1940s Japanese Menko cards?

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by jjbond

Yeah, the more I read, the more fascinating it is to see the difference between Japanese and American collectors. I do think it's only a matter of time until PSA and the perfect condition quest begins to dominate.

What do collectors do with all the unclassified Menko cards? Is this something that is actively sought out (thinking that they would be more rare/unique/valuable than the standard fare), or do people focus on what they can classify with a checklist?

Unfortunately PSA has opened an office in Japan and is slowly creeping its way into the hobby here. On the plus side though (as a guy who collects raw cards), the hobby here is way less focused on condition than people are in the US. I just checked and on Yahoo Auctions (Japan's ebay) there are a little over 300,000 listings in the baseball card category right now. Out of those only 640 are PSA graded cards (zero SCG graded ones, and about a dozen Beckett). Everything else is in its natural state!

Dealers in Japan have also been slow to take up the grading scale used in the US (Mint, nmt, exmt, etc etc). Usually dealers either won't state a card's grade at all, or will use a three tier system (high, medium, low) that really just gives a ballpark estimate.

Menko collecting in Japan is kind of weird though in that Japanese collectors view it as a different category of collectible than baseball cards.

I think this is changing now, mainly due to the influence of American collectors, but it used to be that baseball menko were part of the general "Vintage toy" collecting scene. So the dealers who sold modern baseball cards almost never sold them, and if you wanted to find them you had to go to guys who mainly sold old toys. I wrote a blog post a few months back about one of those dealers, they are quite neat:

https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspo...-in-japan.html

Japanese collectors of menko (not just baseball ones) don't have a good idea of what sets are out there since there are no definitive catalogues. In fact the vintage guide by Engel is the only catalogue of baseball menko out there and it only exists in English, only a few Japanese collectors are even aware of it (this is changing a bit too, more seem to be becoming aware of it).