Identifying Japanese Bromides (Starffin, Kawakami et al)

[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

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the kind words. The kanji you posted that are on that bottom left card on page 11 do say Chubu Fujiwara, so that would be catcher Tetsunosuke Fujiwara of the Chubu Nippon Dragons. So even though the picture looks like a pitcher pose, it appears under the magnifying glass that he may be wearing a catcher's mitt.

I can help on page 12 now, and will look at the other pages tomorrow. The Maeda on the 2 cards is not Maeda. It is once again Hisanori Karita, player-mgr. of the Flyers. The combo card says: Flyers on the 1st line and Karita manager, Shiraki pitcher on the second line. His solo card says Tokyu Karita. The kanji for Kari and Mae are very similar, especially with these weird fonts that were used on many bromides, and are easily confused. You are quite right on Nagamochi, and the other player is SS Sadayuki Minagawa who was only on the Flyers in 1948. The card says Minagawa Kyuei, and 1948 is the only year that the Flyers were the Kyuei Flyers.

I will look at the next few pages tomorrow night.

Jeff

[Frankish]

Originally Posted by Jeff Alcorn

I can help on page 12 now, and will look at the other pages tomorrow. The Maeda on the 2 cards is not Maeda. It is once again Hisanori Karita, player-mgr. of the Flyers. The combo card says: Flyers on the 1st line and Karita manager, Shiraki pitcher on the second line. His solo card says Tokyu Karita. The kanji for Kari and Mae are very similar, especially with these weird fonts that were used on many bromides, and are easily confused. You are quite right on Nagamochi, and the other player is SS Sadayuki Minagawa who was only on the Flyers in 1948. The card says Minagawa Kyuei, and 1948 is the only year that the Flyers were the Kyuei Flyers.

Hi Jeff, and thanks again! I really should have known Karita, as he was pointed out earlier. Each player that I identify (or someone identifies for me) goes in a notebook, where the names (about 200 of them now) are sorted by initial kanji character. If I can't find it that way, I try my luck sketching the names into Google Translate, which is hit or miss. If I don't recognize one of the kanji characters, though, which happens more often with the handwriting or stylized fonts, my notebook doesn't help much.

This project certainly has been an education. I feel that I am still in the very shallow end of the pool but do feel I'm moving in the right direction....

[Frankish]

The Nankai Hawks cards continue on the seventeenth page of the album. The page begins (in the upper left) with something of a mystery to me. Clearly this color bromide is of a Hawks pitcher, but the several ways I’ve tried to translate the name with Google Translate it comes out as Tasho Yuzuki, but I can find no Hawks player of that name. My suspicion is that it is Hawks pitch Susumu Yuki but I am not sure. The card in the upper right is a bit more straightforwad, as it is pitcher Hiroshi Nakahara, who played one season in 1943 for Hanshin and then the rest of his career with the Hawks from 1948-1955.

The left card in the second row is another mystery to me. The card has no identifying text but based on uniform and couple of other reasons, I think it is from 1948. Does anyone know who #30 on the Hawks was that season?

The right-hand bromide in the same row shows three Hawks players, which I am translating as: Kasai, Yasui, and Tagawa. Naofumi Yasui played second base for the Hawks and Yutaka Tagawa played outfield for the team but only in 1947 (so dating this image pretty clearly). But I can find no “Kasai” on the 1947 squad. The kanji is 河西in case anyone has a better idea as to the name….

The third row pictures (left to right): Kasahara again, Kazuo Horii, and a card that might be short stop Chusuke Kizuka (again, I’m unclear on the kanji translation). Horii was a long-time player (two seasons before the war and then 1946-58 with Kinki Great Ring and then the Hawks). If the other card is Kizuka, then it would be from 1948 at the earliest, as that was his rookie year.

The last row appears to be Kasahara and Yasui again, assuming I am identifying them correctly.


Yuki - Nakahara
Tsuruoka? - Hawks (Kawanishi, Yasui, Tagawa)
Kasahara - Horii - Kizuka
Kasahara - Yasui