New member intro: Greetings from Japan

[seanofjapan]

Thanks for the kind words of welcome everyone!

Originally Posted by biohazard

Hello Sean,

I used to live in Japan (Yokohama, Yokosuka) back in the late 60's. What is the card market like there? Is Ichiro all the craze? I wish that I had collected a ton of Sadaharu Oh cards when I lived there.

Thanks. I live in Nagoya but have been to Yokohama a few times, its a great city (probably its changed quite a bit since the 60s though!)

There is a pretty active market for cards here, mostly Japanese ones. Its not as developed as the US one, which I kind of like (keeps things simple).

Ichiro of course is huge, especially with his accomplishments this season!

Grettings...so there seems to be a steady supply of shonen ruth postcards coming from japan. How commonly found are these in japan??

I got my own copy of the Shonen Ruth postcard a few months ago. They are actually a bit hard to find these days. I check Yahoo Auctions Japan (Japan`s version of Ebay) for them regularly and copies only show up once every 2-3 months or so.

I suspect that most copies have already left the country to the US market, where the demand (and prices for them) were quite a bit higher until recently, so there probably aren`t a lot left actually in Japan anymore. The prices here for them have more or less caught up by now (I paid almost $200 for mine, which seems to be about what they go for in mid-range in US auctions).

Incidentally the standard catalogue (and PSA, SCG and other grading companies) have made some pretty big errors in describing that postcard. It was actually issued in 1929, not 1928, and the correct title is "Shonen Kurabu" or possibly "Shonen Club" rather than "Shonen Kulubu".

Kawika, Evilking000, glchen, h2oya311, packs -love those cards! My main collecting interest these days is Calbee cards from the 1970s and 80s. My main project at the moment is(over-ambitiously) trying to put together a full set of the 1975-76 Calbees, which is almost 1500 cards. I put some photos of the highlights on my blog if you are interested: http://baseballcardsinjapan.blogspot.jp/

I`ll try to put some pics up here too as I get new (and hopefully interesting) stuff.

I lived in Tokyo (Azabu Juban) in the early-mid seventies and found collecting North American sports cards back then almost impossible. Dealers, didn't want to ship internationally, auction houses were not as ubiquitous as now, etc. So being now a Tokyo boy, I became a Yomiuri Giants fan, went to many of their games, (the Japanese fans loved the fact that I was a gaijin supporter, sitting in their section of the stands, and collected a few Nagashima and Oh cards, now long disappeared. I suspect my ex-wife who organized our departure might have had something to do with it. Great memories. Welcome to the board, and I hope we will hear from our Asian correspondent often.
P.S. One of the fascinating things about Japanese baseball back then was the practice of when a batter hit a foul ball, a parade of young pretty Japanese girls armed with gloves would rush the field and whoever caught the ball would dutiful toss it back to one of them. It never failed to amaze me, exemplified Japanese group discipline, but I doubt would ever work at Yankee Stadium. Does this still go on? However, when there was a home run a lucky fan got to keep the ball.

Oh wow, the favorite cards in my collection are my mid-70s ones (which mostly feature the Giants) - I would love to have been able to take in a game back then. I think spectators are allowed to keep the balls nowadays, though I read about that practice before. I`ve been to games in a few different stadiums here (Koshien Stadium (the greatest place to watch a game in Japan), Nagoya Dome, Fukuoka Dome and Green Stadium) but never caught a foul ball so I`m not sure if they all have given that up or not.

Fortunately collecting US cards is a bit easier these days thanks to Ebay. Unfortunately most sellers still don`t ship overseas (or charge an arm and a leg for it) but there are some that are accomodating!