Yet Another Mandarake Mail Day

Yesterday I received my latest order from Mandarake, the Japanese antique toy store chain that ships to the US.  I thought I'd share what I got in this post.

My total order was only six cards and as usual most of the cards (five of the six) were Calbees from the 1970's.   This first one is Hiromu Matsuoka of the Yakult Atoms from the 1973/74 set - it was 400 yen:

1973/74 Calbee #307

This is a 1974/75 Calbee card of Koji Yamamoto of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.  At 600 yen, this was the most expensive card in the order:

1974/75 Calbee #206

 This is another 1974/75 Calbee card.  It shows Shigeo Nagashima at his retirement game on October 14th, 1974 (this is the fourth order I've placed with Mandarake - three of them have included a card with an image from that game).  It was 400 yen:

1974/75 Calbee #406

I picked up this 1977 Calbee "Grey Back" card of Hajime Kato because I liked the photo.  It was only 100 yen:

1977 Calbee "Grey Back" #62

I also liked this photo of Isao Harimoto doffing his cap to the Giants cheering section.  This is another card from the 1977 Calbee "Grey Back" set and it cost me 200 yen:

1977 Calbee "Grey Back" #71

The final card I got was not a Calbee card.  Sean had done a post a while back about the 1977/79 Nippon-Ham set and I got to thinking that I should try to add another card from that set to the other three that I have (not that I have any intention of attempting to build that set).  So I picked up this card of Takamasa Suzuki of the Dragons for only 400 yen.  It might look like a Calbee card but it's actually a little narrower and a little taller than the 1970's era Calbee cards:

1977/79 Nippon-Ham #29

If you do the math you'll see that the cards ran me 2100 yen.  Now normally this is the part where I say that SAL shipping ran me 700-ish yen and took three weeks.  However, due to COVID-19, Japan Post is not doing SAL shipping at the moment so I had to either do DHL (1350 yen) or EMS (2000 yen).  I decided to do DHL as I had always been happy with how fast my orders from Amazon.co.jp come using them.  I was not disappointed as I placed this order Tuesday afternoon around 1 PM EDT and received it on Friday afternoon at around 5:15 PM - just over 76 hours!