The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first Olympics to include baseball although it was a demonstration sport until the 1992 Barcelona games. Unlike in the US, however, no baseball cards were ever issued for the amateurs who played for Japan in any of the Olympics. The first Olympics that allowed professionals to play baseball were the 2000 Sydney Olympics. These were also the first Olympics that there were Japanese baseball cards for so we'll start there.
Before we do though, I want to go over what I think is the history of the licensing for cards of the National Team in Japan. This is basically based just on tracking who released which set when. It looks like Upper Deck had the initial license in 2000, followed by Calbee in early 2001. BBM took it over in 2002 (with their first set being the team set for the 2001 IBAF Baseball World Cup) and held it through 2008. Konami took over in 2009 and had it until 2013/2014. Calbee again had it from 2015 until 2020 or so. Topps picked it up at some point after that although I'm not sure when. Topps' first Japanese National Team products were the Topps Now Samurai Japan cards and team set for the Australian friendlies in November of 2022. As of this writing, Topps is still the license holder - they have Topps Now Samurai Japan cards up for sale at this very moment for the team that played two games against Team Europe earlier this month. (I will confess to being completely confused as to why BBM was able to include Samurai Japan cards in last fall's Infinity set.)
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| 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese Team Cards #221 |
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| 2001 Calbee #J-01 |
Tournament: 2000 Sydney Olympics
Medal: None
Cards: 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese National Team Cards, 2001 Calbee
Missing Players: Shinnosuke Abe, Jun Hirose, Masanori Ishikawa, Akichika Yamada, Yuji Yoshimi
Notes: The Japanese baseball team for the Sydney games was a hybrid pro-am roster with eight professional players, eleven corporate league players and five collegiate players. The 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese National Team Cards set was a 264 card set that featured Japanese Olympic athletes from a number of different sports. It included cards of 19 of the 24 players on the baseball team - only the collegiate players were excluded. The following year, Calbee included an eight card subset showing all eight professional players in their National Team uniforms. I think the Upper Deck cards were "officially" Olympic cards (they have the logo of the games on them) while the Calbee cards were not.
Tournament: 2004 Athens Olympics
Medal: Bronze
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes: It is somewhat baffling to me that there was no card set for the 2004 Olympic team. It was the first time Japan sent an all-professional baseball team to the Olympics and the team they sent was absolutely stacked. The pitching staff included Koji Uehara, Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tsuyoshi Wada and Hisashi Iwakuma while the line up featured Michihiro Ogasawara, Norihiro Nakamura, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Kenji Johjima, Kosuke Fukudome and Kazuhiro Wada. It is especially baffling considering that BBM did a team set for team from the 2003 Asian Baseball Championship that was a qualifier for the 2004 Games and included insert cards of that team in the 2004 1st Version set. The team dominated all but one opponent at the Games and it was that one opponent that caused them to end up with the Bronze Medal. The Australians were the only team to beat them in pool play and Chris Oxspring out-dueled Matsuzaka in the semi-final game.
Tournament: 2006 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes: This is a little misleading in that while there were no Japanese cards issued for the 2006 WBC, there were many US based cards issued, including 56 cards that featured the manager (Sadaharu Oh) and sixteen players from the Japanese team.
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| 2008 BBM Japan National Team #JPN12 |
Tournament: 2008 Beijing Olympics
Medal: None
Cards: 2008 BBM Japan National Team Set
Missing Players: None
Notes: I used to think that BBM hadn't done a set for the 2004 Olympic baseball team because their results were so disappointing. If that was indeed the case, there's no way they'd have done a set for the 2008 team. While the team was again pretty well stacked, they went a mediocre 4-3 in pool play, just barely qualifying for the medal round. They then lost both the semi-final game against South Korea and the Bronze Medal game against the US to come away with no medal for the second time in three Olympics with professional baseball players. I do not believe that the set was "officially" an Olympic set as there's no logo or acknowledgement of the team being from the Olympics on them.
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| 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC #W09R089 |
Tournament: 2009 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC
Missing Players: None
Notes: Konami produced the gold standard for a WBC set in 2009. The Baseball Heroes WBC set contained 253 cards of 253 individual players representing all sixteen teams from the tournament. All the players on the roster for the four teams that made the final round - Japan, South Korea, the US and Venezuela - are included in the set (ok, the roster was the roster for the final round so Brian Roberts is in the set but Dustin Pedroia is not since Roberts replaced Pedroia on the US roster for the final round). Each of the other twelve teams have twelve cards in the set with the exception of Panama which only has eight. There's two twelve card inserts sets - one has the All Tournament Team while the other has three extra cards for players from the four final round teams. The set is an "official" WBC card set and features the tournament's logo.
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| 2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ004 |
Tournament: 2013 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2013 Konami Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Many players
Notes: The 2009 Konami WBC cards are somewhat difficult to come by but they can be found. In contrast, the 2013 Konami Samurai Japan cards are incredibly scarce. I didn't even discover they existed until 2022. There's only 11 cards featuring a single player from each NPB team (the 2013 Japanese WBC team had no players from the Baystars). I've only been able to get two of them so far. The cards are not "official" WBC cards - there's no logo on the cards themselves and I think the sleeve patches have been removed from the photos.
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| 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-07 |
Tournament: 2015 Premier 12
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Kenta Maeda
Notes: Calbee issued four Samurai Japan sets in the five years between 2016 and 2020. Each set was issued in the fall, usually in November. What was odd about the sets is that they covered the players who had played for Samurai Japan from July of the previous year until June of the year of issue. So for example, the 2016 set featured players who had played for the team from July of 2015 through June of 2016. Of course, in reality that meant the players who suited up for the team in any tournaments or friendlies being played in either November or March of each year. Doing it like this produced two issues. The first is that the players in the set are not necessarily the players on the roster for a tournament - which is probably one reason why Calbee never associated the sets with a particular tournament. The second and probably bigger issue has to do with how (I think) Calbee's NPB license works - they can make baseball cards of any player on an NPB roster the same season they are issuing the cards. So if a player like, say, Kenta Maeda, played in the Premier 12 in November of 2015 and then spent 2016 in MLB, Calbee would not be allowed to issue a card of him in a 2016 set. The upshot of all this is that the 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan set is not specifically a set for the 2015 Premier 12 team as it also contains cards for players who played in friendly games against Taiwan in March of 2016 and does not include a card of Kenta Maeda. The set is also not "official" as there's nothing to tie it to the Premier 12.
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| 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-29 |
Tournament: 2017 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Norichika Aoki, Ginjiro Sumitani
Notes: The 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan set covered the players from the 2017 World Baseball Classic along with players from the friendly matches against Mexico and the Netherlands in November of 2016 (which allowed it to have Shohei Ohtani who did not play in the 2017 Classic). Because he spent 2017 in MLB (and the set was not an "official" WBC set), Calbee was unable to include Norichika Aoki in the set. I've been somewhat at a loss to understand why Ginjiro Sumitani, who was a late addition to the WBC squad to replace the injured Motohiro Shima, was not in the set though.
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| 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-27 (Seiya Suzuki) |
Tournament: 2019 Premier 12
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Shun Yamaguchi, Yoshihiro Maru
Notes: The 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan set was the only one of Calbee's Samurai Japan sets to only have players from one event and that was due to the pandemic. While there were supposed to be friendly matches against some other country (I think it was Taiwan) in March of 2020, they were cancelled as COVID lockdowns began. Despite this, the set was still not an "official" Premier 12 set. Shun Yamaguchi spent the Coronavirus shortened season in MLB in 2020 and so was not able to be included in the card set. Like Sumitani in 2017, Yoshihiro Maru was a late addition to the roster (he replaced the injured Shogo Akiyama) and was somewhat inexplicably left out of the set.
Tournament: 2020 Tokyo Olympics
Medal: Gold
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes: There have been four Olympic baseball tournaments using professional players. Japan has medaled in two of them - the 2004 Athens Games and the 2020 Tokyo Games (which were played in Yokohama in 2021). It blows my mind that there are cards for the two Olympic teams that did not medal (2000 and 2008) but not these two teams. Especially since the 2020 team won the Gold Medal on their home soil. Hell, even the incredibly disappointing South Korean team had baseball cards!
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| 2023 Topps Samurai Japan #1 |
Tournament: 2023 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2023 Topps Samurai Japan
Missing Players: None
Notes: Having an actual license for the WBC allowed Topps to produce a set that included both NPB and MLB players.
That's a total of eleven "major" tournaments since 2000 - five WBCs, four Olympics and two Premier 12s - and there have been Japanese-issued baseball cards for eight of them. Three of those eight featured cards of all the players on the team.
Given that Topps Japan has done Topps Now singles and team sets for three different Samurai Japan "events" now (the 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Tournament and the 2022 and 2024 friendly matches against Australia and Team Europe respectively), I fully expect them to do the same for this fall's Premier 12 team. I expect that they'll be the first cards for a team in that tournament to acknowledge it.
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