I've had a busy couple of days lately.  We had some family in town and I've been running around doing local touristy things.  Today I did a tour of the Herr's Potato Chip factory which was a lot of fun but I was disappointed that they didn't give away baseball cards with their Phillies Ripples unlike some potato chip companies I'm familiar with.  

In the middle of all this I received my latest package of Japanese cards from ZenMarket which was a little frustrating because I didn't have time until this evening to really deal with anything in the box.  I got the latest Topps and Epoch sets and I'll be doing posts for them shortly but I thought I'd start out by posting about some other odds and ends that I picked up.  Usually I'll ask Ryan to pick these kind of items up for me but between finding a couple of things with short fuses and some promotions they were running with both Mercari and Rakuten, it made sense to get these through ZenMarket instead.

I think the first three cards I'm going to show were the coolest of the batch.  These were giveaways by the Marines at three games in mid-May where the WBC trophy was on display at Chiba Marine Stadium and feature the only two members of the Marines to suit up for Samurai Japan for the WBC - Roki Sasaki and manager Masato Yoshii who was the team's pitching coach.  I'm a sucker for national team cards so I really love these:

I've been kind doing kind of slow build of the "Rising Stars" short printed subset from the 2000 Upper Deck Ovation set for a while.  To be completely honest I'd considered giving up a couple of times, especially when Twycchang told me that the Tomohiro Nioka card was kind of rare and would likely run me more than $10.  I came across it for only 600 yen ($4.49) however so I jumped on it:

2000 Upper Deck Ovation #5

Since then Ryan has picked up all but one of the other cards I needed for this subset so I guess it'd be a little silly to give up on it now.

I picked up what appear to be "sample" "Lions Winning Game" cards, one from 2011 and the other from 2012.  Both cards list the Lions first game for each season but not the outcome.  I don't know if these were promo cards or something similar.  I do know that the Nakamura card from 2012 has a holo finish that doesn't necessarily scan well:

Sports Card Magazine #79, published in January of 2010, included ten "bonus" cards for that year's Rookie Edition set.  Each card featured a player who had been drafted for each of the ten previous years (including 2009 which meant the last "bonus" card was for a player who was in the Rookie Edition set - Yusei Kikuchi).  The cards all used the 2010 Rookie Edition design.  I found the Toshiya Sugiuchi card on Rakuten and picked it up.  This is only the fourth of these that I have in hand although Ryan has picked up four more of them for me:

2010 SCM #135/BBM Rookie Edition #116