Identifying Japanese Bromides (Starffin, Kawakami et al)

[Frankish]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you so much. You are very generous with your time.

And of course you are right...silly mistake on my part with Robins and Flyers. Sometimes as I'm writing from my notes I manage to confuse myself hopelessly.

Originally Posted by Jeff Alcorn

The bottom left P next to Shigeaki Kuroo should not be Fujiwara. The only Fujiwara in Japanese BB in 1947 or 1948 was Dragons C Tetsunosuke Fujiwara.

That is very interesting. So would it make sense that the bottom left picture (page 11) is then Tetsunosuke Fujiwara? It is a little hard to read but along the top margin of the card is printed:

中部 藤原

Thanks again!

[doug.goodman]

What a great great thread this is. Thank you all.

[Frankish]

Well, my research break was shorter than planned thanks to Jeff's generous help. The knowledge lurking on this board never fails to impress me....

Page 12 of the album begins with some familiar faces from Page 11. In the upper left is Giichiro Shiraki along with (and this may be wrong as I am having a tough time reading it) Maeda, although embarrassingly I can’t find them on the same roster so am not sure of the year. Probably a dumb oversight on my part. [Thanks to Jeff, I now know this is again Hisanori Karita] To the right of that bromide are two cards of Shigeaki Kuroo on the Flyers.

The second row begins on the left with a player that reads (to me) as Minagawa, but I am not sure who that is. Any ideas? [Sadayuki Minagawa, shortstop 1948] To the upper center is a miniature card with no text (and as a result I have no idea!) and to the far upper right another card of Maeda? [Actually it is Hisanori Karita] Again, I find it hard to read. In the middle row below that are cards of Oshita and what I take to be Eikichi Nagamochi, a player I don’t come across often.

The bottom two cards are also Hiroshi Oshita, one of my favorite players. But I will have more on that for the next page in the album.

The bromides appear to be 1947 or 1948 issues (based on uniforms and the like), which is consistent with this album generally which I am guessing was put together by the original owner in late 1948 or 1949.

[Frankish]

Hiroshi Oshita is my favorite ballplayer from the early postwar period in Japan. He debuted on the Senators. And if the fact that one of the eight teams making up the 1946 Japanese Baseball League was named the Senators doesn’t speak volumes about the odd relationship between Japan and the US during the early postwar/occupation period, I don’t know what does. Anyway, in his rookie season he hit .281 and set a home run record (20). In 1949 he would go on to bat .305 with 38 home runs and a .626 slugging percentage.

He was hugely popular and famously used a blue-painted bat (the other great hitter of that period, Tetsuhara Kawakami, played with a red bat). He had a lifetime batting average of .303 and hit 201 home runs. His career statistics might have been even more impressive if he hadn’t missed a prime stretch of playing years as an officer in the war.

This thirteenth page of the album is made up of nine Oshita cards. Five of the bromides picture him in his dark 1946 Senators uniform and are clearly what I would deem rookie cards from 1947 bromide sets (although "rookie" cards in Japanese sets can be tricky to define). The other four cards picture him the Tokyu Flyers uniform, presumably from the 1947 season. There are two very distinctive cards on this page. The center card may be from the pretty rare 1947 Marutsu Small Photo Set (JBR 152), while the card in upper left of the page bears a great deal of similarity but is as far as I can tell yet uncatalogued.

Ironically (or sadly or coincidentally…I don’t know), this all time Flyer great was actually training as a kamikaze pilot when the war ended.

I've attached some closeups of cards that I don't see very often and strike me as attractive....

[Frankish]

Page 14 continues the album with some more Oshita cards and one cool card from the 1947 Marui Decorative set, I believe.

The non-Oshita card appears to be Flyer's player Eikichi Nagamochi. Sadly, I'm limited to books and research about Japanese baseball written in English. If I were younger or smarter, I would learn to read Japanese and expand my resources greatly. But for now all that I can find out about Nagamochi is that his twelve year career was entirely post-war (1946-57), starting with the Senators (which would become the Flyers and eventually the Fighters) and finishing with the Hiroshima Carp.

[Frankish]

The research chugs along….

Page 15 hosts the last two Oshita bromides (upper right and middle left). I particularly like the pose on the latter as it reminds me of one of the great American hitters but I can’t quite place it.

The rest of the page is composed of some of Oshita’s fellow Flyers. Given the rosters I could find for the Flyers, I suspect a number of these bromides are 1948 (most of the album seems to be 1947), as at least one of the players didn’t join the franchise until 1948. Three cards (upper left, bottom center, and bottom right) are marked Yoshie without any first name. Clearly the player is a pitcher so I’m assuming the card must be of Eishiro Yoshie, an obscure pitcher with only three seasons on record, 1948 and 1949 with the Flyers and a partial 1950 season with the Giants. Other than the fact that Yoshie was born in Vancouver, Canada and only moved to Japan for high school and university, I can’t find any information about him. The upper left card also reads Kaneda in its right-hand margin, but I think that's just part of the next card that was miscut.

Other Flyers include Yoshie’s fellow pitcher and also outfielder Tajo Hitokoto (upper center and middle right) and catcher Keiichiro Suzuki (middle center and bottom left). Like Yoshie, Hitokoto had a brief career (1946 with the Senators, ’47 and ’48 with the Flyers, and finally 1950 with the Braves). Suzuki, on the other hand, spent his entire eleven year career with the Flyers (and its predecessor, the Senators).

After this page, I think we are ready to move on from the Flyers….

[Frankish]

Long before the team I will always think of as the Osaka-based Nankai Hawks (which it technically was from 1947-1988) became the Fukuoka Daiei and then Fukoka SoftBank Hawks, the team had one of the great names in all of baseball history: Kinki Great Ring. I mention this because several of the bromides on this page picture players in their Kinki Great Ring uniforms (presumably from the 1946 season?). It is most easily distinguishable by the cap emblem that looks like a wedding ring. It’s also worth noting that Kinki Great Ring, in what I believe to be its only full season by that name, won the 1946 Japanese Baseball League championship!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the original owner of this album (my best guess is in around 1949) glued the cards into the notebook pages largely by team. So with Page 16 the Hawks section begins. From the 1940s through the 60s, the Hawks were a very successful franchise. In fact, it was the Hawks that would eventually send Masanori Murakami to the US to be the first Japanese player in MLB.

A key figure in the Hawks’ success in the 40s and 50s was ace pitcher Takehiko Bessho, who played for the team from 1942-48 (with a break for the war) before joining the Yomiuri Giants (1949-1960) in something of a scandal (head-hunting star players was apparently prohibited at the time). The top row of bromides are all Bessho cards. In the first two, he appears in his 1947 season Hawks uniform, while in the upper right card he appears in his 1946 Kinki Great Ring uniform. Bessho is also shown mid-windup in the far right card of the middle row.

The remaining Hawks players proved more difficult to identify. The middle left card appears to be long-time Haws catcher Keizo Tsutsui on a card with pretty cool graphics. To his right is a pitcher that I keep trying to translate as Yuzuki but is probably Susumu Yuki, who only played for nine seasons (all with the Hawks) but put together an impressive 123-64 W/L record.

The bottom left and center cards aren’t that obvious to me but I am venturing that they are of second baseman Naofumi Yasui, with whom I was unfamiliar before this project.

The final card (bottom right) introduces Tokuji Iida, one of the great first basemen in Japanese baseball history. This photo and bromide both appear to be from the 1947, his rookie season.

PS: The bonus photo is my one and only Murakami card. PSA here displays its ass-hat “Trading Card” policy for those that don’t want to wait 12 months for them to identify an obvious issue. Good thing they didn’t go out on a limb and identify it as a “Baseball Card.” /rant