Samurai Japan Crosses Over

For the second time this year, I've been made aware of a card of Shohei Ohtani that I previously didn't know about.  But unlike the Konami Baseball Collection Location Test cards, this is a card that I would have liked to have picked up had I known about them when they were issued.

Late last week I got an email from William, a reader that I've exchanged messages with a few times in the past.  William was letting me know that he'd picked up a card of Sho Nakata from a "crossover set with the anime My Hero Academia":

The front, obviously, shows Nakata in his Samurai Japan uniform while the back shows Katsuki Bakugo, one of the characters from "My Hero Academia", wearing a Samurai Japan uniform.

William mentioned that there was a card of Ohtani in the set as well.  I tracked down completed sales for both a Nakata and an Ohtani on Mercari - the Nakata had sold for 800 yen while the Ohtani went for 225,100 yen ($4.92 and $1385.44 respectively).  I swiped the images from the Ohtani listing to share here:

The back of Ohtani's card shows Izuku Midoriya, the main protagonist from the anime.

William also came across a photo of a Tetsuto Yamada card from the set as well:

The "2013 Samurai Japan" text on the cards is very misleading.  I was pretty confident that these cards were NOT from 2013 for a couple reasons.  The Japanese National Baseball Team didn't adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013 so these cards would not have been associated with that year's World Baseball Classic team.  In fact, the uniforms worn in the WBC that year were different that what's on these cards.  The first team to play under the name "Samurai Japan" was the team that took on the Taiwanese National Team in a three game set in Taiwan in November, 2013.  Neither Ohtani nor Yamada were members of that team although Nakata was (Nakata was also on the WBC team that year*).  So it seems unlikely that a 2013 Samurai Japan set would include the two of them.

*Just to be clear, neither Ohtani nor Yamada were on the 2013 WBC team either.  Yamada's breakout year wouldn't come until 2014 and Ohtani had just been drafted.  It'd have been really unlikely that he'd have made his professional baseball debut as a member of the WBC team. 

Of course, the biggest reason that it's unlikely that there'd be a crossover set between Samurai Japan and "My Hero Academia" in 2013 is that the anime didn't debut until 2016.  And the manga that it's based on wasn't published until 2014.

So when did the cards come out?  I did some searching on-line using the Japanese text for "Samurai Japan My Hero Academia" (僕のヒーローアカデミア 侍ジャパン) and pretty quickly got some answers.  The crossover event was announced in January of 2017 and was scheduled to take place at the "WBC Team Sendoff matches" on Feburary 28th and March 1st of that year where Samurai Japan would take on the Taiwanese WBC team in Fukuoka.  A number of items depicting characters from the anime wearing Samurai Japan uniforms would be available for sale at the games.  

Most importantly, baseball cards would be distributed to fans attending the games.  Each of the first 3000 fans for each game would receive a single card from the ten card set.  Quickly doing the math, that means there were a total of 6000 cards given away those two days.  If we assume that they printed the same number of copies of each card, there's 600 copies of each card.

Only nine of the ten cards in the set depict an individual player.  In addition to Ohtani, Nakata and Yamada, the set included cards of Nobuhiro Matsuda, Hayato Sakamoto, Shogo Akiyama, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh and manager Hiroki Kokubo.  

I'm not positive, but I think the tenth card depicted all nine players (ok, the manager and eight players) and looked like this:

The back of this card depicted all nine of the anime characters that were paired with the players on their cards:

So I think we've pretty much definitely established that these cards are, in fact, from 2017 and not 2013.  So why do they say 2013 on them?

As I mentioned before, the Japanese National Baseball Team didn't officially adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013.  And, more importantly, they didn't just adopt the name - they copyrighted it.  So that line of text is simply acknowledging that the name (and, more importantly, the logo) was copyrighted in 2013.  

It turns out that these aren't the only Samurai Japan cards that have this copyright line on them.  Check out the back of Ohtani's card from the 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan set, released just a couple months before these cards:

Just to be clear, I digitally added the red oval around the text.

I was somewhat surprised that there are two of the Ohtani cards up on Ebay right now.  They're both graded by PSA and are selling for $24,000 and $25,000 respectively.  Both cards are incorrectly labeled as "2013" issues.  I guess I'm not terribly surprised that PSA has it wrong (given some of their previous work with NPB cards) but I had been under the impression from Dan Skrezyna (aka Korean Cardboard) that PSA needed some sort of documentation about a set, like a checklist on TCDB, before they'd slab a card and id it.  I did a quick search on TCDB but didn't find this set listed.  So I don't know what basis PSA used to id the cards but they pretty clearly got it wrong.

I suspect that the fact that if the cards really were from 2013 they'd include a really rare Ohtani rookie card probably played into PSA being sloppy here but perhaps I'm being a little cynical.

My thanks to William for bringing these cards to my attention.  I wish I'd seen them in 2017!

UPDATE - William came across a listing for the tenth card on PSA's registry.  I was close on what I thought it would look like:

And, once again, they've got it mislabelled on which year it was.