It turns out that getting a hole in one in golf is actually quite hard and if you are a sumo wrestler it is even harder.  Over 50 years ago the former Yokozuna Tochinishiki got one and has since been the first, and only, active or retired sumo wrestler to do so.  How hard is it to get a hole in one?  Well, according to the U.S. National Hole-In-One Registry it is about 1:12000 for an average player....so given that a course has about 3-4 Par 3s, you would need to play about 3500 rounds of golf before you sink one.  American baseball has seen numerous holes-in-one by active and former players: Mike Maddux, Luke Hudson, and Brian Matusz to name a few.  Football's legendary Jan Stenerud and Peyton Manning have both hit one.  Even the NBA's future HOFer Steph Curry has made one.

I am a set completionist and love collecting and cataloguing sumo menko and cards.  It is my passion and goal to continue to build the most comprehensive checklist of Japanese Sumo Menko and Cards out there.  Part of doing that is chasing set variations and trying to decipher why the same set was made differently across its production run.  Much like today's parallel and short-printed cards, variations can be a fun chase to completing master sets.  I recently picked up this Z573 set that was issued inside an unknown magazine in 1957.  Or at least I think it was.....actually before a few weeks ago I would have been dead certain.  Now, I don't know.  The original sheet I had found years and years ago was printed with blue ink.  It looked like the numerous other sets from the 1950s and 1960s that were issued in magazines as free giveaways to entice kids to buy the magazines.  Then I stumbled across this version that was printed with brown ink.  Huh....not something that I have ever seen before with magazine issues.  The print run would have been a day or two on these magazines and then shipped out.  Changing colors midstream would have been odd.  So now it is making me question what I have here.  Regardless, I am now able to add a new type to the Z573 set.  Introducing the Z573-2: 1957 Zashi Type 2 - Brown Ink on Front.

My quest to catalogue every sumo menko and card produced and publish my findings has been driving me over the past ~20 years.  These days discovering news sets is few and far between, but this past month I was able to solve a part of a "mystery" that has been bugging me for a while.  The BC598: 1959 Trophy 6 set always stood out as a loner.  These five trophy BC-series menko cards seemed out of place because they only depicted the trophy hardware, never wrestlers.  But I could never pinpoint where they belonged so I gave them their own catalogue number and set name until I could find out.  However, I recently discovered an uncut pair of BC5710: 1957 Yamakatsu Gyoji 5 menko that had both a BC598 and BC5710 on it.  Mystery solved or so it seems.  For some reason I never caught on that on the back of the trophy cards, they had the years associated with the last 8 winners of the trophy that was depicted on the front.  When do the years end?  In the middle of 1958.  So I had the wrong year on both of these sets.  So now I will merge both of these sets and recatalogue them being from 1958, but the question remains, why did Yamakatsu issue these difficult-to-find trophy cards as well as give them a 6-digit Fighting number instead of 5 digits like the rest of their set counterparts?  Were they used for some other prize?  The mystery deepens....

I found this photo in an old Life Magazine. The caption reads:

"To portray the profusion of objects small boys manage to stuff into the pockets of their jeans over a year's time, the magazine, with the cooperation of the mother who collected the items, photographed this trove in 1957.  Not counting what the washing machine ate, the total was 476, uh, things."




I see:
- Toy soldiers
- Miniature Frying Pan
- Army Enlisted Stripes for a uniform
- Money
- A crap ton of rocks
- Toy guns
- Shotgun Shells
- Zorro Mask


What else do you see?  How many sports cards can you recognize?  Send in the cavalry from the experts!!!

Here is a fun set from 1957 called Kami Zumo or "Paper Sumo" in English.  Paper figures of sumo wresters, as seen in the photos below, at placed standing facing each other in a ring made of cardboard....the wrestlers are made to stand by bending their legs or folding their arms.  Players then make the wrestlers move by tapping the outside of the ring with their fingers and the winner is the one who forces their opponent out of the ring or to fall over.  This 1957 Kami Zumo Set came with two wrestlers and a cardboard sword...I am assuming for the losing paper wrestler to commit ritualistic suicide if he lost.   Each of the wrestlers in this set are about 2 1/4" tall and they each have an actual photo of the wrestler's head superimposed on the paper body.  Pretty cool.  I also did a review on the 1961 Ito Kami Zumo Set.  Here is a YouTube video of two people playing kami zumo.