Mandarakes

I thought I'd (finally) complete my posts about the card shops I visited on my trip to Japan last May with a quick post about the two Mandarake stores I went to.  Mandarake is a chain of antique stores in Japan that specialize in manga, toys, and other things including, of course, baseball cards.  There are 15 stores across the country, from Sapporo up north all the way west to Fukuoka.  I stopped briefly in the one in Nagoya back in 2019 but my main interaction with them the past few years has been ordering cards from them on-line - they ship to the US!  On this trip, I visited their stores in Fukuoka and the Nakano ward of Tokyo.

I had walked by the store in Fukuoka in 2019 on a Sunday morning on my way from Tenjin to Maizuru Park but it wasn't open at the time.  It wasn't somewhere that I had really intended to visit on this last trip until I realized it was only about four blocks from Mint Fukuoka's new location and I could do both shops with only one subway trip.

It took a few minutes once I entered the store to find the baseball cards.  The store is large and has a lot of stuff but if I remember correctly, there were signs or a directory (in English) that told me where the cards were.  They were in the back of the first floor on the far right.  I think I needed to ask someone about Calbee's but they had several binders full of 70's era cards.  I know I bought a few but I don't remember what I bought at this point.  I realize that this may be somewhat less than useful but I can at least tell you that the store has Calbees available in it.  To be honest, I found the Mandarake store much more useful than Mint Fukuoka but your mileage may vary.

The Nakano store is located in the Nakano Broadway shopping center which can be somewhat intimidating crowd-wise.  Ryan had taken me here on my first trip back in 2013 and the crowds put me off enough that I made us leave.  I went here again with Ryan on my last day of this trip.  Ryan reminded me of my reaction to the crowd the first time we went but I think that after dealing with Japanese crowds for two weeks on this trip, I was able to take them in stride a little better.

Instead of there being one big Mandarake store in the mall, they have a series of separate shops (39 in all across four floors!) that all specialize in a different genre.  The card shop is on the second floor:

They had a bunch of old baseball cards in a glass case.  You can see there are both Calbee and Takara cards available:

They also had a bunch of singles in boxes by the cash register that you needed to ask to see.  This was where Ryan and I spent most of our time here.  I again wasn't really intending to buy any cards here but, of course, I found a couple that I had to grab.

Ryan had said there was another shop on the same floor that he'd seen baseball stuff at but we had to walk around a little before we found it.  It turned out that it was Mandarake's store for movie memorabilia which also includes baseball stuff.  Here's one of the display windows in the hallway:

Ryan had noticed a Sadaharu Oh card in the window that I was pretty sure had been a giveaway at a Giants game in 2008.  We went into the store so that he could buy it - I told him if he wasn't going to get it, I was.  The store had a lot of movie posters that I briefly looked through - I was thinking about getting one for my oldest daughter if I saw a movie I knew she liked but I wasn't sure how I could get it home in one piece.  Ryan pointed me to a bunch of baseball publications towards the back of the store.  I thumbed through them for a bit before coming across an interleague program for the Tigers from 2005 that included two baseball cards.  It was only 1000 yen so I grabbed it.

I'm not sure I'd prioritize going back to either of these stores on a future trip to Japan - it's a bit unpredictable what you may find there.  But it's a little like going to G-Freak - if you've got the time and feel like looking through boxes of random cards, there are worse places to go.  And you might get surprised by what you run into.

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Yokohama (Updated)

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

The last Mint store that I visited on this trip was the Mint Yokohama store.  I've made three trips to Japan and visited this store on each trip but the store has been at a different location each time.  In 2013 it was just north of Yokohama Station, in 2019 it was west of the station and now it's east of the station.  I assume that on my next trip it'll be south of the train station.

The new location is on the seventh floor of the Marui City Mall and I think this location is the closest of all three to the train station.  It's a pretty easy walk out the east side of the station, up a flight of stairs to a walkway that takes you over the surface street and under the highway.  You'll see the Sogo shopping center directly ahead of you but Marui City is to the right of it:

Inside you can take escalators or elevators up to the seventh floor:

I'm not sure why but I didn't take any photos in the shop itself.

This is another one of Mint's stores that I've kind of ineptly labeled "Mall Shops for building recent sets" although to be honest I'm not sure how much they carried in the way of recent singles.  It's one of the Mint stores that strikes me as having some interesting random stuff in it.  As you might expect, they carried a lot of Baystars team-issued cards which was the main thing that I picked up here.  I didn't buy too many as I didn't have a list of what I already had and didn't want to pick up duplicates (a concern that I also had at Mint Sendai getting Eagles team-issued cards).  Like all the other Mint stores, they had unopened new stuff - I bought a pack of the 2024 Topps NPB cards here.

I'll repeat what I said about this store in 2019 - it's not worth coming out of your way for but if you're already in Yokohama for a Baystars game or something else, it's relatively easy to come stop off here.

Here's a map showing the store's location:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Odawara (UPDATED)

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

One of the shops that I was eager to revisit on this latest trip to Japan was Mint Odawara (I think the "official" name of the store is "Mint JAC Odawara").  To repeat what I said in my post about my first visit here on my 2019 trip, Odawara is a city in Kanto located southwest of Tokyo, nestled between the Hakone Mountains on the one side and Sagami Bay on the other and is one of the major gateways for heading to Mount Fuji.  It takes about a half hour to get there from Tokyo Station on the Shinkansen but more like an hour and a half to two hours by conventional trains.

This is yet another Mint store that moved in the past five years.  It used to be in the EPO shopping mall a couple of blocks from the train station but it's now in the Odawara Station Square (Ekimae) Building which, as the name implies, is located almost right next to the station.  I took this photo of the building from the walkway outside the station:

The store is located on the second floor of the building.  To get to it, you need to go into the building next to the Matsumoto Kiyoshi drug store on the left side of the ground floor.  If you look closely at the above photo, the entrance is just to the left of the man walking on the sidewalk just above the blue car.  Towards the back of the store is an escalator (or at least I THINK it's an escalator - it might be stairs) as well as an elevator.  The store is pretty obvious when you reach the second floor - at least when I was there, there weren't any other shops around.

Here are photos of both the outside and inside of the store:

This is a pretty good store for set building.  The shelves on the left side of the above photo have a lot of boxes of singles and I spend a half hour or so going through them, looking for cards from my want list.  I didn't find many but that had more to do with what was left on my want list after cleaning up at Quad Sports, Coletre, BITS and Mint Hakata than what was in stock here.  There were a lot of singles from BBM sets - flagship, Rookie Edition, Historic Collection and Diamond Heroes/Touch The Game/Genesis although not much from the team sets - and Calbee.  I was surprised to see a box of singles from Upper Deck's NPB issues from 2000 and 2001.  Ryan's comment about this store from 2019 was that "they have a slightly different selection of cards from other shops, so I've found things as I've shown up. They won't have much newer product, as far as I can tell, and it seems that gaming cards and US products are their biggest sellers now."  I can't speak to the gaming cards and US products but I think that's still a pretty apt description of their inventory.

The store's owner was pretty friendly and spoke some English - as always, his English was better than my Japanese.  He asked me some questions about what I was doing in Japan and we compared ages - if I remember correctly, he's 75.  I think his son helps him with the store - I was asking him about the Calbee Hawks cards and I think he was trying to tell me that his son would be along soon and spoke better English.  Unfortunately I couldn't wait around as I was heading to Shizuoka for a baseball game that afternoon.

To summarize, I think this is a good little store but I'm not sure it's worth going out of your way for it.  But if you have a few minutes to spare while traveling from Tokyo to or from points west, it's an easy side trip.

Here's a map showing the location of the store:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Fukuoka (UPDATED)

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

While I'm on the subject of Fukuoka...

Mint Fukuoka used to be located in the Tenjin Vivre shopping mall and was pretty much a run-of-the-mill Mint store in a mall.  From what I saw when I visited it in 2019, the store had singles for recent sets along with hits and unopened product.  It also had a lot of gaming cards and (I think) some amount of random older cards - if nothing else, they had rookie cards for a lot of Hawks players along with other stars.

The store moved out a few years ago - I'd guess the mall getting torn down played a role in that decision.  They're now located in a kind of out-of-the-way location and have apparently ceded the style of store that they used to be to Mint Fukuoka Parco (which is basically a block away from where Tenjin Vivre used to be).  They're now pretty much a hits only store which, like Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi, really isn't my cup of tea.

As I mentioned, the shop is in kind of an out-of-the-way location.  They're on the sixth floor of the Stage 1 building down Daimyo Central Street about three blocks from the Chuo Ward Office on Meiji dori.  The nearest subway stop is Akasaka station.  Here's a couple photos of the building and the entrance to the shop:

The one somewhat unique thing about this shop is they have a bar inside so you can get a beer to drink while you break open a box of cards.  Mint Shibuya in Tokyo used to have this at their old location but I don't think they do at their new one (which I didn't get to on this past trip). 

Like I said with Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi, I may have missed something here as I didn't spend a great deal of time in the shop.  And what they have may appeal to other collectors - it just didn't do much for me.  The one thing I will say is that at least Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi is easy to get to.  Pretty much the only positive about this store's location is it's not far from a Mandarake store that has some old Calbees.

Here's a map of the shop's location:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Fukuoka Parco

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

As you'd probably guess from its name, Mint Fukuoka Parco is a card shop located on the seventh floor of the Fukuoka Parco shopping mall in the Tenjin area of Fukuoka-city.  

I'm not entirely sure when it opened but it wasn't there when I visited Fukuoka in 2019.  It seems to have filled the hole left by Mint Fukuoka when that store moved from the Tenjin Vivre shopping mall that was across the street from Parco and has since been torn down.  Mint Fukuoka is now located a few blocks to the west of Parco and has gone somewhat upscale - I'll be doing a separate post about them in the near future.

Given that they're in a shopping mall, it's probably not a big surprise that I categorize them as a "Mall Shop", specifically a "Mall Shop for building recent sets" as they had some bins full of singles from recent sets.  They also had some other more random stuff - I ended up picking up a couple Calbees from the mid-1970's there.  I was a little disappointed that I didn't find any of the 2023 Calbee Hawks cards there but I really can't hold it against them as I didn't find them in ANY store I went to.

This is probably the most approachable of the three Mint stores in Fukuoka as it's a little easier to find than the other two (although Mint Hakata is my favorite of the three - I'd argue Mint Hakata is the best card shop in Japan west of Nagoya).  Go here if you just want to get some recent cards and you might be surprised by whatever else you might find.

Here's a couple photos of the shop itself:

Here's a map showing the location of the shop:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

I've mentioned before that the distribution of baseball card shops in Japan seems to be very lopsided, with more than half of the shops that I know about being located in Kanto.  There are only four that I know of in Kansai - the antique toy store Kinkys and three Mint stores - Mints Umeda and Daimaru Shinsaibashi in Osaka and Mint Sannomiya in Kobe.  I've not been to Kobe so I haven't been to that store but I like Mint Umeda despite it not really being a good set building show.  Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi had opened since my previous trip to Japan so I decided to take a look at it when I was in Osaka back in May of this year.

As the name implies, the shop is located inside Daimaru Shinsaibashi which is a department store located on Midosuji Avenue in the Chuo ward of Osaka, just five or six blocks north of Dotonbori canal.  The shop is on the ninth floor of the store.

I'll be honest here - this really isn't my kind of store.  It's definitely in the  "Mall Shops with only hits" category.  There were unopened boxes and packs of recent stuff and a lot of expensive cards lining the walls and cases.  I didn't see any singles from recent sets or boxes of random cards to pick through although I won't swear they weren't there.  I did a quick walk through the store so it's possible I missed something.   

Like Mint Shinjuku, there's nothing wrong with this kind of store if all you're looking for are unopened boxes and hits.  It's just not what I'm looking for from a store.  I wouldn't say I was disappointed with the store, though, as it was pretty much exactly what I expected from it.

Here's a map showing the location of the shop:

Card Shops In Japan: Kinkys

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

While I've been working on posts about the card shops I visited on my trip to Japan in May, I've realized that most of the new posts are for shops that I really didn't like very much (Mint Shinjuku, Mint Tachikawa) while I'm only updating existing posts for stores that I really liked (Quad Sports, Mint Ikebukuro, etc).  I've been doing the new posts in the order that I visited the shops and next on the list was one of my least favorite stores.  I decided to switch things up a little and instead write about a shop that I really enjoyed instead - Kinkys in Osaka.

With a name like "Kinkys", you might get the wrong idea when I describe it as an antique toy store.  Let me be clear, they don't sell THOSE kind of toys.  What they do sell are vintage toys from the 1950's and later, kids magazines, record albums and 45s and lots of trading cards, especially baseball cards.  They stock a lot of Calbee cards and I also saw Yamakatsu and menko cards there.  Sean had discovered this store on line (although I don't think he's made it there in person yet) and Ryan has been here several times.

I visited the store the afternoon of the day I had arrived in Osaka.  The store is located about a quarter mile from Neyagawashi Station on the Keihan Main Line.  It takes around a half hour to get there from Umeda Station and about 40 minutes from Dotonbori.  It's on the second floor of a small building with an udon restaurant on the ground floor:

You get to the shop by going into the doorway on the right and climbing the stairs.  The stairwell is decorated with picture sleeves from vintage 45s - I was amused that there were a number of singles from the Kinks:

The store is packed with stuff - enough that it can be a little difficult to maneuver.  I took a bunch of photos although I don't know if they really capture the store well (the store's website does a better job of it):

There was a big pile of Calbee albums for various sets (not just baseball):

While I found Calbee cards in several different locations in the store, the most valuable ones (either due to rarity or being in really good condition) were in binders up near the cash register:

While the Calbees in the rest of the store are basically in random groups, the cards in the binders are organized in order so it's easy to find a particular card you're looking for.

I ended up buying a handful of Calbee cards here.  I saw the Yamakatsu and menko cards but I didn't really look into them too much since there weren't any specific cards of those that I was looking for.  Here's what I bought:

I also bought a 45 of the Young Rascals "People Got To Be Free" for a friend of mine who's a huge record collector.  I knew he liked the Young Rascals (we went to see them in Baltimore way back when) and I (correctly) figured he'd get a kick out of it:

I spent 4000 yen here which wasn't too bad considering the Lions multi-player card was 2000 yen and the 45 was 1280.  My total was actually 4120 yen but the shopkeeper (who I assume is the owner) rounded it down to 4000 yen since he didn't take credit cards.  I had enough cash with me to pay the full price but he insisted on the lower price. 

I didn't talk to him much as he was on the phone for a bit when I arrived at the store but the owner seemed friendly.  He did insist that I leave my shoulder bag and the shopping bag from the Godzilla store I had visited earlier that day on a shelf while I was in the store (you can see them in one of the photos I took in the shop).  With so much stuff I'm sure he's worried about shoplifting.  Customers wearing backpacks are likely to knock stuff over as well.

If I haven't been clear, I'd go back here in a heartbeat despite it being a little out of the way.  It was a very fun store.

Here's a map with the store's location:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Sendai (UPDATED)

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

After attending an afternoon Eagles game at Miyagi Baseball Stadium on my day trip to Sendai, I headed for Mint Sendai.   This was my second visit to this store but my first since they moved to their new location.  They had previously been in the E BeanS shopping mall on the west side of Sendai Station but have since moved to the Parco Shopping Mall that's MUCH closer to the station - you pretty much walk outside the station and the Mall is right there.

The store is located on the eighth floor of the mall and I felt like I was going back in time when I stepped out of the elevator on that floor - I had to walk through a Tower Records to get to the card shop!  It took me back to the 1980's when I used to regularly haunt the store near the Foggy Bottom Metro Stop in DC.  

I didn't spend any time browsing in the record store, though. as my thoughts were firmly on baseball cards.  Here's a couple photos of the shop:

(I want to point out that I don't think the photo on the store's page at the Mall's website is actually of the store.  It looks more like Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi in Osaka - in fact you can see a cropped version of the same photo on the Osaka store's site.) 

The thing that really struck me about this store is that besides the hits, I didn't feel like they had many baseball cards at all.  They appeared to have a lot of non-sports cards but there were several boxes of random baseball cards beneath one of the counters.  The boxes I looked through had a lot of Calbee cards from the last ten years or so but they also contained random things like mid-70's Calbee cards and Hideki Matsui Home Run cards from the 1990's.  The big thing I was expecting to find here were team issued cards for the Eagles.  They had a lot of those and I think they also had singles from BBM's Eagles team sets although I may be misremembering.

When I came up with my new categories for Japanese card shops last month, I categorized this store as a "Mall Shop for building recent sets".  I'm not sure that's really accurate since I don't remember seeing singles for anything other than Eagles cards and random Calbees although I certainly could have missed them.  I'm not sure I'd categorize them as "Mall Shop with only hits" either though as they were a little more interesting to me than that.  Maybe the best way to think of them is somewhere in between those two categories - they have the recent unopened stuff and the hits but they also have some random other things.  It's definitely not a store you should expect to do any set building at (unless you're trying to finish an Eagles team issued set) but it's worth a visit if you've got a half hour or so to kill in Sendai.

Here's a map with the store's location:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Tachikawa

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

Mint Tachikawa is located - appropriately enough - in Tachikawa, a city west of Tokyo-city (but still in Tokyo prefecture) on the JR Chuo line.  It was not a store that really registered on my radar but when I realized Ryan and I could easily swing by it on our way from Toho Studios to Seibu Dome on my first full day in Japan, I decided to check it out.

Ryan did posts on the store back in 2012 and 2014 but the store has moved a few blocks to the west since then,  It is now located on the first floor of the Park Avenue shopping mall which is located roughly a quarter mile northwest of the JR Tachikawa station:

You can walk all the way to the mall from the station on an elevated walkway but you'll need to drop down to the ground floor to find the shop.

If you look carefully at the second photo, you can see Ryan in the back of the store, opening his packs of Dream Order cards.

As you can see, the store is very small.  It's pretty much a "Mall Shop With Only Hits".  Ryan and I both bought some unopened Dream Order products - packs and starter decks - at the store but it wasn't a place where I was going to knock off anything from my want list.  I don't think they had any singles from recent sets but I could have missed them.  

The shop is not conveniently located to central Tokyo - it's about a half hour train ride from Shinjuku station.  But if you're in the area to check out Tachikawa Airfield or Showa Kinen Park or just passing through on your way to Seibu Dome and want to get the latest packs or boxes, it's worth stopping by.

Here's a map of the store's location:

Card Shops In Japan: Mint Shinjuku (UPDATED)

Please check my "Card Shops in Japan" page before planning a trip to this store to verify that it's still where it was when I visited.

The first card shop I went to on my trip was Mint Shinjuku, which was somewhat appropriate since it had been the first one I had gone to on my previous trip in 2019.  It had moved at some point in the five years between my visits to the seventh floor of the Shinjuku Marui Annex shopping mall - look for the building with the "Wald 9 Cinema" sign on it.

Here's some photos of the shop itself:

When I went there in 2019 I felt like the store fell into the general category of "Mall Shop" - a store that's likely to have singles from recent sets as well as hits and unopened packs and boxes.  I had picked up a couple Epoch One cards and a card I was missing from the 2018 Epoch NPB set there.  The new location appears to really have divested from having recent singles (although they had Dream Order ones - not sure if those were rare parallels or not).  I'd throw this shop in my new category of "Mall Shops with only hits" which, depending on what you're looking for, could be fine.  The shop is just a few blocks east of Shinjuku station so it's a convenient place to go if you want to grab some of the latest cards.  It really had nothing that I was particularly looking for though and I'm somewhat surprised that, according to the time tags on my photos, I spent ten minutes in the shop.  I have no idea what I did during that ten minutes as I didn't buy anything.  

This was literally the first place in Japan I went to after checking into my hotel, about 3 1/2 hours after my plane landed.  I was tired and a little jet lagged so my evaluation of the store may be colored by that.

Here's a map of the shop's location:

Card Shops From The Trip Overview

Now that I'm done with the posts about the cards I brought home from Japan in May, I'm going to start writing about the card shops I went to.  I went to twenty one stores in all, although that total includes two Mandarake stores which aren't really card shops.  

I was going to do posts on all twenty one but I realized that ten of the stores I visited are ones that I did posts on for the 2019 trip and nothing's really changed for them.  They're still in the same locations and they still appear to carry the same things they did before.  For these ten, I'm just going to update the previous posts I did with some new photos and information.  So there will be no new posts for Quad Sports, Mint Akihabara, Mint Ikebukuro, Mint Urawa, Coletre, SportsCard BITS, Mint Umeda, Mint Hiroshima, Mint Hakata or G-Freak.  (I'm not sure how soon I will get around to those updates though.)

That leaves me with only doing posts on stores that have moved since I visited in 2019 (Mint Shinjuku, Mint Sendai, Mint Fukuoka, Mint Odawara and Mint Yokohama) and stores I'd never been to before (Mint Tachikawa, Mint Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Kinkies, and Mint Fukuoka Parco).  I'll probably do a single post on the two Mandarake stores I went to (Fukuoka and Nakano Broadway).

One thing I want to do here though is kind of categorize the stores.  This is just my take on the shops - other people may have different opinions.  What I want to do here is to give people a sense of what to expect from a store so they have an idea of what shop might have what they're looking for.

Note that I'm only categorizing stores I went to on this trip.

The first category is "set building" shops.  These are the stores that carry lots of old singles so that you can finish completing sets.  Personally, these are my favorite card shops in Japan.  The shops in this category are Quad Sports, Coletre, Mint Ikebukuro, Mint Odawara, SportsCard BITS, Mint Hakata and Mint Urawa.  I'm kind of wavering on Mint Urawa because I had a bad experience there this trip but they may have more singles than I thought.

The second category is (for lack of a better phrase) "random old stuff" shops.  These shops will have vintage cards but it may be difficult to predict what they'll have in stock at any particular time.  Basically this category includes the Mandarake stores as well as Kinkies - an antique toy and music store in Osaka.  I'd also include Biblio in this category but I didn't make it there on this trip.

The third category is the "random stuff" shops and there's really only one in this group - G-Freak.  He's got a lot of stuff and a lot of it is recent but it's really not a shop you can walk into expecting to knock items off your want list. 

The remaining categories are for "Mall Shops" which are, as you'd expect, essentially relatively small shops in shopping malls (well, usually - Mint Fukuoka really isn't in a shopping mall but it's got that kind of feel).  I used to lump all of these together but I've realized there really are two distinct groups.

The first group I'm going to somewhat ineptly dub the "Mall Shops for building recent sets".  These stores will have a lot of hits and unopened boxes and packs but will also stock singles from most of the major sets for the past couple years.  Some of them may also have random older cards as well.  These stores are all Mint stores - Akihabara, Umeda, Fukuoka Parco, Sendai, Yokohama and Hiroshima.  

The second "Mall Shop" category (and final overall one) is "Mall Shops with only hits".  These are the stores that pretty much only stock hits and unopened boxes.  These are my least favorite stores but if that's what you're looking for, they're the places to go.  Again, these are all Mint stores - Shinjuku, Tachikawa, Daimaru Shinsaibashi and Fukuoka.

For me, personally, the amount of time I spend in a store is directly related to what kind of a store I think it is.  I'll spend hours in a "set building" store but maybe a couple minutes in the "Mall Shops with only hits".  The other shops will fall somewhere in between those two extremes.

Best Card Shops In Japan?

I recently came across a YouTube video by someone called the "Sports Card Investor" who went to Japan and reported on the "Best Card Shops In TokyoJapan" (UPDATE - as Zippy Zappy points out in the comments, the video actually says "Tokyo" not "Japan".  Not sure how I convinced myself it said "Japan" but it doesn't).  Now, obviously that's a pretty subjective topic as what appeals to one collector may not appeal to another but I found the whole thing kind of grating.  Here it is if you want to watch it:

He visits six locations in Tokyo - Mint Lab, Mint Games (in Ikebukuro), Mint Akihabara, a Pokemon Center, Mint Shibuya and a Pikachu Sweets/Pokemon Card Game station.  It's kind of an odd group since half of those sell game or Pokemon cards rather than sports cards although to be fair, he did label it "Best Card Shops" and not "Best Baseball Card Shops".  Of the sports card shops, I've been to Mint Akihabara and Mint Shibuya (although before they moved to their current location).  I have also been to Mint Lab's predecessor Mint Kanda although Mint Lab is a much different store than Mint Kanda was.  I would not rate any of those stores as "the best in Japan" or even " the best in Tokyo" but again, those are subjective ratings.  For me, the "best stores in Japan" are Quad Sports, Coletre, Mint Ikebukuro, Mint Urawa, BITS! and Mint Hakata - along with Wrappers if they're still actually open - and two of those aren't in Kanto.

I think what I find annoying is the narrator's focus on Western cards.  "Oh, wow, look at all the Kobe cards!"  "Hey, you can get American football cards here!"   I guess I don't understand the point of traveling halfway around the world to look for cards you can find in the US.  I feel like he just gives the NPB and J-League cards a passing glance, except for the Shohei Ohtani 2013 rookie cards which he drools over.  And he's surprised there are sumo cards.  I mean, there are plenty of oddball sports sets in Japan that would surprise someone - curling, women's bowling, beach volleyball - but sumo?  Of course there are sumo cards.

I was amused that the guys at Mint Lab gifted him a box of 2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection, saying it was more beautiful than Topps Chrome Refractors.  Yeah, maybe, but it's still ugly.  I would have rather watched his kids bust that box than the ones they did - one kid had a couple boxes of Donruss football cards and the other had a Topps Chrome soccer box.  Again - why go halfway around the world to get cards you can go across town for.

Bottom line I guess is that this is a style of collecting that doesn't appeal to me.  And that's fine, it's a big hobby.  But I don't think this video really gives a good sense of what the card market is like in Japan.

Calbee Cards From Mandarake

I recently placed an order for a bunch of old Calbee cards from Mandarake, a chain of antique toy stores in Japan that ships to the US, and the cards showed up yesterday.  My selection criteria for the cards was simply if I liked the photo on it.  I thought I'd do a quick post to show off the cards I got.  So in chronological order...

I've been wanting this card of Sadaharu Oh ever since I saw Sean post about it:

1974/75 Calbee #405

By the way, that mirror was under the stands at Korakuen Stadium - I think it was between the clubhouse and the tunnel to the dugout.  It can now be found in the Hall Of Fame.  I didn't take a picture of it during either of my visits there but there's a virtual tour of the Hall Of Fame available on-line so I grabbed a screen shot of it from there:

This card shows Makoto Matsubara coming home after hitting a pinch hit two run home run to put the Central League ahead 4-3 in Game 2 of the All Star Games on July 20th, 1975.  Matsubara was the game MVP.  That's Shigeo Nagashima behind him:

1975/76/77 Calbee #26

Here's a card of Jinten Haku from the pink border series of the 1975/76/77 Calbee set.  Haku is from Korea and his real name is Baek In-Chun.  He spent 19 seasons in NPB before joining the KBO when it started up in 1982.  He hit .412 with 19 home runs in 71 games as player-manager of the MBC Blue Dragons that year - he's the only .400 hitter in KBO history:

1975/76/77 Calbee #349

I picked up three cards that show scenes from the 1976 Nippon Series in which the Hankyu Braves defeated the Yomiuri Giants in seven games.  The first card shows Giants outfielder Isao Shibata leading off first at Korakuen Stadium.  That's Bobby Marcano playing second for the Braves and I'm pretty sure that's Hideji Katoh playing first:

1975/76/77 Calbee #1265

It's funny - Mandarake actually misidentified this card being Kenji Awaguchi instead of Shibata.  They misread the number on the back as "1263" rather than "1265".  To be honest, I can see how they could have made the mistake:

Speaking of Marcano, this card shows him doing what I think is a post game interview.  Since he's in a home uniform, I'm assuming it's from one of the games played in Nishinomiya - maybe Game 3 since he hit a home run in that game.  The gentleman to the left of Marcano is Roberto Barbon, who had played for Hankyu in the late 50's/early 60's and became an interpreter for the team when Barbon joined:

1975/76/77 Calbee #1280

This last card shows Bernie Williams rounding third after homering in Game Six of the Series at Korakuen Stadium.  That's coach Akira Ishii (#72) and Braves starting pitcher Takashi Yamaguchi (#14) cheering him on (not sure who the guy in the jacket is):

1975/76/77 Calbee #1288

This is a 1981 card shows Yohohama Taiyo Whales shortstop Daisuke Yamashita leaping to avoid the sliding Awaguchi:

1981 Calbee #334

I picked up several cards from the 1983 Calbee set.  Here's Fighters catcher Tatsuo Ohmiya:

1983 Calbee #259

Kenichi Yazawa high-fiving Yasunori Ohshima:

1983 Calbee #388

Yutaka Fukumoto tracks down a fly ball:

1983 Calbee #395

Takuji Ohta getting a stuffed animal after homering:

1983 Calbee #592

I've got a couple 1987 Calbee cards of Bob Horner already but this one intrigued me.  I'm not entirely sure what the occasion was but I think it may have been his first game with the Swallows:

1987 Calbee #111

Lotte's Norifumi Nishimura doing some light weight training:

1991 Calbee #26

The first Calbee cards I ever got were from the 1992 set so it's a bit odd that I only have nine of them.  I decided to pick up two more:

1992 Calbee #92

1992 Calbee #101

Mandarake's prices are still amazingly cheap.  The most expensive card of all of these was the Oh mirror card which was only 400 yen.  The Williams, Akiyama and Nishimura cards were 300 yen apiece; the Fukumoto, Hasegawa, Ohmiya, Yazawa and Yamashita cards were 200 yen each; the Matsubara, Marcano and Haku cards were 150 yen each and the Shibata, Horner and Ohta cards were only 100 yen each.  The subtotal was 3050 yen.  DHL shipping was 2060 yen so the total was 5110 yen which worked out to only $46.86.  So the average price for each card, including shipping, was a little over $3.  Not too shabby!