Several days ago Sean over at Getting Back into Baseball Cards....in Japan (BaseballCardsinJapan.blogspot), posted about a new menko find to the baseball community.  It is a new menko of the ever popular Shigeo Nagashima and up until this point had not been catalogued in the Japanese Baseball community.  In the sumo community, I have run across this set only a handful of times.  They are extremely rare and very hard to find since they were printed and sold at the tail end of the menko era when menko popularity was waning.  There is a plain, white-bordered version as well as an even more rare gold-bordered version in the sumo world.  I have catalogued this set as the 1959 Comic 9-10-11 (Catalogue #: M591-1 White Border and M591-2 Gold Border).  The back has the TV anime character "Moonlight Mask" which aired on Japanese television and in theaters in 1958 and 1959 which led me to believe this set was printed in 1959.  Up to this point, it seemed this was a sumo-only set, but what we might be seeing here is a multi-sport set.  And given there are gold-bordered versions, there is a good chance these were issued in boxes with the gold-bordered menko as prizes.  It is great when some of these new mysteries pop up and keep the older Japanese card collecting community on the hunt to try and continually answer some of these decade-old mysteries.

Have a great week!

A lot of my friends and family are actually celebrating Valentine's Day on Saturday this year since yesterday was a workday.  Us too, we are heading out to our favorite happy hour joint later today.  So I consider this Valentine's Weekend as a whole.  And like many other bloggers, I feel like I should get up a Valentine's Weekend post.  Today I highlight the 1959 3-Part Trump Set (Catalog #G591).  These awase "matching" sets are popular even today since a host of games could be played with them.  We see a variety of them in the United States as kids games.  Most commonly, they are used in Japan as playing cards, or trump as it is known in Japan.  They are also used as a matching game where you put the cards face down and try to find the corresponding cards to form the wrestlers' image in this case.  There are 16 wrestlers total in the G591 set with 48 total cards coming in the box.....surprisingly, these sets are not all that uncommon and so you can pick them up here and there for reasonable prices throughout the year.    I pulled out the 4 wrestlers that bear the heart pips in honor of Valentine's Day to give you an idea.  Coincidently, these are the 4 highest ranked wresters in the set: Yokozuna Wakanohana, Yokozuna Asashio, Yokozuna, Tochinishiki, and Ozeki Kotogahama. 

Japanese baseball and sumo wrestling have shared some common history.  Athletes from both sports often intermingle with each other.  Sumo wrestlers get to throw out the first pitch at games and baseball players will sometime swing by the sumo stables to eat with the top wrestlers.  In 1959, sumo and baseball were at equal pinnacles with strong Yokozuna and the emergence of baseball stars like Nagashima and Oh.  This transcended to cards as well as shown here.  Issued in the January 1959 Omoshiro Book (おもしブック), these two sheets of cards contained 16 sumo wrestlers and 16 baseball players.  When cut, each card measures approximately 1 5/8" x 2 1/2".  Catalogued as the Z591: 1959 Omoshiro Book Zashi 0 for sumo and the JBR60: 1958/1959 Omoshiro Book set for baseball, these cards are somewhat hard to find....I've only seen three sets in close to 20 years.  Here is the checklist for both sets:

• Yokozuna Chiyonoyama
• Yokozuna Tochinishiki
• Yokozuna Wakanohana
• Ozeki Matsunobori
• Ozeki Asashio
• Ozeki Kotogahama
• Sekiwake Wakahaguro
• Sekiwake Shinobuyama
• Komusubi Tokitsuyama
• Komusubi Tamanoumi
• Maegashira Dewaminato
• Maegashira Annenyama
• Maegashira Naruyama
• Maegashira Wakachichibu
• Cartoon Rikishi - Yokozuna Gokurou

• Yoshio Anabuki
• Shigeru Fujio
• Tatsuro Hirooka
• Kazuhisa Inao
• Kazuo Kageyama
• Shigeo Nagashima
• Futoshi Nakanishi
• Teruo Namiki
• Katsuya Nomura
• Hiroshi Oshita
• Tadashi Sugiura
• Kenjiro Tamiya
• Tasumitsu Toyoda
• Shozo Watanabe
• Wally Yonamine
• Yoshio Yoshida

Collecting Japanese menko cards in the late 1950s has a similar aspect shared with the current United States sports card industry...they both were/are a form of gambling.  In the 1950s, Japanese manufacturers would randomly insert winner menko cards in M-series boxes.  These winner menko were the regular white-bordered menko, but had a small stamp on the back indicating the level of prize you won.  If you happened to pull a winner menko from the box you could redeem it for an uncut sheet of gold-bordered prize menko.  The large, uncut sheets (4-8 uncut menko) were reserved for the top prizes and the smaller sheets (1-4 uncut menko) were reserved for the lower prizes.  These gold-bordered prize menko were included with the box when the shop owner purchased it from a wholesaler, but they were removed and displayed to entice kids.  As I can only imagine the amount of yen Japanese kids would plop down to try and "win" one of the gold-bordered cards.  Sound eerily familiar?  As you can imagine, these gold-bordered menko are extremely hard to find and quite valued among sumo card collectors.  Here are two gold-bordered menko from the M591: 1959 Comic 9-10-11 set, a non-winner regular white-bordered menko, and some examples of other gold-bordered menko with their original boxes.

This knocks out 1/5th of one of 2017 collecting goals which is to discover and catalog 5 pre-1960 sets.  Here is an interesting pair of bookmark cards that I picked up over in Japan recently.  It is from a bimonthly magazine called Manga King (漫画王).  This was given away in the annual 1959 New Year's edition and measures approximately 4 3/4" x 4 3/4" and printed on thin cardboard.  I've never seen this set before and it has a previously uncatalogued card of Yokozuna Wakanohana and an uncatalogued second-year card of the baseball Hall of Famer Shigeo Nagashima of the Giants.  The back is printed in purple ink and has calendars for the first 6 months in 1959.  There is also a line down the middle to cut the card in half so you get two separate bookmarks.  These type of sets were fairly common in the 1950s and 1960s as give aways in magazines....especially in the elementary school magazines.  Hopefully there are more cards to this set out there.  Here are the cards and the sample cover of the April 1959 magazine.

Anyone watching the Hatsu Tournament?  It appears Yokozuna Hakuho is making another run at a championship!

This set(s) is one of the main reasons I love to collect, catalog, and checklist new sumo menko and cards.  I thought I had the set(s) figured out and then I dig up new information and found additional menko that proved my original research wrong.  I wish I could tell you that I have it all squared away in this blog, but I'll need to spend several hours now revisiting these sets and come up with new checklists which I'll post here and get in my next book edition.  I picked up this prize sheet several years ago and tucked it away, but dug it out again recently to double check I had my checklist up to date and to take a picture for reference.  Originally I had this set as the 1959 Maruichi Sagari 7 Set (BC595) (Note:  I believe Engel incorrectly lists these as a Maruya sets) with two types (with and without borders).  As I was reviewing the checklist with this prize sheet I noticed that some of the wrestler's fighting names (shikona) had changed and that the top prizes on this sheet were of only Kashiwado and Taiho who didn't really become popular until 1960 and beyond.  Then I noticed subtle differences between the Type 1: White Border menko and Type 2: No Border menko in terms of who is represented in each set indicating different release dates.  I remember Engel talking about border and borderless sets being released in different years so I went back and double check and he does mention borderless being issued a year earlier than bordered sets.  This very well may be the case here and I am thinking the Type 2 set is actually from 1959 and the Type 1 is from 1960.  (A great example of how Japanese sumo and baseball menko research helps and verifies each other)  I also translated what was at the top of this prize sheet and it has written "丸一新版相撲面子集" which translates as "Maruichi New Edition Sumo Menko Collection".  I take this as meaning an updated and new release of a previous edition.



This prize sheet is what you typically would see hanging up in the dagashiya.  It's approximately 24"x 36" and has 1/2/3 prize levels.  The 1st-level prize menko are large 8" x 11" and there are 3 of those.  The 2nd-level prize menko are six uncut sheets of 4 menko.  The 3rd-level prize menko are 16 uncut sheets of 2 menko.  In a 100 枚 taba pack that means almost a 1-in-4 chance of winning!  As with most prize sheets, the paper is very thin and starting to deteriorate.  Hopefully I can figure out how to preserve these someday, but at least the glue used to hold the menko on the sheet is still holding strong.

  These menko are very common to find in auctions probably because they were released so late in the menko boom and there was likely a lot of deadstock left over in dagashiya.  The set(s) show the rikishi in various poses and action shots agains a mostly solid background or on the dohyo and measure approximately 1.75" x 3.0".  Backs are printed in a blue ink and have the "Gu-Choki-Pa" mark in a circle at the top with the shikona down the middle and the 7-digit Fighting Number along the bottom.  The left column contains the rikishi's height and weight in kiograms and centimeters and the right column has the rikishi's prefectural birthplace and heya information.