My First Japanese Cards

I got thinking recently about the first Japanese cards I ever got.  Part of this was spurred by a discussion Justin Shafer and I had a few months back when he had me on his video podcast "That Hobby Show" show on YouTube - he remembered a story I had once told him about getting some cards at a shop in Frederick, Maryland.  So I thought I would do a real quick post about the Japanese cards I got BEFORE I actually started collecting Japanese cards.  (This does not count the 1979 TCMA set that I had when I was in high school that I sold with the rest of my childhood collection when I was in college.)

The first Japanese cards I got were those ones Justin was asking about.  In 1991 I was living in Beltsville, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC.  My birthday that summer was on a Friday so I took the day off from work and spent the afternoon in Frederick looking around at a couple antique malls before heading up to Hagerstown to watch the Suns play.  At some point I stopped by Burton's Coins & Cards in Frederick - I have it in my head that I stopped by there AFTER the game but that can't be right as the game wouldn't have ended until 9:30 or 10 and Hagerstown's a half hour away from Frederick - where I came upon a box of 1991 BBM packs.  I had read about them in Baseball Card Magazine but had never seen any - I had been interested in the set but felt that the $70 price the magazine said it was going for was more than I wanted to pay for it.  At the time I was collecting MLB cards and just starting to get serious about minor league cards.  This was four years before Hideo Nomo joined the Dodgers so no one was really thinking about NPB players coming the US.  Anyway, I ended up buying a pack.  I only remember one of the ten cards from the pack - it was for a player who eventually would become one of my favorites:

1991 BBM #219

The cards went into my collection and were the only Japanese cards I had for about four years.  In 1995 I was visiting my parents at their home in Newark, Delaware and stopped off at a card shop - I think it was called something like "Steve's Cards" - in a shopping plaza about two blocks from their house.  Steve had a small pile of Japanese cards in his display case and I decided on a whim to buy them.  I don't remember how much he was selling them for but I'm sure it wasn't a whole lot.  There were two different types of cards.  First was about seven 1992 Calbee cards - if I remember correctly they were actually packs rather than loose cards.  Once again I ended up with cards of players who would become favorites of mine (and one of those cards has a cameo appearance of the favorite player from 1991):

1992 Calbee #51

1992 Calbee #43

The other cards in the pile were what I eventually learned were the 1992 Takara Hiroshima Toyo Carp set - all 30 cards still in their case.  Since this was the summer of Nomo-mania, Steve wanted to be sure that this wasn't the team that Nomo had played for in Japan.  After I assured him it was not, he included the set in what he sold me.  These were my first Japanese cards that had no English on them and it wasn't until years later when I got my first copy of one of Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist & Price Guide" did I learn who all the players were.

1992 Takara Carp #20 Manabu Kitabeppu

1992 Takara Carp #28 Shinji Nishida

The last batch of Japanese cards that I got were from my co-worker Lonnie in 1996.  Lonnie was a computer programmer like me but he did some card dealing on the side.  He had gone to Japan a few years earlier for work and out of curiosity bought two packs of cards - a pack of 1992 BBM and a pack of 1993 Tomy.  The Tomy pack had included a card of Nomo.  I think I paid him $20 for all the cards - the price was pretty much driven by the Nomo.  Like the 1991 BBM pack, I don't remember too much about who was in either pack - these are the only ones I'm sure about (well, I'm pretty sure about Kawakami but I could be misremembering - but today marks 102 years since his birth so I need some excuse to show a card of his...):

1992 BBM #125

1992 BBM #32

1993 Tomy #047

I didn't get any more Japanese cards until I joined Ebay in 1999 and started seeing cards show up when I was looking for minor league cards.  By late 2000 I was seriously collecting them and by 2002 I was pretty much collecting nothing else.