Back in May of last year I posted about these sumo wrestling bromides calendar cards.  The first one I picked up was of Komusubi Tamanoumi and I recently stumbled across this one of future Yokozuna Asashio shown as an ozeki.  The good news is I can now nail down the year of these cards to about 1958.  These cards are interesting and really hard to find as I have only run across these two in the 20 years of collecting.  I thought they were originally from the 1960s or 1970s so I am now not sure what company Daiichi is or what services/products it provided.  More to follow I am sure as I try and find a few more of these along the way.  I hope everyone has an awesome week!

Days have blurred into nights have blurred into weekends during quarantine.  Given the fact that I have not posted in almost a month just illustrates how time flies and gets blurred when work, home, hobby, and free time are all done within a 40' distance from one another.  I hope everyone is doing well and hanging in there.

I won this BB-series card several months ago and thought it was an apt opportunity to highlight it here.  I have only ever seen this card in all my years of collecting.  It appears to be an appointment card for the Daiichi Paint company that was prominent in the 1970s and 1980s.  On the front is then-Komusubi Tamanoumi and on the back are days of the week (Monday through Saturday) along with times from 1:00pm to 6:00pm.  It is a pretty cool piece of ephemera from the late 1950s.

Given it has a bunch of ambiguous days of the week and times, it fits perfectly into how most of us are feeling on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.  It measures about 2.5" x 3.75" and has a nice amount of foxing on the front to give it just the right amount of patina.

Have an awesome week!

Fuji and I have a little dual-post action going on this Saturday where each of us is posting our Top-10 favorite unopened boxes we have in our collections.  Check out his here.  It was tough narrowing it down to ten, but I was able to break them down into different categories to help me decide.  From #10 to #1, here is what I came up with:

#10 (Also known as my favorite Vintage Japanese Sport Box) - 1991 BBM Baseball



#9 (Also known as my favorite Collector's Choice Box) - 2013 BBM P. League Bowling

As a set completionist, I dislike having single, uncatalogued cards/menko in my collection.  It pains me to see these lone cards without any other companion cards because it prevents me from cataloguing them in my book.  This lone sole of Yokozuna Chiyonoyama has sat in the lone sole section in my to-be-catalogued binder for many years now...probably on the order of a decade or more.  By all accounts, it is a rather ordinary menko/playing card.  The edges are smooth indicating it was likely issued in packs or in a magazine as a give away.  On the back there appears small glue spots which indicate it could have been used as a prize card for a menko set, or it was stuck in a album.  It is off-centered which is not uncommon for menko/cards of this era and could elude to it being more of a give away in children's magazine.  Chiyonoyama was ranked as Yokozuna from 1952-1958 and was the stablemaster for the great Chiyonofuji so he definitely is no slouch.

I hope everyone had a great weekend and have an amazing week!

One of the most neglected parts of my sumo menko and card collection is the BB-Series, or Black and White Bromides.  The 1940s BB-series bromides are a "nightmare" to try and catalog due to the sheer number of different sets produced.  A lot of detective work has to go into binning them to the correct sets....and I don't always get it correct so every edition of my book I have to fix numerous sets and checklists as I get smarter on them.  I'm not complaining, but with limited time these BB-series badboys get relegated to the bottom of my priority list.  In fact, when I first started collecting sumo cards, I wouldn't even keep most of my BB-series bromides...that was a big regret.  I've reached the point in my collecting where I can now focus on these black and white beasts.  Now that we are settled in Germany, I've been experimenting with shipping from eBay purchases as well as shipping from Japan.  My first pickup was this nice 1950s lot from Ebay.  Believe it or not, a few cards from this lot are actually quite rare.....I was even able to catalog a new type of set which happens very rarely these days.  The BB572 Marusho set now has been confirmed to have a Type 3: Brown Back.  Pretty cool. These cards are well loved which makes me cherish them more.  I love the candid shot of Yokozuna Wakanohana taking on three young boys which is quite common in the sumo world.  Kids would test their strength against a sumo wrestler, usually during special events like retirement or promotion ceremonies.

I haven't checked to see which ones of these are doubles yet....hopefully not many.  I did notice as I am writing this, there are two winner menko....marked with a purple "1" on the #81004 BB572 and a purple "3" on the 524300 BB601 menko.  Plus a kid named Norio lovingly marked the back of one menko with his name.  Fuji, do you recognize any from your book?

Thanks for reading and hopefully I'll have some more posts for you soon as the goods start flowing into Germany.