Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

These guys duplicate players that I already have, so no advancement on the project here, but thought I’d share anyway. On the left we have Bozo Wakabayashi, in the middle is Tetsuharu Kawakami, and on the right is Hiroshi Oshita. These cards are from the JBR13 set – or at least the Oshita card is. The other two are identical to JBR13 cards except that they are blank on the back. (Or, well, they were before someone wrote on them.) My guess is that all three of them are JBR13 cards, just missing a pass on the back. Although I guess it’s possible that they’re from a set that’s identical but for the printing on the back. I’m really not a fan of this set – all the cards are boring headshots printed in sepia tone. Moreover, these three examples are in pretty rough shape: creasing, staining, writing, etc. On that note, however, I will say that I kind of like the writing.

The text in the parentheses on the front of the cards gives the player’s team. On the Wakabayashi card it has been scratched out and replaced. Both the text and the replacement writing are illegible (at least to a non-Japanese reader like me), but I’d be willing to bet that it originally said “Osaka” and that the handwritten bit says “Mainichi”. The cards were issued in 1949, and the following season Wakabayashi was traded. You see this all the time on old American cards, it seems pretty likely that that’s what happening here.

As for the writing on the back: it appears to be a dice game. There are twelve, numbered, lines of text. I copied the first three lines from the Kawakami card into Google Translate and got “middle hit”, “chicken neck”, and “left hit”. While I suppose “chicken neck” might be late-40s slang for a strikeout or something, my guess is that I mis-transcribed one of the symbols. Anyways, “middle hit” and “left hit” sure make this sound like a game. Some of the text is repeated on the other cards. My guess is that each kid is supposed to pick a card (or maybe form a lineup – if they had enough cards), then they take turns rolling dice to see what happens in the game. The handwriting on all three cards looks the same to me, so they probably came from the same collection and it was the same kid drawing up the dice game.

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The #2 listing on the back of the Kawakami card looks like the first kanji for shortstop, followed by the kana for go & ro. When you put those 2 together you get "gro" for ground- so #2 is saying "Ground ball to shortstop". You got the other 2 correct- a hit to center field and a hit to left field. These same types of abbreviations are on the back of all the Takara game cards issued from the late '70s to the late 90's, and are for playing a dice baseball game.

Thanks again,

Jeff

[nat]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the info. Either this kind of game was popular long before the Takara cards were printed, or whoever wrote on this cards did it long after they were printed - the JBR13 set is a 1949 issue.

(Also - I wonder how you are supposed to roll a 1...)

[seanofjapan]

Great finds, I was about to comment on the similarity to the Takara games too.

I have a couple of the Takara ones and am very tempted to try actually playing the game, I just need to find someone to play it with!

[nat]

No new players, but another card that I picked up as a part of a lot, so I thought that I might as well share it.

This is Karou Betto, about whom I've written before. In America Betto is, sadly, probably best known for appearing on one of The Dude's t-shirts in The Big Lebowski. Which, let's be clear, is a fine piece of cinema, but a great player (and manager) like Betto deserves better.

The card is from the JCM 78 set, which was issued in 1949 to commemorate a tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals. Seals players have 'Seals' written on the back of the card, Japanese players have 'Nippon' (Japan) on the back. I don't know why they decided to include the Japanese players that they did. There are only five of them in the set, so it's not like it's an all-star team that the Seals were playing against or something. Besides Betto it includes:

Takehiko Bessho - an all-time great pitcher
Takeshi Doigaki - a good catcher, but not a hall of famer
Kikuji Hirayama - an outfielder who had been a star before the war, but by 1949 was merely average
Shissho Takesue - a hotshot rookie pitcher who would quickly flame out

[seanofjapan]

That Betto is awesome, I've never seen one of those before. I love how awkward the way they drew him holding the bat is, its almost like they had 8 year olds drawing these things, which I find quite endearing.

[nat]

Here's another player that I've written about before. Tokuji Iida was a power hitting first baseman.

This card is an uncatalogued menko. It's a pillar-style card, however, so it's pretty easy to guess about an issue date: late 40s or maybe 1950 or so. The art is weird. It makes him look like a lizard wearing blush.

Iida played for Nankai from 1947 through 1956, and Kokutestu for the rest of his career. Wondering what happened for him to change teams, I went through the roster of the 1956 Kokutetsu and 1957 Nankai teams, trying to find the player that he was traded for. But no one played for both of those teams. Anyone know what happened such that players changed teams in the 1950s, or, even better, what Iida's story is?

It's true that in the early days the reserve clause wasn't a formal part of player contracts, but after a scandal involving Takehiko Bessho it was included in the standard player contract starting in 1951. So Iida couldn't have just declared himself a free agent the way that Bessho did. I tried looking him up on Japanese Wikipedia but - probably due to my poor Japanese - couldn't find any information.