Japanese HOF Project

[nat]

Osamu Mihara was a force in Japanese baseball for decades. He rose to prominence with Waseda, and went pro as soon as it was an option. At 24 he was playing for the Giants (then Kyojin). He made his debut in the fall of 1936. All of his professional appearances (as a player) would be at second base, and there would be a total of 108 of them between 1936 and 1938. Although he was a part of the All-Japan team that played the Americans in 1934, once he went pro he was, at least as a batter, nothing special. He never hit a home run, although he did steal a few bases. His batting lines are about what you would expect from Japanese baseball in the 30s. I don’t know what his fielding was like, but whatever reputation he had at the time couldn’t have been from his offensive production.

B-R says of his role in the war only that he was a private in the army. Presumably that’s what interrupted his playing career. When he came back from the war he was 35 and hadn’t played professional baseball in nearly a decade. A return to the field was not in the cards. He seems to have quickly secured a role managing the Giants, however. In 1947 Mihara supplanted Nakajima. The Giants, as usual, were extremely successful, but he didn’t last long as the helm. Yomiuri replaced him briefly with Nakajima again, and then permanently with Shigeru Mizuhara (see the post above this one).

Because I’m looking into it: here’s an aside on Giants managers. The Giants are looking pretty good on this one: Fujimoto, Yokozawa, Nakajima, Mihara, Nakajima again, Mizuhara, Kawakami, Nagashima, Fujita, Oh, back to Fujita, back to Nagashima, Hara, Horiuchi, back to Hara. That is a heck of a lot of hall of famers managing the Giants, although admittedly not all of them are in the hall because of what they did as managers. Yoshinobu Takahashi breaks the streak. Although he was pretty good in his own right, we’ll see. Everyone who managed the Giants from their founding in 1936 through 2015 is in the hall of fame. One starts to wonder in which direction causality runs here. Are the Giants super good at finding gifted managers, or does managing the Giants make a manager look like they’re gifted?

Mihara’s tenure at the head of the Giants was short-lived. Three seasons and then out. He sat out the 1950 season and then took over the top job for Nishitetsu. This is where he really made his name. The Lions were the powerhouse of the Pacific League during the 1950s and Mihara led the team through all of it. Their star third baseman was Futoshi Nakanishi, who married Mihara’s daughter. Probably a good way to ensure that you’ve got a spot on the team, but Nakanishi (a hall of famer in his own right) didn’t need the help. In 1960 he moved on to the Taiyo Whales, leading them to their lone championship. In 1968 he joined the Kintetsu Buffaloes, with whom he had a fair amount of success. And then the last three years (starting in 1971) he managed the Yakult Atoms. They were a bit below 500 while he was there. Mihara was famous for a relatively gentle managing style. For instance, he never hit his players. The fact that this was notable I leave here without comment.

The card today is an uncatalogued bromide. Mihara is on the Giants, so that means the card is from 1947-9, but I can’t pin it down any better than that. He’s talking to Shigeru Chiba, which is neat, two hall of famers on the same card, but it doesn’t help date the card. Chiba played his entire career for the Giants, including the entirety of Mihara’s tenure there. The back of the card has a stamp which, if my high-school Japanese doesn’t fail me, is the kanji for ‘roku’ or ‘five’. It’s common for bromides to have back stamps – usually they indicate that the stamped card was a “winner” which could be redeemed for a prize (usually a bigger card). I’ve never heard of a fifth-place prize (1 through 3 is pretty common), but I guess that’s what it could be.

Mihara is another late addition to my list, so picking up this card doesn’t advance me towards my goal very much. I’m at 91%.

[nat]

No cards today, but some interesting video. The internet thinks that this is video of Eiji Sawamura. Strangely enough, on a French website. I don't know enough Japanese to follow the voice-over.

Somebody also has a gif of (what is allegedly) his delivery.

[nat]

These guys duplicate players that I already have, so no advancement on the project here, but thought I’d share anyway. On the left we have Bozo Wakabayashi, in the middle is Tetsuharu Kawakami, and on the right is Hiroshi Oshita. These cards are from the JBR13 set – or at least the Oshita card is. The other two are identical to JBR13 cards except that they are blank on the back. (Or, well, they were before someone wrote on them.) My guess is that all three of them are JBR13 cards, just missing a pass on the back. Although I guess it’s possible that they’re from a set that’s identical but for the printing on the back. I’m really not a fan of this set – all the cards are boring headshots printed in sepia tone. Moreover, these three examples are in pretty rough shape: creasing, staining, writing, etc. On that note, however, I will say that I kind of like the writing.

The text in the parentheses on the front of the cards gives the player’s team. On the Wakabayashi card it has been scratched out and replaced. Both the text and the replacement writing are illegible (at least to a non-Japanese reader like me), but I’d be willing to bet that it originally said “Osaka” and that the handwritten bit says “Mainichi”. The cards were issued in 1949, and the following season Wakabayashi was traded. You see this all the time on old American cards, it seems pretty likely that that’s what happening here.

As for the writing on the back: it appears to be a dice game. There are twelve, numbered, lines of text. I copied the first three lines from the Kawakami card into Google Translate and got “middle hit”, “chicken neck”, and “left hit”. While I suppose “chicken neck” might be late-40s slang for a strikeout or something, my guess is that I mis-transcribed one of the symbols. Anyways, “middle hit” and “left hit” sure make this sound like a game. Some of the text is repeated on the other cards. My guess is that each kid is supposed to pick a card (or maybe form a lineup – if they had enough cards), then they take turns rolling dice to see what happens in the game. The handwriting on all three cards looks the same to me, so they probably came from the same collection and it was the same kid drawing up the dice game.

[Jeff Alcorn]

Hi Nat,

Thanks for continuing this series. The #2 listing on the back of the Kawakami card looks like the first kanji for shortstop, followed by the kana for go & ro. When you put those 2 together you get "gro" for ground- so #2 is saying "Ground ball to shortstop". You got the other 2 correct- a hit to center field and a hit to left field. These same types of abbreviations are on the back of all the Takara game cards issued from the late '70s to the late 90's, and are for playing a dice baseball game.

Thanks again,

Jeff

[nat]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the info. Either this kind of game was popular long before the Takara cards were printed, or whoever wrote on this cards did it long after they were printed - the JBR13 set is a 1949 issue.

(Also - I wonder how you are supposed to roll a 1...)

[seanofjapan]

Great finds, I was about to comment on the similarity to the Takara games too.

I have a couple of the Takara ones and am very tempted to try actually playing the game, I just need to find someone to play it with!

[nat]

No new players, but another card that I picked up as a part of a lot, so I thought that I might as well share it.

This is Karou Betto, about whom I've written before. In America Betto is, sadly, probably best known for appearing on one of The Dude's t-shirts in The Big Lebowski. Which, let's be clear, is a fine piece of cinema, but a great player (and manager) like Betto deserves better.

The card is from the JCM 78 set, which was issued in 1949 to commemorate a tour of Japan by the San Francisco Seals. Seals players have 'Seals' written on the back of the card, Japanese players have 'Nippon' (Japan) on the back. I don't know why they decided to include the Japanese players that they did. There are only five of them in the set, so it's not like it's an all-star team that the Seals were playing against or something. Besides Betto it includes:

Takehiko Bessho - an all-time great pitcher
Takeshi Doigaki - a good catcher, but not a hall of famer
Kikuji Hirayama - an outfielder who had been a star before the war, but by 1949 was merely average
Shissho Takesue - a hotshot rookie pitcher who would quickly flame out