30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Twenty-three Thousand Words

A few years ago, Ryan over at This Card is Cool offered to help me out with my Japanese trading card collection.  It's a fairly simple process.  He picks up items he thinks I'd enjoy over the course of a year or two... and after he has enough stuff worthy of a package... I pay him and he ships them across the Pacific.


I paid $125 for the most recent package and it was worth every penny.  To put things into perspective... I spent almost three hours sifting through all of these goodies and scanning the images in this post.  That's three hours of pure entertainment.

You know the old adage... a picture is worth a thousand words... so tonight I'll keep the writing to a minimum... and let the pictures do the talking.

1991 BBM Baseball

Three down.  One card to go.

Hideki Matsui Sticker Sheet

Godzilla has landed in San Jose.

2002 Japan National Team Set

2001 Kirin Cup Pin Set

Two huge additions to my Samurai Blue PC.

2011 and 2014 Real Venus Sets

Japanese women and sports.  Two of my favorite things in life.


More Japanese women.  Newscasters?  Love 'em!

1997 Bandai Mr. C.B. Set

Mr. Ed has nothin' on Mr. C.B.


Hello kitty.


Round one of unopened packs.  More ladies.  Yes!


Round two of unopened packs.  Ryan gets the chips.  I get the cards


Round three of unopened packs.  Two of my students' favorite things:  video games and anime.


More anime... although not quite sure if this calendar is classroom appropriate.

1994 The Petty Girl Set

More ladies and definitely not classroom appropriate.


Round four of unopened packs.  Four new additions to my unopened baseball card pack collection.


Smells old.  Looks old.  Feels old.  I'm gonna guess that this huge disc is old.  By the way... in case you forgot... old = awesome.

2012 Panini Cooperstown #15

Speaking of awesome.  Meet the newest addition to my Gwynn binder.

2014 BBM Wings of Gold Set

Another set filled with lovely Japanese ladies... and some guys who like to wear leotards.


Oh my!  That's Sadaharu himself... and five guys I don't recognize.  Oh well.  This piece of cardboard is sweet!


And wrapping things up are a bunch of random cards ranging from vintage soccer to baseball mascots.

Thanks Ryan for helping me out again.  I had a blast going through this package and flipping through all of these awesome pieces of Japanese cardboard.

If you ever need some American cardboard... just say the word and I'll start gathering up some stuff for you.  But I wouldn't blame you if you prefer ripping packs of BBM and Calbee instead of Topps and Panini.

Happy Saturday and sayonara!

7 comments:

Zippy Zappy said...

That's quite a package from Ryan.

Next time ask him to send you Juicy Honey cards ;). lol.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic! I'm looking forward to seeing what's in those packs.

Ryan G said...

Fuji: I'm happy that you're happy! It's always fun just finding all this stuff for you, though I must say that I haven't really found anything this year other than the small package you received in June. Kenny's suggestion to send you Juicy Honey cards might be a joke, but you never know - something like that might end up headed your way!

The disc is from the 1970s, It's a 1976 Mitsuya disc, to be exact. They come in different sizes which seem to have different rarities but in Japan everything old is pretty rare.

The super-colorful cards with barcode tops are Aikatsu cards, a game that seems to be finally losing popularity here. And the Love Live calendar was an exclusive item from Sega, but I happened to get two of them. If you have questions about any of this, don't hesitate to ask!

Tony L. said...

Did you get any cards of the Shimizu J-Pulse? I love that team name, even if I have no idea if the J-Pulse is any good these days (or ever were, to be fair)!

NPB Card Guy said...

The other guys on that cardboard die with Sadaharu Oh are Shigeo Nagashima (#90), Masaichi Kaneda (#34), Koichi Tabuchi (#22), and Koji Yamamoto (#8). I think the other guy (#41) is Kenichi Yazawa but I'm not sure. Nagashima and Kaneda as shown as the managers of the Giants and the Orions respectively so that would date this to between 1975 and 1978.

I like the fact that the faces of the die have the "rock-paper-scissors" symbols on them as well, just like a lot of menko cards do. I should probably try to find one of these for myself...

Fuji said...

Zippy - Looked up Juicy Honey... very interesting.

shlabotnik - Me too. I'll get around to them sooner or later. Just started to reorganize my binders. As soon as that project is finished, I'll be ready to start adding new cards to them.

ryan - thanks again for all of your help. The disc is awesome. Thanks for the background on it. Any info on the sweet Sadaharu Oh die?

tony - i'm going to guess that I didn't. I sorted all of the singles into teams, but didn't see any of their cards. however... since i don't read japanese... i might be wrong.

npb - thanks for the background on the die. i don't have many sadaharu oh cards, so this one was extra special.

Ryan G said...

Fuji - I don't know anything other than what NPB Card Guy told you. It was pretty cheap, but recently I've seen some offered for sale at much higher prices. Then again, everything "vintage" here is very volatile.

NPB Card Guy: I didn't know you didn't have one! I thought one had been mailed out to you in the past... if I do have another extra I'll put it aside for you; I can also check the little shop that had them before next time I'm in that area. It's not a card shop but some random little shop near Ueno.