out of wrestling since 2006, now with "Pro Wrestling Wave" promotional group.

 Next is Moeka Haruhi. She's been all over entertainment, also serving as a gravure idol, voice actress, and general celebrity. She too is with Pro Wrestling Wave, at least through last March.

 Moving on to the 2018 autographs, this is Azusa Christie. Or Christie Azusa, as she signed her name. Or Azusa Takigawa. Her Japanese Wikipedia page mentions that she was a cheerleader for the Chiba Lotte Marines, so there's a baseball connection here. Given her age, she probably doesn't have any baseball cards, but now she has wrestling cards, so it's all good.

 Here we have Mitsuru Konno. Despite her all-business expression here, it seems like she's more friendly most of the time. I doubt I'd like to get on her bad side, regardless. Apparently she has other things going on so she doesn't compete very often.

Let's end with Kaho Kobayashi, who hails from Kasukabe. That doesn't sound important, but it's very close to where I used to work and live, so she's a "hometown" girl. Like Larisa Oleynik (Santa Clara County) and Nick Markakis (Woodstock, GA).

Kobayashi's Wikipedia page is quite comprehensive, as I believe it lists every single event she has ever participated in. Seriously, that thing is detailed, at least through February 9 of this year. It looks like she is or was in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her entrance song is Johnny B. Goode; how cool is that?

Until next time...

One Card = Two Cards

When it comes to the Olympics, there are two sports I really look forward to: figure skating in the winter, and gymnastics in the summer. They are art in motion, plainly put.

It doesn't hurt that the US has had some really good competitors in these sports. I could probably ramble off at least a dozen names between the two sports (in no particular order, women only):

1. Dominique Moceanu
2. Dominique Dawes
3. Shannon Miller
4. Simone Biles
5. Kerri Strug
6. Carly Patterson
7. Gabrielle Douglas
8. Aly Raisman
9. Tonya Harding
10. Nancy Kerrigan
11. Sasha Cohen
12. Nastia Liukin
13. Shawn Johnson

Thanks to sets like Goodwin Champions and Allen & Ginter, I've managed to accumulate several relics and autographs of the US's best. Yes, the Topps Olympics sets and some Leaf and Panini issues have contributed hits of Olympians as well. My newest acquisitions are these two relics of McKayla Maroney.

I don't have the cards in-hand; they are at my mom's house. But I believe that Maroney gave a leotard or warm-ups to Topps for these relic cards, rather than just a T-shirt or pair of jeans. Honestly, I would have been happy with just one card, but the seller was offering these as a pair, and patience is not my middle name. Besides, I now have two color swatches for the same card.

I do know Aly Raisman's relics in 2016 Goodwin Champions are from a leotard, which I think makes them so much better than most memorabilia cards in sets like Americana. Maroney and Raisman are athletes, and as such, their memorabilia cards should reflect that. (Side note: Kerri Strug's relics are from a warm-up jacket, and Sasha Cohen's are from a warm-up shirt).

McKayla has a relation to baseball, in a way - she tossed out the first pitch at a White Sox game in 2014:

That event got her a baseball card in Topps' First Pitch set (I miss that set; I hope it makes a comeback soon). She also threw out the first pitch with her gymnastics teammates in Dodger Stadium in 2012:

Until next time...

2018-18 V. League (Women) Revisited: A Trio of Autographs

It didn't take too long for me to get samples of all of the different hits in the V. League set. That's mainly because one seller listed a whole ton of them at the same time. I got outbid on a few cards, but then I just went back and found another from the same set.

So here they are:

 First is a sticker autograph. As you can see in the lower-left corner, this is serial-numbered out of 25. The sticker fits pretty well, so it's hard to tell. The card itself is flat, despite the 3D design. The card number is in the upper-right front, and the player's photo appears on the front and back; her jersey number, name, position, and team name are below the signature.

 "Photo and Autographed" does have a die-cut portion where a photo is included. I'll never understand why photo cards (and those cheap "Life Photograph" things that evolved from bromides) are so popular here. The image quality really isn't any better; perhaps looking through a magnifying glass it would be.

Anyway, these too are sticker autographs, and if you enlarge the image, you can see that the sticker itself is off-center. I wonder if that was intentional to make the signature more vertical. Cards are numbered out of 30, and the player's name and team appear on the photo itself, while the back includes a general team photo. I figure they printed one card type for each team and just glued in the photo and added the sticker for each player.

Authentic Autographs are the final part of the trio - these have a raised frame surrounding an autographed piece of paper. The paper is similar to that used on autograph boards in Japan ("framed paper"). These are numbered out of 25, and feature a photo of the player on the front (top-left corner) and back, with her jersey number, name, position, and team on the front. The back mentions "hasamikomi" which generally means to pinch, but also to insert - essentially the Japanese version of a "cut" signature.

That about wraps up the V. League set, so until next time...

Card Gallery: 2017-18 V-Premier Women's League Official Trading Cards

Given the relative obscurity of this set, I figured it'd be good to provide a visual checklist. Sorry, right now I don't have time to translate the names or include card numbers, but I might go back and do that some time. All cards are in order.

One thing that's very visible here but I didn't mention in yesterday's post is that the players are grouped by team, and then sorted by jersey number.