Another poster showed some Starfin cards earlier in the thread, but I’ve got one now so I’m going to give him a full write-up.
Victor Starfin was a pitcher from 1936 to 1955. He was the second greatest pitcher in Japanese history, and Walter Johnson is, in a number of ways, a good American analogue for him. Before the war he played for the Kyojin – I assume that this is the same team now known as the ‘Giants’. After the war he moved around a bit but spent the better part of his time playing for the Stars. Starfin was the first Japanese player to win 300 games (retiring with 303), he had a career ERA of 2.09 (in an admittedly low-scoring environment), and he still holds the all-time record for shutouts in Japan. At the height of his career he was pitching an insane number of innings: 458 in 1939 (the first year in which the season was not split in two) and 436 in 1940. In the latter year he recorded an ERA of 0.97. He won consecutive MVP awards. Take that Bob Gibson.
As you might have guessed, Starfin wasn’t Japanese. He was Russian, born into an aristocratic family that sided against the Bolsheviks during the revolution. As the Bolsheviks swept to power, the Starfin family fled before them, first to Siberia, then to China, and eventually settling in Hokkaido. My guess is that he was about two years old when they left Russia and something like seven or eight when they finally arrived in Japan. It seems that his position in Japan was somewhat precarious. The family entered on transit visas, which would probably have made living there long term a dicey legal proposition. Wikipedia reports that the owner of the team (Matsutaro Shoriki) who signed him effectively blackmailed him into going pro, as he could have had the family deported.
Despite his success, Starfin’s story is, in many ways, a very sad one. That he was forced into baseball is just one aspect of it (he had wanted to attend Waseda University). Starfin struggled with depression and alcoholism through much of his life. Xenophobia also took a significant toll on him; he was forced to adopt a Japanese name, and later was confined with other foreign residents during World War II. His alcoholism might have cost him his marriage, and probably cost him his life. (To be clear, he did lose his wife. Some sources say that it was his drinking that drove her away, others that she was looking for a way out of Japan and Alexander Boloviyov offered it.) In any case, Starfin died after running his car into a train in 1957. The details of the accident are not clear, but there is a fair amount of speculation that he was driving drunk and caused the accident. (Apparently baseball-reference hasn’t heard about the accident: it lists him as still alive and 102 years old.)
Starfin named his son ‘George’, after Babe Ruth.
Amazingly there is video of Starfin pitching.
Here he is in 1949.
My card is a bromide from the JBR53 set, issued in 1949. Although you can’t really make out the uniform, that would put him on the Stars.