I made a neat new "discovery purchase" the other day: Baseball pull fortunes (Yakyu Hikuji)..

I got a big pile of them, display backing and all!
This are a type of product that doesn't exist in North America but has a long history in Japan. Each of these packs contains ten strips of thin paper which stick out at the bottom (in the above photo the black and white player head shots at the bottom are the parts of the paper that sticks out).  Each strip has a fortune written on it, like you would find in a fortune cookie.  The best one you can get is "Daikichi" which is really good luck.  The worst is "Hazure" which means you are a loser.  And there are a few in between.  So each kid would get one of these packs, then with their friends they would each pull one of the strips out and see who would get good luck and who would get bad.
 If you ever visit a shinto shrine in Japan you'll probably come across something very similar as they sell similar fortunes there. The ones sold at shrines are called "Omikuji" and come in folded pieces of paper rather than being pulled off of tabs like these baseball ones are.

These are a couple that my wife and I got at the Hakozaki shrine in Fukuoka many years ago (the chocolate banana was also purchased there, it was a festival day).


My baseball ones feature colorful wrappers with six different players on them: Senichi Hoshino, Sadaharu Oh, Masahiro Doi (I think), Shigeo Nagashima, Koichi Tabuchi and Koji Yamamoto.   The players whose head shots are featured on the ten strips peaking out at the bottom don't necessarily match the player on the wrapper (The one with Senichi Hoshino for example has a picture of Isao Harimoto on the strips.  Though most of the others do match).
 The backs of the wrappers have some cool color images of various players.

Judging from the fact that Isao Harimoto is featured as a Giant and Masahiro Doi is featured in a Taiheiyo uniform I would date these to 1976.
 I decided to try my luck and pull one of them.  Instead of tearing them off as they were designed I decided to just unwind the wire at the top holding the bundle together so I could put it back without damaging it.  This is what I got:

"Losing pitcher with a 5-10 record, so sad!"  "HAZURE"

Oh no, I got the loser one!

Back in the day these sold for 10 Yen each.  Looking around the internet it seems these "pull fortunes" were pretty popular back in the 1970s as there were similar bundles with various anime characters also sold from around that time.  These seem to have been the only baseball ones made and they are pretty hard to find.  Or at least I think they are, these were the first I've ever seen though I hadn't even known they were something I should be looking for in the first place until I found them!

Kind of a neat thing to add to my collection, they have a strong "Showa retro" look to them which I find appealing!

 I'm not a gambling man.  I went to a casino once in my early 20s, lost 30$, failed to see the fun in it and have never set place in one since.  I've also lasted almost 2 decades in Japan without once having partaken in its peculiar and ubiquitous form of legalized gambling: Pachinko.

But I do have one area where I like to dabble in risk:  Buying big lots of vintage Calbee cards off of Yahoo Auctions.  When they come up they can be a really great way of getting started on a set or just familiarizing yourself with cards you've never encountered before.

They generally come in two kinds. In one kind the seller puts up pictures of every card in the lot, back and front, so you know exactly what you are bidding on and there are no surprises.  The other kind though are lots in which the bidder just puts up a picture of a pile of cards and tells you how many there are, but you have no idea what most of the cards are. These are the risky ones.

Back in Canada I would never in a million years buy a pile of cards without knowing what I was getting because of the obvious potential for being ripped off.  But in Japan.....I don't wish to perpetuate cultural stereotypes but Japanese people in general have a reputation for honesty for good reason.  When a seller puts up a lot of vintage Calbees without photos of every card in 99% of cases its not because they are trying to sucker you into buying a bunch of crap, its more likely that they are busy and just don't want to bother photographing everything.  These lots are usually worth taking a chance on.

I came across one lot from a seller (this guy) who I had never bought from before. The description just said "60 Calbee cards from the 1980s" and nothing else. It had a photo in which you could see about 7 or 8 random ones, the rest being underneath.  I did the math and put a bid on.  And won.  My winning bid was 2700 Yen, which with shipping came in just under 3000 Yen, or about 50 Yen per card.  That is a pretty good per-card price for 1980s Calbee, but of course that would depend on what the cards were.

They arrived yesterday and I broke open the Smart Letter pack to reveal these babies:
 There were a few things I was concerned about before opening them.  Were there a lot of duplicates?  Were there a lot of beaters?  Were they all commons with no stars?  Were they all 1987 Calbees that I already had?

Happily the answer to all of these questions was negative.  I got a pretty interesting and well rounded lot when I broke it open, with cards from eight different years between 1980 and 1989.  Here they are sorted into piles by year:
 Most of the cards were from the 1983 set (18 cards), 1984 set (9 cards) and 1985 set (16 cards) which was great because those are sets that are a bit harder to find that the ones from the later 80s (except 1989) and ones that I still need most of them (especially the 83 set).  Most of those cards were ones that I needed.  There were only 2 from the 1987 set (both ones I already had) and 1 from the 1988 set (also a double).

The lot also had two cards from the 1980 Calbee set, which were the first cards from that set I have ever gotten.  The 1980 set is kind of interesting in that they are the same size as other cards from the 1980s, but still have the captioning of the series in the set that all cards from the 70s have, which is kind of neat.  One of the cards I got was 15 time all star Masahiro Doi, which was great:
 In the 1985s I found this card of Hall of Famer Hiromitsu Kadota which I found striking, I like that "ABIN 85" sign in the background.
 The 1984s had some pretty good stars among them too:
 Condition wise the lot was pretty good.  About half the cards (basically all the ones post 1985) were about Ex-mint, while the earlier ones were a bit more mixed with some corner fuzz and the occasional ding.  Out of the 60 cards though there was only one true beater, this 1983 card of Mitsuo Tatsukawa which looks like it has been to hell and back:
 Within the lot there were only two duplicates (both in the 1983s) so I got 58 different cards.  Looking through my checklists 34 of those were ones I needed, which was pretty satisfying.
All in all I am pretty happy with this lot.  My gamble paid off!

Matty Alou is arguably one of the best foreign players to ever come to Japan, though for some reason he isn`t often mentioned in most lists of the greats of his generation to make the trip like Frank Howard, Clete Boyer or Willie Davis.  He had a long and successful MLB career that included an NL batting crown, a couple of all star selections and the fame that went along with being a member of arguably the most talented baseball family in history.

He played for three years with Taiheiyo in the mid 70s at the tail end of his career, and he appears in the monster 1975-76 Calbee set.  I finally picked up one of his cards from that set, #542, which features him batting against a Hankyu pitcher named Ashikaga on April 28, 1976 in Nishinomiya Stadium (the runner on second is Masahiro Doi, who appears on another card from that set which I have written about before). 

Frustratingly the back of the card, while telling us that Taiheiyo won a come from behind victory, doesn`t actually tell us what the outcome of this at bat was, though it might be inferred that Alou drove the runner in.  Its kind of a cool in-game picture, with the funky Taiheiyo uniforms and Nishinomiya Stadium looking characteristically under-packed - you can count exactly 3 people sitting in the stands in right field.  The all dirt infield looks cool, I wish more stadiums today had them.

One of the things I find particularly interesting about Calbee sets from the 1970s are cards of the Lions.  The Lions today play in Saitama and are owned by Seibu, but back then they played in Fukuoka and had several owners (Nishitetsu, Taiheiyo and Crown Lighter).

What interests me most about them though is that they went through an experimental period in which their uniforms were designed backwards - with the front of the jersey looking like the back and vice versa.  One of the cards that best presents this unique style is #911 from the 1975-76 set.  Its from the 1976 All Star game series and features Lions outfielder Masahiro Doi rounding the bases. 

The front of his jersey has that big 3 in the middle and looks exactly like the backs of most conventional jerseys (and the backs of Lions jerseys feature the team name or sometimes "Fukuoka" like the fronts of most look like).  At the time the Lions were officially the Taiheiyo Club Lions.

I`m not sure why the Lions experimented with this interesting design - it didn`t catch on (no other contemporary team had their jerseys like that) and the Lions abandoned it not long after this card was made. The Lions weren`t a particularly popular team in the 1970s and this may have been an attempt to spur some interest in the team by giving them a radically different look from others.  Sadly it didn`t work and the team relocated from Fukuoka to Saitama in 1979.  A friend of mine who was a kid in Fukuoka in the 1970s has regaled me with stories of how devastated he was when they moved. Being a Montreal Expos fan I was able to relate.

Another appealing point is that in addition to the backwards look, the pink color of the uniforms also really stands out - not many baseball teams have gone that route and it makes Lions cards really noticeable when you are flipping through a stack of 1970s Calbee cards.