Japanese HOF Project

[seanofjapan]

Originally Posted by nat

Here's the next batch of pictures of the magazine. As near as I can tell, this is an article about the big sluggers of the day. Several of the pictures are of Kawakami, and one of the cartoons mentions Oshita.

I didn't post all of the pages to the article. Some of them are just text, and I figured those would be of limited interest. But if someone around here who reads Japanese (Sean, Jeff, somebody?) wants to give me a rough idea of what the article is about, that would be great. (I've included close ups of small sections of the text.) And if anyone is interested in reading the whole thing, I'd be happy to give them (or post, or link to) larger images of the entire article.

On another note: I've considered hunting for R5 and uncatalogued menkos. Given that there are so many uncatalogued sets, do you think that there would be any point to this? If there is a limited supply of uncatalogued sets, a type card from any one of them is special. But if a whole bunch of sets are uncatalogued, is the fact that any given one of them is super rare interesting any more? (There is also the issue that this would be an even more niche project than collecting Japanese hall of famers, but that's another matter.)

Next time I'll post the article about the Red Sox.

The first article (on the left) is written by Kyouichi Nitta, who played for Keio University in the late 1910s and faced a University of Chicago team that visited Japan. After graduating he studied design in New York, and became a somewhat prominent golfer in Japan in the 1920s. He returned to baseball after the war and served as a coach and manager for a few NPB teams in the 1950s. The article is about the Japanese/American ("Nichibei") way of hitting, so I guess he's talking about American style hitting, though the article is a bit hard to read.

About collecting R5 and uncatalogued menko, that is a cool idea! But I'm not sure how easy it will be in the US to do that, even in Japan they are hard to track down (though Prestige collectibles auctions do get a lot). I'm not sure how many sets are uncatalogued at this point, I've found some but not many (relative to the number that are catalogued). Actually most of hte uncatalogues menko I have are from sets that are in the catalogue, but the specific card isn't.