Unopened Kabaya-Leaf Packs

I came across something interesting on Ebay recently.  There's a seller named desertsheephunter who's apparently gotten hold of some unopened packs of the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set.  I'd seen an auction of his a few weeks ago for an empty pack wrapper but I felt I really hit the jackpot last night when I saw his auction for the two sticks of gum from a pack - he had included pictures of him opening the pack that the gum came out of.  I've exchanged some messages with him over the past day and got permission from him to show the photos here:

It's not clear from these photos that there were actually two cards in the pack.  In addition to the Akira Kunimatsu card shown in these photos (which has been graded and is also for sale), he also pulled a Sadaharu Oh card!  He shared another photo showing both cards with me that he hadn't used for the auction:

He mentioned that the Oh card got a grade of 7.5 and that he'd already sold it.

Here's a close up photo of the gum sticks:

He must have more than one pack as he mentioned that the "packs came in at least 4 different colors; blue, yellow, green and reddish/orange".  I think the pack he opened in the photos was reddish/orange while the empty wrapper he had up for sale a few weeks ago was green:

The text on the lower part of the front says (roughly) "bubble gum 10 yen, 2 pro-baseball cards included".  

The text on the left hand side of the back says "baseball card gum <bubble gum>" while the text on the right hand side is a mail-in offer for a "signed handkerchief of Giants players".  The instructions are to mail a 15 yen stamp to the Kabaya-Leaf Co. Ltd at "198 Shimoishii, Okayama-City".

You can see that the wrapper was somewhat transparent.  Mel Bailey, the Air Force serviceman who had imported the Kabaya-Leaf cards to the US back in the 1960's, had taken advantage of this when trying to track down some of the cards in the set that the company had not sold him directly.  As he told Ralph Pearce in 1993:  "The way they were packaged, you could see who the card was you were getting in the box of candy.  So, we knew which ones we were short, so anytime we saw those we'd pick them up."

As far as I know, these are the only unopened packs of Kabaya-Leaf that have been seen since 1967.  And these may well be the only Kabaya-Leaf cards in North America that hadn't at one time been in Mel Bailey's hands.

I'd like to thank desertsheephunter for sharing the information and the photos with me.