Munetaka Murakami Samurai Japan Cards

I had mentioned when I did my "New Import" post for Munetaka Murakami that I had a lot of Epoch One and Samurai Japan cards for him.  I did a post on the Epoch One cards last week and I thought I'd do the Samurai Japan one now before I get caught up in the Tatsuya Imai and (potentially) Kazuma Okamoto posts in the next few days (neither of whom I have as many Epoch One or Samurai Japan cards for).

As far as I know, there are 17* cards of Murakami as a member of Samurai Japan, of which I have 16.  Just about half of them (eight) are US issued cards for the 2023 World Baseball Classic while the others are all Japanese issues for that tournament and assorted friendly matches.  I'm going to run through the cards in roughly chronological order.

* Not including parallels, autographed or memorabilia cards

Murakami's first appearance with a Samurai Japan team was the one that played a couple friendlies with Mexico in March of 2019.  His first Samurai Japan baseball card was from the Calbee set that was released that fall:

2019 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-33

His next appearance with Samurai Japan and the first major international tournament that he played in for them was the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which was played in 2021 and the baseball competition was played in Yokohama).  Unfortunately there were no baseball cards issued for that edition of the team.

Murakami's next played for Samurai Japan in the friendlies against Australia in November of 2022 (along with warm up games against the Giants and Fighters).  Topps issued 16 Topps Now singles for the team which included two cards for Murakami.  They also issued a full team set via Topps Now:

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan #003

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan #007

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan Team Set #SJ-22

Murakami's best known tenure with Samurai Japan was from the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  Murakami had ten cards across the ten sets/subsets that Topps did for the tournament - two of which (the Samurai Japan team set and the Japan Edition "Samurai Japan" insert set) were ony available in Japan.  I have nine of these - I'm missing his Bowman Chrome card:

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-66

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-69

2023 Topps Now Samurai Japan Team Set #WBCJPN-5

2023 Topps Global Stars #10

2023 Topps Global Stars #F-3

2023 Topps Samurai Japan Team Set #30

2023 Topps 2 WBC Stars #WBC-60

2023 Topps Japan Edition Samurai Japan #WBC-5

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic #84

In addition, BBM had a Samurai Japan subset in their 2023 Infinity set which wasn't "officially" for the WBC but might as well have been:

2023 BBM Infinity #25

Murakami's final appearance to date with Samurai Japan was the friendly matches they played in March of 2024 against "Team Euro", a team of players from European Union nations.  Topps again did Topps Now singles for this series (dubbed the "Global Games") although there were just eight of them this time, one of which was Murakami.  They also again did a full Topps Now team set:

2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #24

Murakami is not the player that I have the most Samurai Japan/Japanese National Team cards for - he's tied with Ichiro for fifth.  I have a whopping 27 cards of Daisuke Matsuzaka with three other players - Yu Darvish, Shohei Ohtani and Tetsuto Yamada - tied for second with 17 cards each.  All but three of the Ohtani's cards I have are from the 2023 WBC (he had 17 in all but I "only" have 14 of them).