New Foreigners in Japan: May Edition

As team sets are released, my "gaijin" collection grows bit by bit. Here are additions from the last couple weeks of May:

 Neil Wagner and Fabio Castillo joined the Lions this year. Wagner is being used as a situational reliever, with 26 games already under his belt but less than 25 innings. Castillo has only 10 games with 56 innings and a 4-3 record so far.

 Chun-Lin Kuo isn't exactly new, but his cards are few and far between. Actually, he hasn't played yet this year at the top level, and only has three games with the farm team.

 Moving on to the Carp, Batista is batting near .290 with six home runs and 19 RBI in 27 games (they've played over 50, so he's only appearing in half of the games). Campos has 15 games and about 15 innings with an ERA just under 3.00.

 Finally, only one newbie with the Giants, Taylor Jungmann. As a starter, he's 6-2 in ten appearances with a beautiful 1.42 ERA. He's averaging 1 earned run a game and yet still has two losses - either he's had a couple blowouts or he needs some run support. He does have one complete game shutout so far this season.

So that's it for now! Until next time...

2007 Sakurado Miss Flash Complete Set (2006 Miss Flash)

This fifteen-card set was released in a box along with a video and some other goodies, but you're here for cards, right?

So there are the cards at the top, a button and a strap, a DVD, the special card, and the large "life photo" print. My scanner chopped off the right edge of this scan.

 Loose in the box was a special card. I'm not sure exactly what options were there, but I'm guessing single-signed and multi-signed cards could be found.

 My loose card, as you see, was a "print autograph" card, serial numbered 006/500.

Before getting to the base set, Flash is a photo magazine focusing on pretty girls - celebrities, models, etc. - cover girls these days are members of idol groups, but others can be found inside. Miss Flash is a beauty pageant started by the magazine in 2006. This card set features the winner, runners-up, and Jury Special Award winners from that first competition. (Miki was the winner, Natsuki and Ako runners-up, and Yuki won the special award.) Despite the competition being in 2006, the set has a 2007 copyright, so it must have been released early in the year.

There are 15 regular cards. Each of the four ladies in the set have three cards each, with the remaining three cards featuring group photos. Here is the base set:

With each model getting three cards, there are six solo photos for each. The quad cards feature two photos each, with a total of five different outfits (card 14 has the same costumes on front and back). I wonder if any costume cards were made for this set.

Anyway, 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...