Vintage Baseball: Learn To Read Japanese

A popular card game here in Japan before video games and TCGs were all the rage was karuta. Kids still play it; it's a great educational tool and it's fun. I'm pretty sure I've explained this before, but for newbies, karuta involves two sets of cards: picture cards and reading cards. The two sets run parallel to each other like so:

The card on the left has a picture of, in this case, a player, with the Japanese character "ra" inside the circle. The right-side card has text. The "ra" is repeated in the upper-right corner, forming the beginning of a word, phrase, or sentence. In this case, it says "raito uchino Chiba senshu", which means, essentially, right fielder, (Shigeru) Chiba. ("uchino" means "our", and "senshu" means player.)

As you can see here and in the rest of this post, the artwork is very attractive. The backs are blank on both reading and picture cards. The background for the reading cards is red with a white catcher line drawing. A similar set is JK 17: 1949 Marumon Karuta, which instead has a right-handed batter in one of two poses. The checklist corresponds to that issue, so it's my belief that this catcher back set is a third parallel or variation.

The cards I got were in pretty poor condition, many missing corners or having some discoloration. They might have been stored in an album of some sort.

Left: a (Hiroyoshi Tsukamoto). Right: to (Toshio Kawanishi).

Left: wi [archaic kana!] (Sadayuki Minagawa). Right: hi (Kazuo Kasahara).

Left: nu (Fumio Fujimura). Right: u (Tsuguo Goto).

Left: wo (Korakuen Fans). Right: no (Zenzo Hasegawa).

Left: ko (Noboru Aota). Right: i (Tokuji Iida).

Left: so (Satoru Sugiyama). Right: o (Hiroshi Oshita).

The "ra" card went into my type collection, while the rest I'll keep in my collection of random vintage Japanese cards. One of these days, I'll pick up a complete old baseball karuta set.

I have a bonus for you in this post. I also picked up a pair of vintage menko. One was really just a milk cap, but I knew that going in. I wanted this card:

It's a cute airplane diecut menko featuring a baseball player in the cockpit. 

The back has the image of the bottom of an airplane, including a Pokeball-looking pair of wheels. I think those are wheels. 61257 is the menko number. It's an uncatalogued menko, but that may because it's a cartoon character instead of related to any particular player or team. It might be related to JDM 3: 1949 Airplane Diecuts, given the basic design. It's a cute addition to my collection, regardless of its origin.

That's all for today! Until next time...

Breaking Bad Bromides (No, Not "Breaking Bad" Bromides)

I love coming across new vintage Japanese cards. It's definitely not easy! Many of the menko and bromide cards in my collection came from US collectors helping me out, so what's left are unknown cards and rare finds. These blank-backed bromides were pretty cheap, but they did come at a price.

I don't know exactly where they were stored, but at least one of them smells like death. Like, seriously rank, God-awful stench. I left them sitting out for several weeks, but even so, after being in a sleeve or box for a while, the smell returns. I might need to leave them out in the sun for a few hours. Thankfully, they're all blank-backed so I can leave them face-down to avoid too much damage. On to the cards.

1950 Marutoku Large Black & White Third Prize Bromide - JBR 9a - Chusuke Kizuka. He's throwing so hard his feet left the ground.

Probably 1950 B&W Type 2 3rd Prize - JBR 2a. Shigeya Iijima. The fans look almost fake, like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a -  Akiharu Tezuka. This is one of three cards from this set I got. I put this one in my type collection.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a - Tetsuharu Kawakami. Seeing a bit of the dugout made this a pretty cool card. This set has at least a few great photos.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a - Takashi Kouchi. Here's another card from the Game set, this time showing some action on the basepaths. Kouchi is the runner, facing the camera. I think the umpire is levitating. And there are some spectators off in the background!

Black and White Small Text Bromides - JBR 124 - Hiroshi Nakao. This fairly standard card also went into my type collection.

Unknown card. Hiroshi Hagiwara. None of Hagiwara's cards match this description. So I have no clue which set it's from.

Unknown card and player. I love the image, but I don't know where it comes from. This card has a slightly glossier top, but it may be from some form of glue or something added by the collector. This has those odd printing/cutting crosshairs, which means it most likely was cut from a larger sheet at a shop or at home.

Probably 1950 B&W Type 3 3rd Prize Premiums (JBR 7a) - Tetsuharu Kawakami. Sadly, this card has some paper loss, but it still has a great image of the stadium in the background. And Kawakami is a legend.

1950 Color with Handwriting Bromide - JBR 89a - Shigeo Ueno. Another card with an interesting background, this one also is colorized! And it has an interesting stylized handwritten-style font. This card also made it to the type collection.

That's all for today! My favorite is probably the Kawakami with the scoreboard in the background. I'm a sucker for scoreboard shots. What's your favorite? Until next time..

Two Vintage, Not Too Vintage

I've recently come across a couple cards I need for my type collection. That's not so strange - there are hundreds of singles in any shop's showcase I need, though they're usually priced higher than I'd like to pay. And tons on Yahoo Auctions, but I'm not scouring through thousands of listings at this point.

But something pops up in a random search, or some card catches my eye, and I end up with a card that's eluded me for the past eight years.

 You might have seen this image on this blog before. This is from Calbee's first set, and it's quite the iconic image. Tigers players Yutaka Enatsu and Tabuchi in a studio shot, with that great 1970s Kodachrome color. I'm assuming it's Kodachrome... is there anything else? Fuji Film, since this is Japan?

Enatsu is one of the greatest pitchers of all time. In 1968, he struck out 401 batters. Even Nolan Ryan couldn't reach that... and the only players who had more than him pitched in the 19th century. He retired with more than 200 wins and nearly 3000 strikeouts over a 17-year career. That's pretty impressive when you realize that for about half of his career, he was a relief pitcher, racking up 193 saves.

Koichi Tabuchi was a home-run hitting catcher for the Tigers, with 474 over his career; in 1973 he hit four consecutive home runs. He was also pretty good behind the plate, with one of the highest caught-stealing rates; he lead the league in this category twice.

This isn't the regular Calbee card, though. That card is pretty valuable and popular, but this is the blank-backed, postcard-sized "large premium" which is much rarer. Unfortunately, this particular card is fairly damaged; you can see some dirt and rough top-right corner. I don't care! I don't remember the last time I actually saw a card from this set, if ever. And I got it for a price far lower than I expected to pay. If this card were in mint condition, it would be worth $700. I didn't pay that. And I'm happy!

Hiromu Matsuoka pitched for the Swallows for nearly 20 years, compiling a nearly-even 191-190 record with a 3.33 ERA, and just barely reaching the 2000-strikeout milestone (he retired with 2008 K's). This card is from the 1976 Yamakatsu Blank Back Green Box set; it's about 7x10 (not a typo), making this quite large. It's too narrow to fit in a US 8x10 photo frame, though the image is too large for a 5x7-centered matte... such is life. I'm not framing it anyway, though as a kid I bet I would have.

Yamakatsu issued a bunch of these oversized cards, but identifying them is difficult. I was glad to find that I really did need an example from this particular set, and even happier to pick it up for just a couple dollars. I was looking for Calbee over the New Years holidays and saw it hanging on the wall at a card shop. A quick check of the (blank) back, and a much more scrutinizing look at Engel's vintage guide, confirmed that it was from a set I hadn't seen yet!

Now if I could only find some of those other 1970s Calbee cards I need for my type collection, and one of those Holograph hologram cards from 1989. And all those other oddball vintage cards.

Until next time!

Vintage: Pop Culture, 1960s Japan Style

Topps has been producing its Allen & Ginter line since 2006. This will be its 15th year; that's a long time for a secondary card brand. I would guess that they never thought it would last so long after other throwback lines like Topps206 and Cracker Jack were only successful for a couple series.

But A&G is popular because it balances baseball with pop culture. That's exactly why I like it, too. However, even today I see people complain about the inclusion of subjects like eggs and gamblers; you'd think that after 15 years people would know what to expect.

And what they probably don't realize about sets like Allen & Ginter and Goodwin Champions is that the multi-sport/pop culture nature of the checklists is an homage to the original releases. The original Allen & Ginter N28 set included only ten baseball players in a set of forty sports personalities. And the other two sets they issued with baseball stars had only six players in each 50-card set.

The cards below come from a similar set issued in Japan. Most vintage Japanese collectors already know that a lot of the 1950s and 1960s sets (especially menko) included cartoon characters or other pop culture subjects. This is the JGA 149: c. 1962 Sideways Playing Card set.

JGA 149 has an unknown manufacturer, and was issued in either 1962 or 1963. The 44-card set includes movie and TV stars, sumo wrestlers, and of course, baseball players. The set came on two uncut sheets, each with 22 cards. It doesn't include typical menko symbols, so it rightfully isn't classified as a menko card. However, I'm guessing it was distributed similarly to menko, or it could have been a premium (prize).

Like many menko and other game cards of the era, the cards were distributed as sheets, and later cut into individual cards. The backs are identical and styled similarly to a playing card. The kanji below the playing card image is the player's last name. Usually, the position is included, too. The card above is for Katsuya Nomura, but his position isn't included on the card due to space concerns.

The key card in the set is Sadaharu Oh, who you see on the left, above. His name is only one kanji character, so his position follows. On the right is Masaichi Kaneda, and the last two characters represent his position as well.

I'm missing two baseball players: Shigeo Nagashima (7 of Spades) and Yoshio Yoshida (10 of Hearts). For some reason, Engel's latest guide values the Oh card at twice the value of Nagashima; in Japan it would probably be the other way around, or they would at least be equally valued.

My six-card lot included two sumo wrestlers and Superman.

As little interest as I have in sumo wrestling, I think it would be neat to have a set of the uncut sheets!

Until next time...

Return of the Goodwin Champion

I don't usually get my eBay purchases in-hand.

I don't show a lot of US cards here because I get my cards from Sportlots, COMC, and eBay, and I have to rely on sellers' scans or do without. 

From time to time, I win an auction from an "international" seller. I don't mean a seller who ships internationally; I'm not paying $25 to get a card shipped to Japan when it's about 1/8th that price to ship to a US address. I'm talking about Asian, European, or even occasional Canadian sellers with the same shipping price to Japan as the States. 

Such is the case with that Goodwin Champions card I showed recently. I forgot that I bought it from a British seller and had it shipped to me, so the original post showed the eBay image.

 And here it is in full 300 or 600 dpi glory. I forgot which resolution my scanner defaults to. But here it is! The pinhole is more noticeable in the scan than in reality, and I'm still worried about the light-blue copper-ish deposits on the back. But boy do Goodwin Champions cards look nice!

One reason I decided to repost this card was the inclusion of the seller's business card, if you can call it that.

This is No. 10? I'm curious what the other cards look like. The text on the back is quite humorous, too, if a bit blue-collared. I wonder if anyone's ever taken him up on his alligator castration services. This card is definitely a keeper, too!

Goal Complete: Nolan Ryan

This lovely card marks the completion of another of this year's goals. The goal was to have every Topps flagship regular (non-subset) Nolan Ryan card from 1972 through 1994. I picked up the 1973 and 1974 cards at the end of December, and the 1975 single in mid-January. I finally tracked down an affordable copy in decent-enough shape from the 1972 set, and now I'm much closer to completing a full run of Ryan's Topps cards. Of course, what I've paid for all the cards from 1972 to 1994 will probably be less than the 1968 rookie card.

Let's see if I can get the 1969, 1970, and 1971 cards in the bag by the end of the year!

Vintage Beauties: More than a Handful of Bromides

I continue my hunt for vintage. I love getting these old cards, regardless of condition! I pounced on cheap lots and oddball singles a few times last month, and these are just some of the spoils.

 Toshitake Nakayama from the Dragons. I believe this is either from JBR 42 or JBR 17. JBR 42, 1956 Yamakatsu Tobacco Menko Sized, identifies Nakayama as being a left-hand pitcher at the end of his delivery. This set doesn't seem to have the "player" title after the name, as seen above (four characters in the left column instead of just two in the sample scan). JBR 17 is the 1957 Tobacco Menko Sized set, and recognizes two variations where the 8 in his jersey is partially obscured but his left hand is visible. There is no description of the writing on the front, but there may be only one column in the example scan.

 Hiroshi Oshita of the Lions. I can't figure this card out so it might be uncatalogued. It seems to match the description of his card in JBR 16, but the style isn't exactly right.

 Giants player Tetsuharu Kawakami. Like the Oshita card, I can't identify this. That said, both of them seem to match the JCM 131 menko issues in terms of front design. They don't appear to be separated menko cards, though. It's possible this is JBR 18, but the text isn't quite right.

 Another Giants. Again, a card that resembles a menko without the menko back: this looks like JCM 26.

 What happened to the borders on this card scan? Again, Giants.

 Hey, not a Giants! Instead, this is superstar Masaichi Kaneda. Don't know who he is? Check out his Wikipedia article for some details. Again, I believe this is a card from JBR 18.

 Hiroshima Carp non-batboy standing by the bat rack. Too bad there isn't more detail in the background. This should be Makoto Kozuru from the aforementioned JBR 17 set.

 Okajima of the Dragons, also from JBR 17. The corners on this card have been clipped, not exactly evenly but it is unique.

 Another Kawakami card. And again, this matches JBR 17.

 From the Dragons. I'm pretty sure this is Sadao Kondo from JBR 2a (1950 B&W Type II 3rd Prize Premiums).

 Here's another one of those tiny cards! This is from LiLi (ririi) Gum. It's small as it is, and that print next to the player's head on the right is miniscule. I have to wonder how they did it.

LiLi Gum's set came out around 1960. Each pack included one piece of gum. The front of my card depicts Shigeru Fujio of the Giants. Back text indicate that there were more cards than the 18 that were released.

And that's it for now! I find myself picking up more and more vintage cards - menko, bromides, and game cards - because they are so beautiful and identifying them is an adventure of its own!