Mistakes on Japanese cards are fairly rare. Mistakes on vintage Japanese cards are even more rare with only a handful of known examples. With the wild west of production from the 1930s to the 1960s, I am surprised there wasn't a ton more. And with hundreds of sets and hundreds of thousands of menko and cards being produced, this is quite the astounding feat. However, one set that got it wrong was the BC603-2: 1960 Doyusha Fusa -Type 2 Set. The front of the menko look normal, but upon turning them over it quickly becomes apparent that someone at the Doyusha factory had a bad day. They got the wrong backs...meaning the name and statistics for another wrestler accidently appear on the menko. Instead of redoing the layout and reprinting, Doyusha overlaid a fan with the wrestler's correct name. The Type 2 set is printed on grey paper stock and is the set that contains the error. The Type 1s all appear correct and were printed on tan paper stock leading me to believe that either A) the Type 1s were printed later after they were all corrected, or B) the Type 2s were printed at another factory and corrected locally. Either way, it makes for an interesting piece of Japanese menko history.
I hope every one has a great weekend and sayonara!
Very cool. Are these error cards something widely known among sumo card collectors? Or did you happen to stumble across these while looking at the card backs?
ReplyDeleteThey are not widely known, but then again there aren’t that many vintage sumo card collectors. I stumbled upon them several years ago as I was checklisting the set. They definitely stood out.
DeleteNot knowing much about subject, I would've thought that errors would've been more common in the post-war stuff. And if they're not, it's hard for me to believe that modern Topps cards contain more mistakes than cards produced in Japan during the late 40's and early 50's. Doesn't say too much for Topps, does it?
ReplyDeleteWith the amount of product they were cranking tout in the 1950s in Japan, it is surprising as well. Topps had a lot more information on the backs I think led to more errors. Pretty uncommon though in Japan for sure.
DeleteOh that is a very neat find. I've never noticed any error corrections like that before, I'll keep an eye on my baseball menko if they ever did something similar!
ReplyDeleteThey seem to be really uncommon. Would be interesting to see if Japanese baseball menko also have any errors.
Delete