Type 1: Green Ink on Back
Type 2: Blue Ink on Back
Type 3: Gold Ink on Front, Blue Ink on Back
The very first menko I owned were from the 1958 Dash 7-8
set, but little did I know when I bought a box of them that I truly did have a
complete basic set (12 menko total in the basic set, 36 menko in master set). In fact, I really didn’t
stumble upon the fact until I started documenting sumo menko sets. Since that “fateful” day in Japan, I’ve
documented hundreds of sets and thousands of menko, but the 1958 Dash 7-8 Set
will always be my favorite. I’m going to give a quick rundown of the set and
then “break” my box of Dash 7-8 open and see how the box was stacked and
collated from the factory!
To this
day, I still have yet to discover or find a manufacturer of the Dash 7-8 set,
but this is not uncommon for many menko sets.
If I had to take a quick guess, slightly more than half of the documented
sumo menko sets have unknown manufacturers.
Unfortunately, the quest to find the true manufacturers will only get
harder and harder as the years go by and many will probably never be identified. Regardless, the Dash 7-8 is a nice set in
terms of production quality and content.
The set has very vivid colors and great images of the rikishi. Most of the menko are nicely centered and the
only complaint with the printing is the red color sometimes is seen with a bad
register. This can lead to a funny
looking mouth with a red mustache or the red of the lips down where the chin
is. It’s very minor, though, and doesn’t detract
from the overall appearance of the set.
The back has a nice and simple design to it. The shikona is vertically in the middle of
the menko with a Gu-Choki-Pa mark above it.
On the right side is the rikishi’s height and on the left side is the
rikishi’s weight. At the very bottom is
a 7 or 8 digit Fighting Number and all this information is surrounded by a
dashed border. They are great looking
menko all around. The one interesting
feature to this set is there were gold-inked menko sheets that children could
win if the pack they bought had a red winning stamp on the back. Four levels of prizes existed. A #3 stamp on the back would win you a
3-menko gold inked sheet. A #2 stamp
would win you a 4-menko gold inked sheet and a #1 stamp would win you a 5-menko
gold sheet. There is supposedly a “Grand
Prize”, but I am still investigating what that is. Up until a few years ago, I had never seen
what the stamp looked like, but it is a simple red number stamped on the
back. There were two types of menko
issued; one with a blue back and one with a green back. Blue backs are much harder to find than green
backs, but gold inked green backs are the hardest of all to find. The fact that I’ve never seen a gold-ink
green back is an indication of their rarity.
The set contained the top rikishi
of the day and was printed at the very end of 1958 and, unfortunately, the two more dominating
yokozuna of the 1950s, Chiyonoyama and Yoshibayama, are absent from the
set. This set also has one of Yokozuna
Kagamizato’s last menko in it as well as the up and coming Yokozuna Wakanohana
and Asashio as ozekis. All in all, of
the 12 menko in the set, 8 are from the sanyaku ranks while 4 are from the
maegashira ranks.
Let’s take a look at what exactly
came in a box of the Dash 7-8 menko. The
box itself is interesting as it explained what exactly children could win if
they pulled a winning stamp. Also
written numerous times all over the box are “Gold Print”, “Special Prize”,
etc…. However, no indication of the
manufacturer appears on the box. The box
measures approximate 8” long, 5” wide and 1” deep. It is sealed by a piece of twine and when you
open it up there are approximately 100 4-menko packs wrapped in a fine
tissue. On top of all those packs are
the gold-inked prize menko that children would win. Interestingly enough, there is no prize sheet
to attach them to as was done with many sets that used this type of prize
structure. Each individual pack contains
the same 4 menko, but was sealed in such a way that you couldn’t see which
rikishi you were buying or any of the winner stamps. I cheated and used a pair of tweezers to
slide the middle card up slightly out of the wrapper to see which rikishi it
was and then slid it back down. Here is
how the set broke down as sealed from the factory:
Yokozuna Kagamisato
|
4 packs, 16 menko, 2 gold ink
|
Yokozuna Tochinishiki
|
7 packs, 28 menko, 5 gold ink
|
Ozeki Asashio
|
9 packs, 36 menko, 4 gold ink
|
Ozeki Matsunobori
|
5 packs, 20 menko, 12 gold ink
|
Ozeki Wakanohana
|
11 packs, 44 menko, 4 gold ink
|
Sekiwake Tokitsuyama
|
6 packs, 24 menko, 0 gold ink
|
Sekiwake Wakahaguro
|
11 packs, 44 menko, 4 gold ink
|
Komusubi Tamanoumi
|
12 packs, 48 menko, 0 gold ink
|
Maegashira Annenyama
|
9 packs, 36 menko, 7 gold ink
|
Maegashira Fusanishiki
|
4 packs, 16 menko, 7 gold ink
|
Maegashira Kitanonada
|
16 packs, 64 menko, 7 gold ink
|
Maegashira Tsurugamine
|
6 packs, 24 menko, 4 gold ink
|
 |
| Level 3 Winner Menko (Note Red 3) |
This is an intermediate set to
build and definitely a challenge to build from the single menko that seldom
appear on the market. What is even more
challenging and fun is to try and complete a set in both green and blue backs
along with the gold ink menko. For all
the sumo menko collectors out there, thanks for tuning in and until next
time….cheers!
