Japanese National Team Sets

With the double whammy of baseball returning to the Olympics after a 12 year hiatus (which actually means they just missed the 2012 London games and the 2016 Rio games) AND the fact that Japan is hosting the 2020 games, I thought it'd be good to do a series of posts on the Japanese baseball team from each of the previous Olympics.  This post, however, is not part of that series.  I want to first do a post to revise the list of baseball card sets featuring the Japanese National Team that I originally published just before the 2008 Beijing games.  I originally intended to publish this post in December but I was waiting on getting one last National Team set in hand before I did, so I had to wait until now.  I'll be starting the series of Olympic team posts with the 1984 team later this month and then do one team a month until July which takes me right up to the games themselves in August.

The reason I'm doing a separate post for the National Team sets is to highlight the fact that while there have been a decent number of sets featuring the Japanese National Team from various international tournaments, only two of the seven Olympics that have featured baseball have been represented in those sets.  In contrast I believe that US Olympic teams from 1984, 1988, 1992 and 2000 have been represented in baseball cards, leaving only 1996 and 2008 (maybe) with no cards (Team USA did not qualify for the 2004 Athens games).

The only sets I'll be mentioning in this post will be for the professional team so I won't talk about the four collegiate National Team sets that I know of (2008 Upper Deck, 2008 BBM, and 2013 and 2019 Panini).

I have written about most of these sets in the past so in many cases I'll simply reference the previous posts.

2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese Team Cards #218

The first card set I know of that featured the Japanese National Team was the 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese Team Cards set, a 264(!) card set featuring a large subset of the Japanese Olympic team in all sports, not just baseball.  There's a 19 card subset in the set that features 19 (obviously) of the 24 players from the baseball team.  The Sydney games were the first ones to allow professional baseball players and the team was made up of eight players from NPB, eleven players from the corporate/industrial leagues and five collegiate players.  It is the collegiate players who are not included in the set which is a pity because one of them was Chuo University's Shinnosuke Abe.  Several of the corporate players went on to play in NPB (Shunsuke Watanabe, Toshiya Sugiuchi and Norihiro Akahoshi are the big ones) so this set is one of the few that features "pre-rookie" cards for Japanese players.

2001 Calbee #J-08

Calbee's Series One in 2001 included an eight card subset featuring the 8 NPB players from 2000 Olympic team - Masato Kawano, Tomohiro Kuroki, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Norihiro Nakamura, Fumihiro Suzuki, So Taguchi and Yukio Tanaka.

2002 BBM Japan National Team #11

2002 BBM Japan National Team #29

2002 BBM Japan National Team #33

2002 BBM Japan National Team #44

2002 BBM Japan National Team# 45

BBM's first ever set for the National Team was a 48 card box set for the Japanese representatives for the 34th Baseball World Cup played in Taiwan in November of 2001.   This set came out in early 2002 and contained a 47 card base set plus either a Yoshinobu Takahashi jersey card or a Yoshinobu Takahashi "non-jersey" card - the "non-jersey" card was nine times as likely to be in the box.  The base set was split up into 28 cards for the manager, players and coaches of the team, two cards for the match results, 10 "Starting Member" cards, four "Home Run" cards (for players who homered in the tournament) and three "Recognized" cards (celebrating the team members who were named to the All Tournament team).  The 24 player roster (the linked page only lists 23 players - it's missing Yuya Andoh for some reason) was made up of 15 NPB players, three corporate league players, five collegiate players and one high school player (Hayato Terahara).  The set contained cards for every player on the roster including the collegiate and high school players.  A number of the collegiate and high school players went on to play in NPB (Terahara, Shohei Tateyama and Yuya Kubo being the big ones) so again this set contains pre-rookie cards of these players.  Oddly enough, none of the three corporate league players ever played in NPB.

2002 BBM 1st Version #416

BBM included 16 of the players from the team in a subset in their 1st Version set in 2002.  The players were the 15 NPB players plus Terahara, who had been drafted and signed by the Hawks since the tournament.

2003 BBM Japan National Team #21

2003 BBM Japan National Team #29

2003 BBM Japan National Team #31

The 2003 Asian Baseball Championship was played in Sapporo in November of 2003.  The Japanese team for this tournament was the first fully professional National Team - there were no collegiate or corporate league (or high school!) players on the team.  The tournament was a qualifier for the 2004 Athens Olympics and Japan dominated it, going 3-0 while defeating China 13-1, Taiwan 9-0 and Korea 2-0.  BBM did a 36 card box set for this team that was released in late 2003.   This included a 32 card base set plus four possible jersey cards.  Like the 2002 set, if you didn't get a jersey card then you got a "non-jersey" card.  The base set included 25 cards for the manager (Shigeo Nagashima), the 21 players and the three coaches, four "Award Winner" cards and three cards of match results.

2004 BBM 1st Version #AJ11

BBM included a 22 card insert set for this team in the 2004 1st Version set.  The sets included all 21 players along with manager Nagashima.

There were no cards issued for the 2004 Japanese Olympic team so the next National Team cards wouldn't be until 2006.

2006 Upper Deck SP Authentic Future Watch #WBC-54

The first World Baseball Classic was held in March of 2006 and Japan defeated Cuba in the finals to win it.  Upper Deck had the rights to produce cards for the tournament and ultimately produced a total of 335 cards over eight different sets.  For the Japanese team itself, Upper Deck produced 56 total cards depicting just 16 of the 29 players on the roster plus manager Sadaharu Oh.  This does not include any memorabilia or autograph cards.  I did a round up of all the Japanese team cards for the 2006 WBC some years ago (which I really should have updated for the Ovation Nation set that I didn't discover until later).

2008 BBM Japan National Team #JPN22

BBM's last National Team set was for the 2008 Olympic team.  It was a 29 card box set that contained a 28 card base set plus one insert card.  I'm pretty sure the insert cards were a parallel issue to the base set - I don't think the set had any memorabilia or autographed cards.  The base set didn't have any subsets - it just contained cards for the manager (Senichi Hoshino), the 24 players and three coaches.

2008 Topps Update WBC Preview #WBC4

Topps won the rights to produce cards for the 2009 World Baseball Classic at some point in 2008 and included a "WBC Preview" insert set in their Update set that was released that fall.  This set contained 25 cards of players who had played in the 2006 tournament.  All the players in the set were part of MLB organizations in 2008, although they hadn't necessarily been in 2006.  There were four Japanese players included the set - Kosuke Fukudome, Akinori Iwamura, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Ichiro.

2009 Topps 2 #BCS7

Japan defeated Korea in the finals of the 2009 World Baseball Classic to win back-to-back titles.  Topps ended up producing 306 cards for the tournament over 10 separate sets.  This included 50 cards for the victorious Japanese team representing 21 of the 29 players on the roster.  I'm including in this count the patch card for the team that was included in the eTopps WBC set but not any of the other autographed or memorabilia cards Topps produced that year.  Again I posted a summary of all the cards for Japan some time ago.

2009 Konami WBC Heroes #W09R105

The 2009 WBC also had cards produced for it in Japan by Konami, the only time (so far) that a Japanese card company has been able to produce an official WBC set using the WBC logo.  The Konami WBC Heroes set featured a 253 card base set which represented 253 separate players, by far the most tournament participants ever included in a WBC set.  This included the entire 29 man roster for the Japanese team.  In addition there were also two 12 card insert sets - one for the All Tournament team that included cards of Matsuzaka, Hisashi Iwakuma and Norichika Aoki and the other was entitled "Special Cards" and included Ichiro, Yu Darvish and Shuichi Murata.

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #29

The 2013 World Baseball Classic was disappointing for the Japanese team on two fronts.  The first is that Japan was beat in the semi-finals by Puerto Rico.  The second is that Topps produced only a very small number of baseball cards for the tournament.  Topps only published two WBC related sets that year - a 15 card insert set for their second series which didn't include any cards of Japanese players and a 100 card set called Topps Tribute WBC which included cards of 15 members of the Team Japan roster.  The set also included a number of memorabilia and autographed cards although the Japanese players featured included players from previous WBC rosters (like Iwamura) as well as the 2013 rosters.

2016 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-03

The inaugural Premier 12 was held in November of 2015 and Japan did very well in it up until their semi-final game against Korea when they blew a 3-0 lead in the top of the ninth and ended up losing 4-3.  They crushed Mexico in the bronze medal (i.e. consolation game) 11-1 while Korea defeated the US 8-0 in the title game.  There are no baseball cards that are officially for the Premier 12 but Calbee issued a set in November of 2016 that featured the Japanese National team which had been rebranded as "Samurai Japan" following the 2013 WBC.  This 36 card set featured all the players from the Premier 12 roster as well as the roster of the Samurai Japan team that played a couple friendlies against Taiwan in early 2016 with the exception of Kenta Maeda, who was playing for the Dodgers in MLB during the 2016 season. 

2017 Topps Now WBC #W-35

The 2017 World Baseball Classic had similar results for Samurai Japan in the tournament (they lost to the eventual champion USA in the semi-finals) but slightly better results in the baseball card realm.  Topps produced a total of 115 cards for the 2017 WBC although all but five of those cards were only available as on-line, on-demand cards under their Topps Now and Throwback Thursday lines.  The other five were in the "Paper Prospects" insert set from the 2017 Bowman set so there wasn't even a dedicated WBC insert set in any of the pack-based Topps products that year, at least not for non-memorabilia cards.  Of those 115 cards, 22 of them featured a player from Samurai Japan (including four of those five Bowman "Paper Prospects" cards).  Only 13 players from the roster were represented on those 22 cards although another four players were available on memorabilia cards from various Topps sets that year.  I did a round up for the 2017 WBC cards that was similar to the ones I did for the 2006 and 2009 cards.

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-24

Calbee issued a second Samurai Japan set in November of 2017.  While again this set was not officially a WBC set it did feature almost the entire roster of the team from that tournament.  The only players missing were Norichika Aoki (who spent 2017 in MLB) and Ginjiro Sumitani who was a late addition to the team, replacing an injured Motohiro Shima (who is in the set).  The 36 card set also includes players from the Samurai Japan team that took on Mexico and the Netherlands in November 2016 which conveniently allowed them to include Shohei Ohtani in the set.

2019 Calbee Samuri Japan #SJ-08 (Rei Takahashi)

2019 Calbee Samurai Japan Limited Edition Box Set #M-3

Calbee issued a third Samurai Japan set in fall of 2019.  This 44 card set featured players from the team's roster for games in the fall of 2018 against Taiwan and the MLB All-Stars and in the spring of 2019 against Mexico.  Calbee also released an eight card Limited Edition box set that was only available via mail in redemption that highlighted games Samurai Japan had played between November 2017 and March of 2019.

I'm not sure what to expect card-wise for the upcoming Olympics.  I guess the most likely thing to expect would be another Calbee Samurai Japan set that would include the rosters for both the Olympic team and the Premier 12 roster from last fall although the set wouldn't officially mention either event.  I could also see BBM doing a multi-sport set like their annual "Infinity" set as a tie-in for the Olympics - it'd probably be similar to the Upper Deck set from 2000 although likely smaller.  As always, time will tell.