Godzilla Lands in Cali

My collection of Japanese baseball players has expanded exponentially over the past decade.  The main push for this growth has been fellow bloggers sending me care packages featuring guys like Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Shohei Ohtani, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and today's featured athlete: Hideki Matsui (also known as Godzilla).

Kenny over at Torren' Up Cards recently experimented with some PWE's to see how long it would take for them to travel across the Pacific Ocean.

I'm sure glad I was one of the guinea pigs, because inside the first PWE was this signed Matsui card:

2010 Topps Heritage #310

According to Kenny this was signed in Staten Island about ten years ago.  Now normally a card of this magnitude would be the highlight of most care packages, but there was another card that just might have trumped it:

2012 Sega Card-Gen #J12-EX-R06

Matsui only played in Oakland for one season, so you don't see too many cards with him wearing the A's logo.  That in itself makes this card a treasured item in my collection.

But when I flipped it over, I saw the word "Congratulations" written on the back and figured this might be a prize card handed out at a Sega-Gen tournament.  I looked all over the internet to find more information about this card, but couldn't even find it on TCDB.  Well Kenny confirmed it for me.

The first PWE also contained a pair of WBC cards from 2009 featuring Yu Darvish and Hisashi Iwakuma:

The second PWE contained the same duo, but in Card-Gen form.

Thank you Kenny!  When it comes to testing out the postal service, you can use me anytime.

Happy Sunday and sayonara!

Extra Innings

Earlier in the year, I had planned on doing a series called Monday Munchies where I'd test out a bunch of Japanese snacks that Ryan (also known as SumoMenkoMan) sent me.  Well I got distracted and a few of these snacks expired over the summer.

Figured I'd open them up and see if they were still edible.  They were.  The first three snack packs contained vanilla wafers.  The fourth package contained a very similar wafer snack, but it was strawberry flavored.  And the package on the far right contained two grape flavored gummies.  All were yummy... and all contained cards.  Here's what I pulled:

I'm guessing all of these are anime shows or manga titles.  I have heard of Demon Slayer, but haven't watched or read it.  The only one I have seen is Sakamoto Days on Netflix.  It's pretty entertaining.

I still have a few more snacks to try out, so hopefully I can get back on track and post at least one Monday Munchies post each month to end 2025.  Until then...

Thank you Ryan for these snack packs!