Monday, August 20, 2018

1956 Sumo Wrestling Karuta Beauty - Like 1953 Topps!

It is not everyday that I get excited about new sumo wrestling sets.  For sure I see my fair share of new stuff and love to catalog it all, but rarely does a set stand out as something unique and outright beautiful.  The majority of the sumo menko and card sets use stock images to create the cards, while others use decent drawings to create the cards.  Not this set, these are some high quality, hand-drawn pictures of the actual wresters that they eventually printed on the cards.  What am I talking about?  The K562 1962 Sports Karuta set in fact.  Here are some images to prove that I am not lying.




This is actually a karuta set, although it doesn't have your typical hiragana/katakana letter on the front.  There are corresponding reader cards, but not in the auction I picked up.  This set likely came in a magazine from 1956 as there are perforations and cut lines on the cards indicating the intent for a kid to cut them out of the magazine.  There are 29 cards in the set including these 6 sumo wrestlers, 14 baseball players, 4 pro wrestlers, 2 boxers, 1 swimmer, 1 marathon runner, and 1 judo fighter.  All of them are equally amazing in terms of image quality.  They measure approximately 2.0" x 2.5", but I am not sure of the real intended dimensions as the set I picked up is somewhat hacked....but I love it since it shows that some kid back in the day actually held these and cherished them as well.

Kind of reminds you of the 1953 Topps Baseball set, right?

7 comments:

  1. Whoever did them was a really talented artist! You can tell they actually put in some research to see what each person looked like.

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    1. They are pretty interesting. The baseball cards are done really well too.

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  2. Those are a pretty cool find, I wonder what magazine they might have come from.

    The faces do indeed evoke the portraits on the 53 Topps set!

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    1. Not sure. Engel’s Guide has them listed, but wasn’t sure what magazine they were in, maybe Yakyu Shonen. It is listed as JK 24.

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    2. From my experience, Engel's guide is about 5-10x higher than what I actually pay for cards. Although great for checklisting, the pricing information is really useless. I think there is some self-serving going on there....knowledge is power I guess.

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  3. Wow those are awesome! That would be some cool cards to search the auctions for!

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    1. I can't remember how I stumbled upon them. It wasn't one of my usual auction searches.

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