Making a Japanese Baseball/Sumo Wrestling Connection - 1959 Menko

Several days ago Sean over at Getting Back into Baseball Cards....in Japan (BaseballCardsinJapan.blogspot), posted about a new menko find to the baseball community.  It is a new menko of the ever popular Shigeo Nagashima and up until this point had not been catalogued in the Japanese Baseball community.  In the sumo community, I have run across this set only a handful of times.  They are extremely rare and very hard to find since they were printed and sold at the tail end of the menko era when menko popularity was waning.  There is a plain, white-bordered version as well as an even more rare gold-bordered version in the sumo world.  I have catalogued this set as the 1959 Comic 9-10-11 (Catalogue #: M591-1 White Border and M591-2 Gold Border).  The back has the TV anime character "Moonlight Mask" which aired on Japanese television and in theaters in 1958 and 1959 which led me to believe this set was printed in 1959.  Up to this point, it seemed this was a sumo-only set, but what we might be seeing here is a multi-sport set.  And given there are gold-bordered versions, there is a good chance these were issued in boxes with the gold-bordered menko as prizes.  It is great when some of these new mysteries pop up and keep the older Japanese card collecting community on the hunt to try and continually answer some of these decade-old mysteries.

Have a great week!