Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

"So the menko cards were all hand cut?"

As far as I know, yes, they are, but I'm certainly open to being corrected on this point. (Sean?) All of mine are hand cut (I assume that's what 'H/C' refers to on the Eto flip); and uncut strips and sheets are pretty common. Now, all of the menko cards that I've seen are from the 60s or before, maybe they started factory cutting newer ones? (Not that they made many baseball menkos after the 1960s.)

Sean: I took a look at your blog links. So they literally took stills from TV broadcasts. That's really amazing. And they'd been at this for 15 years at that point, you think that they would have a regular source for photos lined up by then.

No new cards for today, but what I do have is a map with the location of each of the current Japanese teams marked on it. Central League teams are at the top, Pacific League teams below. I hope that the color coding is clear enough. There are some exceptions here*, for instance, the Fighters occasionally play "home" games in Tokyo. In fact, you'll notice that a LOT of teams call the greater Tokyo metro area home. Which, I suppose, makes sense given the population density. Japan has 127 million people (so, a bit under half of the US population) squeezed into 145 thousand square miles (roughly the size of Montana, a bit smaller than California). AND, the middle of the county is full of mountains. That makes for a lot of people all in the same place.

*The Buffaloes have two home fields. They're close together, but I've marked them both.