Japanese Baseball 1960s Yukata Bolt & Card - Nagashima

Thanks to all that responded and replied in my last post on the 1960 Japanese Yukata Bolt and Sumo Card of Yokozuna Taiho.  Equally as popular in the 1960s were baseball stars Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima and they both promoted yukata companies and adorned several cards attached to these beautifully indigo-dyed fabric bolts.  The bolts allowed the purchasers to make their own yukata patterns and sizes at home.....basically like buying fabric in bulk.  This particular bolt made by Tokyo Yukata features a beautiful jagged herring bone pattern in dark, light, and pale blues although the card of Nagashima shows him wearing a more cross-hatch pattern.

Stay safe everyone!

1960s Japanese Yukata Bolt & Card - Yokozuna Taiho

In the past year or so, I have been very enamored with these bolts of indigo yukata material with photo cards attached to them from the 1960s.  Athletes, actors, singers, kabuki stars....they all adorned brilliant blue/indigo yukata and promoted many different styles from many different companies.  Right now I have a close to 30 of these bolts in my collection and there is something soothing and mystic about the patterns.  This particular bolt and card are made by the Tokyo Yukata Company (東京ゆかた) and feature a card of the Dai-Yokozuna Taiho attached to a neat "shell" patterned bolt.  The card has the number "110" on it.  I also own #103 and #113 with different wrestlers so it appears that this was a run of sumo cards in a larger group of bolts.  Would be neat to know if Tokyo Yukata made hundreds of other bolts....I'm always on the lookout.

Folded up, these bolts measure about 13" long, 6" wide and about 1.5" thick. 

Please stay safe out there with this ever rapidly-changing health environment!  Sayonara!

Fuji for President!

Fuji is the ever-generous gifter throughout the sports card blogging community.  He recently shot out 33 care packages and I was on the fortunate receiving end of one of them.  Like the other 32 recipients of these postal gold mines, I am deeply honored and very surprised with how well Fuji creates these.  He knows everyone's tastes and collecting passions.  Fuji doesn't collect sumo wrestling cards, but this package nailed a bunch of awesome cards for my other collections.  Let me dive in a bit more:

2018 Stranger Things Season 1 Commemorative Patchs Tommy H and Officer Powell.  These came one per blaster box and Fuji sent them my way to fill in some holes.  I am slowly working on this 24-card insert set. 

1975 Phoenix Giants Michael Cramer and 1969 Topps Man on the Moon #48B Space Food!  Michael Cramer was an amazing part of our hobby since the 1970s and started the Pacific Trading Card Company.  He is also an NFL photographer and an all around legend in the hobby.  Rich Klein did an excellent article about him back in 2013.  The Man on the Moon set is one that I would love to complete as I am a space nut!  But thanks to Fuji, I am one less card away!

A pile of 1980s to modern Nolan Ryan cards!  As a kid I collected Nolan Ryan like tens of thousands of other kids and adults.  The 1994 baseball strike, college, and companies producing too many cards to enjoyably collect and drove me out of the hobby back then, but I recently pulled out my Nolan Ryan collection again and want to fill in some holes.  Fuji loaded me up with enough goodness to keep me busy for a while!

California Lottery Scratchers.  Last time we met, Fuji and I gambled a bit of our card show money away on CA Scratchers....he is keeping the tradition alive between us for a bit longer.  I am going to slow roll these over the course of a week or so, but the few that I have scratched haven't led me down a path to retirement yet.

Fuji, I can't thank you enough!!  Fuji for President!

1960s Japanese Yukata Bolt & Card - Yokozuna Taiho

If you were a kid in the 1990s, you were likely decked out in denim.  This versatile fabric adorned rocks stars, high school kids, cowboys, and politicians.  There is probably no single fabric that identifies America better than denim.  In the 1960s, if you wanted to part of the "in" crowd in Japan, you covered yourself in a beautiful cotton indigo-print yukata during the summer time.  This style of yukata was seen all over Japan during this time and celebrities helped to promote and sell this fabric to the masses.  Being a necessary outfit for sumo wrestlers, they were part of the leading edge of this trend.  The great Yokozuna Taiho, as the face of sumo wrestling, was sought after by the major companies and to help sell the product they often included a photo card showing how the indigo print would look as worn.  I recently picked up this yukata bolt with one of Taiho's cards attached.  Yukata bolts are 100% pure cotton bulk fabric and the purchaser would then have to seam, hem, and sew to make the actual yukata.  Thousands of different patterns were produced so I am not sure what you would call this one, but it has a beautiful deep blue square "barbed wire" pattern with light grey cross hatching behind. This bolt has the "Main Dying Excellence Certificate" which looks like it was the quality seal given out by the company.  My fascination with these yukata/card combinations continues. 

1960s Japanese Fabric Beauty

Recently, I've been obsessed with collecting bolts of Japanese yukata and kimono material from the 1960s that have bromides attached to them.  These bromides, usually of famous people, show the cloth being worn by the person to give an idea of what it would look like.  I have quite a few now and need to start cataloguing them.  I picked this "beauty" up off of eBay a few weeks ago....unfortunately, there is no name on the bromide so I don't know which celebrity this is.  Nonetheless, the cloth is made from indigo dye (which all that I have found are) and is a beautiful geometric pattern that fades to different sizes with flowers added in.  The manufacturer placed a sticker with the number "82"...probably to indicate the style. 

Simply beautiful!

The 3 Japanese Sacred Treasures of the 1960s and the End of the Golden Age of Menko

       Browsing the internet, you can find numerous articles and tidbits of information regarding menko and the impact the game the game had on Japanese children.  The history of menko from the late 1800s to the mid-1960s is well documented in various books, magazines, and internet sources.  However, its eighty year run as one of the most popular children's game often doesn't focus on the abrupt ending in the mid 1960s.  Menko survived the devastating Kanto earthquake of 1923.  Menko survived the World War II paper drives.  Menko even survived the extreme poverty and rebuilding of Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  However, in the mid-1960s menko could not survive the 3 Japanese Sacred Treasures.

      The 3 Treasures I am referring to are the television, electric washing machine, and electric refrigerator.  These treasures rapidly enhanced the standard of living in Japan and ushered in the era of mass consumerism.  Televisions in homes now offered a distraction to kids who otherwise might be playing menko with their friends.  The pressure of parents on Japanese children to advance themselves in society (basically go out and earn these three treasures} through studying more and hard work also decreased time to play menko.  Playing menko was often seen as a hindrance to advancing japan and children were spending all their extra time.

   The last sumo menko set of the golden era was the 1964 Marusho Tawara 5 set.  This set was not extraordinary at all and a sad end.  In fact, this set was a rehash of several other sets Marusho had done earlier in the 1950s.  At this point, menko profits were likely all dried up and they were attempting to crease a set with as little investment as possible.  The total number of menko in this set is likely between 30-50.  It does, however, contain 5 Yokozuna (Kashiwado, Taiho, Tochinoumi, Sadanoyama, Tamanoumi) at various stages in their career.

Each menko can have several of the approximately 10 different back designs and each of those back designs can be found in different colors of ink making the master checklist quite large.  There are 5 different types of backs: Red Ink, Blue Ink, Grey Ink, Light Green Ink, and Dark Green Ink.

There are a lot of parallels to card collecting in America these days.  Lots of other distractions that pull kids away from card collecting.  What happens when our generation of older collectors goes away?  I personally don't think enough of a new generation has been created and we'll see another dramatic cut in trading card production in the next 10-20 years.