Lotte, the same company that owns the Marines in Japan and the Giants in Korea, issued two 120 card sets in 1989 and 1990.  Both sets were issued in packs containing a single card along with two pieces of gum.

The 1989 set featured borderless photos with the player's name and team on the front in Japanese.  The corners of the cards are rounded.  They very much resemble the "phone card" size Calbee cards from 1990-91 except Calbee had the player names in English.  (In fact when I first saw the set years ago I kind of thought that Lotte was ripping off Calbee's design until it clicked with me that they came out first!)  The backs of the cards feature the player's name in English.  I suspect this is the first Japanese set to have the player's name in English on it.  Calbee added English names to the back of their cards in their third series in 1989 and I wonder if it was in response to Lotte having them.

The set contains the stars of the day including Hall Of Famers Koji Akiyama, Tatsunori Hara, Tsutomu Itoh, Hiromitsu Kadota, Manabu Kitabeppu, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Choji Murata, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Yutaka Ohno, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami and Tsunemi Tsuda along with other stars like Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Norihiro Komada and Takehiro Ikeyama.  There's a large number of Western players in the set including Greg "Boomer" Wells, Ralph Bryant, George Hinshaw, Mike Diaz, Mike Easler, Brian Dayett, Anthony Brewer, Willie Upshaw, Tony Bernazard, Carlos Ponce, Jim Paciorek, Larry Parrish, Matt Keough and Cecil Fielder.

Half of the cards in the set has some sort of variation.  Most of these are either variations on the English spelling of the player's name ("Ito" vs "Itoh" or "Fieldar" vs "Fielder") or the player's weight but there are two different versions of the front of Bryant's card and two completely different versions of card #29 - one is Easler and the other is Dayett.  You can see the full checklist for the set over at TradingCardDB.com.  Here's some sample cards:

#9 Koji Akiyama

#40 Hiromitsu Kadota

#106 Takehiro Ikeyama

Back of #11

Wrapper

The fronts of the cards in the 1990 set have white borders and feature the player's name in English on them.  Again I believe that this is the first time that the player's name appeared in English on the front of a Japanese card.  Calbee started doing this with their second series of cards that year (which was also when they changed the size and shape of their cards to match the 1989 Lotte set).  The cards had the more traditional sharp corners rather than the rounded corners.

The checklist for the 1990 set was very similar to the 1989 set - in some cases literally.  A number of players have the same number in both checklists.  The 1990 set contains the same 11 Hall Of Famers that the 1989 set had plus Masaki Saitoh.  Hideki Irabu appears in this set as well.  There doesn't seem to be as many Westerns in this set however, only Bryant, Wells and Diaz.  Neither of the big rookies from 1990 - Hideo Nomo and Atsuya Furuta - appear in the set.  There's only one known variant - there's an extremely rare version of card #117 for Cecil Fielder.  It appears the card was pulled when Fielder returned to the US in early 1990.  The more common version of the card is for Katsuhiko Kido.  The full checklist can be see at TradingCardDB.com.  Here's some example cards:

#57

#36

#67

Back of #82

Wrapper

Engel rates both sets as having a scarcity factor of "R1" which means "between 250 and 1,000 copies known of most cards".  My feeling is that the 1989 cards are less common than the 1990 ones which is a shame because I think the 1989 cards have better photographs.

I got an email from Rob Fitts after I did my post last week about the Kanebo Gold Card sets from 1993 & 1994.  Rob had some unopened packs of Kanebo cards and wanted to know if I was interested in buying any.  I decided to buy three packs of the 1994 cards since I only had a couple cards from that set.  I got the package in the mail today and decided to do a quick post on it.

The packs were very attractive.  The front of each pack featured a different player on a different team:




That's Norihiro Komada on the Baystars wrapper and Masahiro Yamamoto on the Dragons one.  I'm pretty sure that's Tomonori Maeda on the Carp wrapper but I could be wrong.  These are definitely more attractive wrappers than the 1993 set had:

Image swiped from The Perfect Guide

Before opening the packs, I wondered if the team on the wrapper had any bearing on the card inside the pack.  Nope - I pulled three Yakult Swallows (each pack only had one card):

#018

#001

#008

I also pulled three individually wrapped pieces of 26 year old bubble gum from the packs:


I decided to pass on trying any of the pieces.

Rob has a few more 1994 packs available.  He may have 1993 ones as well.  He also is selling a "starter" set of 43 different 1993 cards.  Anyone who is interested should contact Rob via his website (where you can also buy his latest book "Issei Baseball" which I haven't read yet and his earlier books which I have read and highly recommend).

I mentioned in my post about the 2000 Japanese Olympic Baseball team that Daisuke Matsuzaka was extremely popular following his performance in the 1998 Summer Koshien tournament and his subsequent entering into professional baseball as the first round pick of the Seibu Lions.  How popular was Matsuzaka?  A company started publishing baseball cards just to be able to cash in on having cards of him.

The company was an outfit called "Broccoli" and I don't know much about them.  Luckily Ryan does so I'll quote his comment about them:

They don't make baseball cards anymore. The company is one of the big media companies here, and they make a bunch of merchandise for shows and comic books. They have a retail shop that's pretty popular too. I'm not sure if they still make any types of regular trading cards, but they do make trading card games, which remain amazingly popular here.

Broccoli issued three card sets that were dedicated only to the Seibu Lions.  Like the Kanebo cards, there's nothing actually on the cards that identifies the card company as "Broccoli".  Instead the cards have a line on the back identifying them as "Lions Official Cards Collection" which could lead to them being confused with the Lions' team issued/fan club card sets from the same years.

Their first set came out in 1999, Matsuzaka's rookie year.  It was sold in packs of 10 cards each.  There were 72 cards in the base set and here's where it starts to get a bit odd.  Those 72 cards represent only 29 players plus manager Osamu Higashio so there are multiple cards for many players - including a total of nine each for Fumiya Nishiguchi and Kazuo Matsui.  Everyone else has three or fewer cards.  Matsuzaka does not appear in the base set(!)  There are multiple card designs but I don't have enough cards from the set to make any sort of pronouncement about how many designs there are (although I'd guess there's nine total).  I only have five cards from the base set and they represent four different designs:

1999 Broccoli #002

1999 Broccoli #022 (Kiyoshi Toyoda)

1999 Broccoli #059 (Susumu Ohtomo)

1999 Broccoli #050 (Ken Suzuki)

The backs are all similar in that they repeat the photo from the front and there's no biographical information included (which doesn't mean there isn't a card design that has biographical information on it):


The set included three insert sets.  One of these was an 18 card set completely dedicated to Matsuzaka.  There was also an 18 card facsimile autograph insert set featuring 18 different Lions players (including Matsuzaka) and a 9 card "Special" insert set featuring 9 different Lions (and again including Matsuzaka).  There were four different versions of the "Special" cards - the most common had silver borders but there were blue, red and gold bordered ones that were more rare.  I don't have any of the Matsuzaka inserts but I have Tsutomo Itoh's cards from each of the other two inserts:

1999 Broccoli #R09

1999 Broccoli #SS8

The checklist for the set is available at TradingCardDB.com.

The 2000 set was again issued in 10 card packs.  The base set grew to 99 cards but it makes a little more sense.  The first 36 cards in the set are basically like a traditional team card set as they represent 36 different players and the backs of the cards have biographical and statistical information about each player.  Matsuzaka is included in these 36 cards.

2000 Broccoli #013

The next 54 cards (card numbers 37 to 90) are similar to the 1999 set - there are 13 different players represented with anywhere between one and six cards per player.  Matsuzaka is not one of the 13 players in this section.  I have representations of six different card designs which I suspect represent all the possible designs but I don't know that for sure:

2000 Broccoli #059

2000 Broccoli #042

2000 Broccoli #044 (Tetsuya Shiozaki)

2000 Broccoli #072

2000 Broccoli #073

2000 Broccoli #084

The backs of these cards again repeat the photo from the front:


Cards 91 to 98 are for the Lions' 2000 rookie class and card #99 is for manager Higashio.  The card backs are checklists for the set.

2000 Broccoli #095

Like the 1999 set there was an 18 card insert set dedicated to Daisuke Matsuzaka.  I have a couple cards from this set.  There's two different front designs on these cards - the first 9 cards have a border that resembles a film strip while the last 9 card have a gold frame:

2000 Broccoli #M09

2000 Broccoli #M12

There were two other 18 card insert sets - "Special" and "Facsimile Autograph".  The two sets had identical checklists and include Matsuzaka.  I only have a card from the "Facsimile Autograph" set:

2000 Broccoli #R10

There were memorabilia cards available in the packs - Matsuzaka jersey cards and Kazuo Matsui bat chip cards.

The checklist for this set is also available at TradingCardDB.com.

Broccolis final set in 2001 was again issued in 10 card packs.  The base set grew to 117 cards.  The first 68 cards in the set constituted a "comprehensive" team set for the Lions - all 67 players on the team's 2001 70 man roster plus manager Higashio (and including Matsuzaka):

2001 Broccoli #012

The next four cards (#69-72) were checklists (and I can't show them because I don't have any of them).  The final 45 cards are three cards each of 15 different players (which do not include either Matsuzaka or Matsui).  The three cards for each player each have a different design (which are repeated for each player):

2001 Broccoli #093

2001 Broccoli #095

2001 Broccoli #079

The backs of all these cards have the same design (except for the photo):


Instead of an 18 card insert set for Matsuzaka like the 1999 and 2000 sets had, the 2001 set instead had a Matsuzaka insert set with only 9 cards.  But they added a similar 9 card insert set dedicated to Kazuo Matsui:

2001 Broccoli #KM08

The set also had an 18 card "Special" insert set (which included both Matsuzaka and Matsui).  There's a "kira" parallel version of this set as well but I only have a card from the non-kira version:

2001 Broccoli #SP07

The 2001 set also had memorabilia cards available - jersey cards for Matsuzaka and Matsui.  Again the checklist for the set is available at TradingCardDB.com.

I've been constantly thinking of this old Dana Carvey sketch while I was writing this post:

Dan and I were messaging back and forth via Facebook last night (well, last night -Tuesday night - for me while it was Wednesday morning for Dan in Korea) about some Japanese cards he had recently acquired.  One of the cards was Hideki Matsui's rookie card from the 1993 Kanebo Gold Card set that Dan thought was actually a BBM issue (I'll explain why in a minute).  I realized that while I've shown Kanebo cards on occasion I've never done a post specifically about them. 

I believe that Kanebo is a Japanese confectionary company.  They issued cards for NPB in 1993 and 1994 with the name "Gold Card".  Actually I should should be a little more specific - they issued cards for the Central League of NPB in 1993 and 1994.  They later teamed up with Topps to produce MLB cards for the Japanese market in 2003.

I frequently describe the Kanebo cards as being similar to the "Action Packed" cards being issued in the US around the same time.  I realize that expecting readers to be familiar with a somewhat obscure card issue from over 25 years ago is perhaps not a great idea so let me explain further.  The Kanebo cards are kind of 3D-ish in that the player's outline on the card is raised up from the rest of the card. 

Kanebo's first set in 1993 contained 64 cards.  It was sold in packs that I think had one card packaged with a piece of gum.  From what I can tell from the "Perfect Guide" I think it was issued in two series of 32 cards.  The two series look the same except that the first series cards have a "1992 Diamond Collection" logo in one of the lower corners while the second series cards have either a team logo or a "1993 Golden Rookie" logo. 

As you'd expect with six teams and 64 cards, the cards are not split evenly between the teams.  There are 13 cards each for the Swallows and Tigers, 11 for the Baystars, 10 each for the Carp and the Giants and 7 for the Dragons.  The manager for each team is included in the set.  The players in the set include most of the big CL stars of the time like Atsuya Furuta, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Tatsunori Hara, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Takehiro Ikeyama and Kazuyoshi Tatsunami.  There's also a significant number of foreign players - Jack Howell, Tom O'Malley, Jim Paciorek, Rex Hudler, Glenn Braggs, Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby and Bobby Rose.  Plus R.J. Reynolds has a cameo appearance on Atsuya Furuta's card.  The full checklist for the set is available at TradingCardDB.com.

I only have a handful of cards from this set.  Here they are:

#011

#003

#017

#033

#002

#018

#026

Here's what one of the backs looks like:


You may have noticed two interesting things about these cards.  The first is that there's a copyright line for 'Baseball Magazine" on the back of the card.  The second is that the name "Kanebo" doesn't appear on it anywhere.  You can understand why Dan thought that this was some sort of BBM issue.  I don't know for sure but I think the copyright line has to do with the photographs on the cards - I'm pretty sure I've seen Epoch cards with a "Baseball Magazine" copyright.

The 1994 set was only 32 cards.  From the ad Kanebo had for their 1994 cards in the "Perfect Guide" it looks like they had originally intended to issue the cards in more than one series again but the second series was never published.  The 1994 set is dominated by Swallows (9 cards) and Giants (8 cards) with there only being four cards each for the Baystars, Carp and Tigers and just three for the Dragons.  Furuta and Ochiai appear in this set as well along with other stars like Akira Etoh, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, Masahiro Yamamoto, Takuro Ishii and Masumi Kuwata.  There's only a couple of foreign players - Howell, Rose, O'Malley and Alonzo Powell.  The checklist for this set is also available at TradingCardDB.com.

This set appears to be much rarer than the 1993 version.  I used to see cards from the 1993 set show up on Ebay every so often (although I can't remember when the last time I saw any) - in fact I think I got all of my 1993 cards from there.  I'm pretty sure I've never seen one of the 1994 cards there however.  I only have three cards from the set and I know for sure I got two of them in Japan (the Komada I got at Biblio in 2013 and the Nomura I got at G-Freak last June) - I'm not sure where I got the Ishii:

#004

#027

#017

Here's what one of the card backs looks like:


Kanebo also issued a 160 card "Gold Card" set for the J-League for the 1993-94 season.  Other than the fact that they exist (and all the cards can be seen in the "Perfect Guide") I know nothing about the set (mostly because it isn't a baseball set).  I have no idea why Kanebo apparently abruptly stopped issuing baseball cards after their 1994 set.  As always I'd love to hear the reason behind it.