I've picked up some more menko cards in the past few months that appear to not be cataloged in Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide".*

*I do need to mention that Gary Engel took a look at some of the cards I've posted and confirmed that the Shigeru Fujio card I have is a previously unknown card from the 1961 Marumatsu JCM 14d set.

UPDATE - I received an email from Gary Engel today (12/14) with his comments on the cards.  I'll add them to each of the paragraphs below.  One thing that Gary did stress with me was the distinction between unknown cards and uncataloged cards.  Just because a card is uncataloged doesn't mean it's unknown.

The first card is familiar looking but I still don't know what set it belongs in.  It's a card of Kaoru Bettoh and it's pretty obviously a Kagome card from the same set as the Fumio Fujimura card I mentioned last summer.  But neither card resemble any of the Kagome sets listed in the most recent edition of Engel.  (Engel: Not in Guide.  I have a copy of this card, too.  And, I've seen it several times.  I suspect it is from a set that is mostly non-baseball, but I have no proof.  (just a hunch))



I suspect that the next card should properly be classified as a bromide card, although I think it's from one of the sets that Engel refers to as links between bromides and the "tobacco" menkos of the late 50's and early 60's.  The player is Noburo Inoue of the Dragons.  Initially I was thinking that the card might be from the 1957 JBR 18 set, but the text doesn't really match (the size of the text of team name is roughly the same as the size of the player's name on the card whereas in the JBR 18 set the size of team name is smaller) and the JBR 18 cards feature stadium backgrounds.  The card is blank backed except for a "3" in a circle that is probably indicates that it was a "winner" card.  (Engel: There are a number of bromide sets which look like "tobacco menko" on the front but have blank backs.  I just keep a visual catalog of everything of this nature that I can find until I can find a taba, display sheet, or uncut sheet of a particular type which will allow me to catalogue each set.  I have not seen this particular card before.)




I'm pretty sure I know which sets that the rest of the cards I'm posting tonight belong in.  This card of Tadao Wako of the Lions  appears to be from the 1959 Marusho JCM 38b set.  That particular set featured only cards of the Giants and Lions, the participants in the 1958 Nippon Series.  (Engel: This is indeed a 1959 JCM 38b card.  Subsequent to the last Guide edition, I have obtained tabas and display sheets of this set.  It is now complete at 40 cards.  One of the two "new" cards that I discovered is this one of Wako.)




These next two cards are also from 1959 - I think they are both from the Maruta JCM 40 set.  The card with only one player on it features Shoichi Ono of the Daimai Orions.  The two player card features Tadashi Sugiura and Tamotsu Kimura of the Nankai Hawks. (Engel: Ono-Definitely a previously uncatalogued member of the JCM 40 set.  Sugiura/Kimura - This card is an already catalogued JCM 40.  It pictures Nomura with Sugiura instead of Kimura.  In fact, the first character for Kimura on your card looks like it was done in a different font.  Was it done by hand?  NPB Card Guy:  The "Ki" kanji does not appear to have been written on the card after printing as there is no depression in the surface of the card that a pencil or pen might have made)





This card of the Dragons' Toru Mori looks very similar to the cards in the 1959 Maruten JCM 135 set.  There's a couple major differences, however, as the cards in that set are assumed to be part of a sequence of pictures for each player in the set, so each card is marked with a sequence number.  The text on the back of the JCM 135 cards is horizontal while the text on the back of this card is vertical. (Engel: This is already catalogued in JCM 135.  It is sequential card number six for Mori, as the Japanese character for the number six is the bottom character within the black text box.)




This card of Toshio Miyamoto (UPDATE - just realized that this is nisei player Andy Miyamoto) of the Giants appears to be from the 1959 (again with the 1959!) Maruten JCM 136 set. (Engel: Yes, this is indeed a previously uncatalogued JCM 136.)




The final two cards appear to be from the 1961 Marukami JCM 14d set that I previously had found the new Fujio card for.  The first card is Takao Katsuragi of the Orions and the second card is Takeshi Kuwata of the Whales.  (Engel:  Several months ago, Rob Fitts was looking through his collection of JCM 14d and discovered that it either has two printings, or there are two very similar sets.  I had never collected this set, and much of my checklist relied on info given to me by Paul Margiott over 20 years ago, when we were putting together the first edition.

Rob doesn't have a complete set, but noticed that there were two versions of many cards in the set, each having a different menko number.  In all cases of cards with two versions, one was printed more crudely than the other, and that there are color variations between the two versions.  In many cases, where the guide checklist had two cards listed for a player, the two menko numbers simply indicated the two versions (I didn't know that), although there are some players who do have two cards with different images within the same version.

At present, we know of 72 cards from the two versions, as opposed to the 58 cards I had checklisted in the guide.  And a second version of the majority of cards is still unknown.  Rob had the Kuwata card.  The Katsuragi card is unknown to me.)






If anyone can shed any light on these cards (or point out where I missed them in Engel), please let me know.

I've picked up a number of old menko cards in the last month or so from Ebay.  A couple of them I have been unable to identify.  Any suggestions anyone has would be helpful.

Kagome was a company that produced a number of sets of rectangular menko in the late 1940's and early 1950's,  The company had a distinctive logo - a six point star.  This Fumio Fujimura card was obviously made from Kagome but the set does not appear in Engel (or at least I haven't found it).  There's a set called Kagome 1 2 3 4 (JCM 52) that is somewhat similar but this card is not from that set.


This Masaichi Kaneda card looks very much like a Kagome card but it does not have the logo.  This is potentially a very early card of Kaneda, perhaps from his rookie year of 1950.



I think this card of Atsushi Otsu of the Tigers is from the same menko set as the "action" cards I wrote about last fall.  It would be from around 1957.



Marusan cards are among the more common menko cards.  They were produced between 1957 and 1964.  A couple of the sets were imported to the US by Mel Bailey and Bud Ackerman in the early to mid 1960s.  Given that the sets are pretty well known, I was surprised to discover that I could not place this Shigeo Nagashima card.  I suspect that it is from one of the JCM 12a-e sets from around 1961 and 1962 but that's really nothing more than a gut feeling.



The last card is of Shigeru Fujio of the Giants.  It's clearly a Marukami "Bat On Right" card from the JCM 14a-g sets from 1959-64.  Based on the size of the text and the location of the team name (and the fact that it's not in parentheses), it looks to me that it's from the 1961 JCM 14d set but it is not listed.  That particular set is the rarest of the "Bat On Right" sets - a couple of the later sets are perhaps the most commonly seen menko cards.



If anyone has any ideas about these cards or can point out to me where I missed them in Engel, please let me know.

I thought I'd do another post about some vintage cards I picked up on Ebay a few months ago.  I've figured out a lot more about these cards than the ones I talked about before.

Among the many menko sets that Gary Engel's latest Price Guide and Checklist (the vintage edition) lists for 1950 there are two somewhat related ones called "Animal Back" (JCM 117) and "Transportation Back" (JCM 118).  I say they are somewhat related because both sets feature the same style fronts and in fact there are known to be cards with identical fronts in both sets.  The card backs feature animals (for JCM 117 obviously) and cars, trains and airplanes (for JCM 118).  Multiple cards use the same backs for both sets, so the backs are completely useless in uniquely identifying a card.

The fronts of these cards are very colorful.  Some of them have the team name in English, some of them have the player name in English and some of them have no English at all.  The player name is always on the card, but it could be in kanji or katakana (as well as English).  The team name is not always on the card.

I won an auction containing 10 vintage menko cards that appear to be either from these two sets or from some other, uncatalogued related sets.  It's not clear that any of these cards are actually listed in Engel at all.  I think I've managed to figure out who several of the players are.

(Note - I'm including the backs in this post just to show what they look like.  As I said above, the back really is no help in identifying the player.)

The first card is from the "Transportation Back" set.  This is Akira Noguchi of the Dragons, the oldest of the four Noguchi brothers who played in the 1930's through the 1950's (and includes Hall Of Famer Jiro).  I identified the player using the team name and the kanji in the upper right corner.  I think that the katakana in the upper left says that Noguchi plays in the Central League - 1950 was the first year of the two league system.



The second card is also from the "Transportation Back" set.  I don't know who this is.  I think it could be Fumio Fujimura of the Tigers but I haven't figured out any of the text on the card.  Engel describes a card for Fujimura in the "Animal Back" set as "RHB ankles up/red bkd" which sounds like this card:



The next six cards are from the "Animal Back" set.  The first is Makoto Kozuro of the Shochiku Robins.  As before, I got the player's name from the kanji and the card is not listed in either set.  The katakana is for the Pacific League I think.



I've narrowed this next card down to two possibilities.  The kanji is for "Kato" but the 1950 Kintetsu Pearls featured two players with that surname - Masakazu and Haruo.  I don't know which of them this is.  I wonder if the kanji in the yellow dot would tell me if I knew what it was.



This next card is one that helps to date the set to 1950 - the only year the Nishitetsu Clippers existed.  This is Shissho Takesue.  Engel lists two Takesue cards in the "Animal Back" set but this doesn't appear to be either of them.



This next card was a bit of a surprise to me when I figured out who it was - it's Hall of Fame manager Yukio Nishimoto from his playing days.  Engel does not list this one either.



I don't know for sure but I have a pretty good idea who this next card is.  I think the katakana at the top of the cards says "Whales" but there was no one on the 1950 Taiyo Whales with the surname "Nagamoti".  What I wonder is if that's a transliteration error for Eikichi Nagamochi.  The other possibility is that the last two consonants got switched and it's really (Masatake) Nagatomi.



I'm confused on this last card.  I think the two kanji characters are for Chiba, as in Shigeru Chiba.  But I don't understand what "Tifa" would be.



The last two cards are from sets that appear to be related to the JCM 117 and 118 sets but have a different style back.  The first is this card of Torao Ooka of the Robins.  As you can see, it has an animal on the back but the style is different from the JCM 117 set.



The other is this card of Kazuo Kasahara of the Hawks.  The back is completely different from all the other cards.



I noticed that the last two cards have the player's name in both English and kanji.  This may actually differentiate these cards from the "Animal Back" and "Transportation Back" cards as I don't know if any of them had the name listed twice in different alphabets.

I'd be curious to know if I read the kanji and katakana right and if anyone has any light to shed on these cards in general.

I've picked up some odds and ends in vintage Japanese baseball cards off of Ebay in the last few months and I have no idea what some of the items are.  I thought I'd show them here and see if any of you have any idea (or can at least read the kanji on them).

First up is an uncut menko sheet showing four cards that appear to depict university teams - I recognize Waseda and Keio right off the bat.  This sheet is very similar to one shown on page 47 of "Sayanora Home Run!" - I've seen a larger sheet selling on Ebay that contained both the sheet I have and the one from the book so I'm pretty confident that they're from the same set.  The book lists the cards as being from the 1920's - if so, then these are the oldest cards I have.



I picked up five die-cut menko cards that also appear to me to depict university teams.  I'm not sure they actually depict a specific player - they kind of look to me like a caricature of a generic ball player.  The five cards appear to be from three separate sets.

Here's the front and backs of the first two that I think are from the same set:





The front of the uniform on the second card could be saying "Hosei" and the back of the cards appears to be showing the kanji for Hosei University.  I thought the "T" on the front of the uniform for the first card could stand for "Tokyo University" but I don't think the kanji on the back matches.

Here's the next two:





It might not be obvious because I think my scanner cut off a little at the top, but the hat on the first card has a "W" on it and the hat on the second card looks like it might have a "K" on it.  "W" immediately makes me think of Waseda but the kanji on the back doesn't appear to match.  On the plus side, the kanji on the second card does resemble the kanji on the Keio cards from the BBM Tokyo Big Six sets so maybe the "K" is Keio.

Last of the die-cuts:



No lettering on the hat or the uniform so I have no ideas on this one.

The next two cards are both rectangular "cartoon" menko cards of Dragons player Michio Nishizawa.  I got these in a single auction with another card of Nishizawa that I was able to place (it was from the JCM 56 - Red/Orange border set from 1949), so I suspect (for really no good reason) that these are from 1949 also:





The last card is a blank backed round menko card.  Like the die-cut menkos, it could be that this card shows a generic ball player rather than someone specific.  There isn't much identifiable on the hat or uniform - except maybe that's an "M" on the front of the hat.


I'd appreciate any help anyone can give me on these.