1940s Japanese Menko cards?

[jjbond]

(I'm not sure which forum section this should be posted in. I apologize if there was a better section for this question)

Over the past few weeks I've started getting interested in looking at old Japanese baseball cards. (I've started learning the language, so this seemed like an interesting and related challenge). I even downloaded Engel's Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist.

Does anyone else collect these? I get that it'd be challenging to find a lot of these, but I'm unexpectedly challenged by matching Menko cards to the checklist (do I assume most things I'm looking up are just unlisted?) It sounds like anything before the '40s is impossible to get, but it looks like there's a lot of nice vintage cards to track down. (and I had thought Meknos would be easier to start with than Bromides...)

[nat]

Hi JJ -

Yeah! Old Japanese cards are great!

There are, indeed, a lot of unlisted sets (and some sets are listed in the guide but are incomplete, so you may yet find unlisted cards from otherwise catalogued sets).

Menkos and bromides are both available, albeit not in the quantities or with the selection that American cards from the same era are. I know that there are people who try to complete sets, but that seems to me like it would be extremely challenging (especially if you're not actually in Japan).

Here is a long thread that is mostly about my effort to build a collection of Japanese hall of famers.

I'm happy to talk about Japanese cards, or Japanese baseball, if you're interested or have questions. We have a few members who are more knowledgeable than I am about it, and who can actually read Japanese (to call my own skills with Japanese "rusty" would be to insult rust), and hopefully they'll chime in here.

[Casey2296]

-
Love Japanes baseball cards.
The only Menko set I was able to complete,1949 JCM 111, also completed the 1964 Fujiya Gum set. Working on a JCM 135 Maruten sequential Nagashima set but the odds of completing that one are steep.
_

[Kawika]

Another dabbler in Japanese cards here. Have two or three small stacks of mostly ungraded menkos, bromides and whatevers. Love the funky aesthetics. Wouldn't dream of collecting a set. Too esoteric for me, brah. No can handle.




'30s Menko



Kaoru Betto abides

1950 Bromide



1950 Shonen premium (approx 6x9)



ETA: To the OP - Avail yourself of Robert Klevens' Prestige Auctions. Robert posts here, is a super nice guy, and is walking encyclopedia of Japanese baseball. He conducts small auctions several times a year. Always has interesting stuff. As far as I know he has a table at the Chicago National that is going on at the present time. One of my regrets of missing this year's event is not spending a pleasant half-hour chatting with Robert whilst eyeballing the cardboard.

[jjbond]

Originally Posted by Kawika

Wouldn't dream of collecting a set. Too esoteric for me, brah. No can handle.

Yeah, I'm torn at trying to work on full sets, or trying a one-of-each just to see all the lovely variety.

[seanofjapan]

I love menko. I’ve spent about twenty years living in Japan and have a pretty decent collection of them with a fair number of sets either complete or semi complete. Its a lot easier to put them together if you live here. This is one of my menko binders

[jjbond]

Yeah, the more I read, the more fascinating it is to see the difference between Japanese and American collectors. I do think it's only a matter of time until PSA and the perfect condition quest begins to dominate.

What do collectors do with all the unclassified Menko cards? Is this something that is actively sought out (thinking that they would be more rare/unique/valuable than the standard fare), or do people focus on what they can classify with a checklist?

I just have a few especially of Wally Yanomine

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by jjbond

Yeah, the more I read, the more fascinating it is to see the difference between Japanese and American collectors. I do think it's only a matter of time until PSA and the perfect condition quest begins to dominate.

What do collectors do with all the unclassified Menko cards? Is this something that is actively sought out (thinking that they would be more rare/unique/valuable than the standard fare), or do people focus on what they can classify with a checklist?

Unfortunately PSA has opened an office in Japan and is slowly creeping its way into the hobby here. On the plus side though (as a guy who collects raw cards), the hobby here is way less focused on condition than people are in the US. I just checked and on Yahoo Auctions (Japan's ebay) there are a little over 300,000 listings in the baseball card category right now. Out of those only 640 are PSA graded cards (zero SCG graded ones, and about a dozen Beckett). Everything else is in its natural state!

Dealers in Japan have also been slow to take up the grading scale used in the US (Mint, nmt, exmt, etc etc). Usually dealers either won't state a card's grade at all, or will use a three tier system (high, medium, low) that really just gives a ballpark estimate.

Menko collecting in Japan is kind of weird though in that Japanese collectors view it as a different category of collectible than baseball cards.

I think this is changing now, mainly due to the influence of American collectors, but it used to be that baseball menko were part of the general "Vintage toy" collecting scene. So the dealers who sold modern baseball cards almost never sold them, and if you wanted to find them you had to go to guys who mainly sold old toys. I wrote a blog post a few months back about one of those dealers, they are quite neat:

https://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspo...-in-japan.html

Japanese collectors of menko (not just baseball ones) don't have a good idea of what sets are out there since there are no definitive catalogues. In fact the vintage guide by Engel is the only catalogue of baseball menko out there and it only exists in English, only a few Japanese collectors are even aware of it (this is changing a bit too, more seem to be becoming aware of it).

[commishbob]

I've sold off much of my card collection but I've held on to my Japanese Menkos and Bromides. There is just something about thiam that made me want to hang on to them. here are a few random pics culled from my old blog. Sorry for the size.