1963 Tokyo Yukata Sumo Bromide Cards

Here is another example of more unique and collectible cards that are surfacing every so often.  Enter 1960s Japanese Bromide sumo cards attached to yukata bolts.  Yukata are worn by sumo wrestlers all times of the year and stores sell that same material in bolts to the fans to make their own.  In the 1960s, the patterns were not as intricate so attaching a bromide card to the bolt would let you know which wrestler the material belonged to.  Nowadays, printing technology allows the wrestlers' names to be printed into the actual material pattern, rendering the bromide card unnecessary.  In the 1960s, they not only did this for sumo wrestlers, but other stars as well.  I've seen these cards before, but have not paid serious attention to them until recently.  Having a bolt of the material in hand, as well as the card, is a cool piece of history and a great collectible.  I definitely am hooked...fellow sumo card collector, Paul F., is partially to thank for that!  I have not decided how I am going to categorize them in the 5th edition of my book.....do I give them their own category or do I include them in the BB-series (Black and White Bromide) category?  I have some time to think about it and try to uncover additional cards to see how many are out there.

Here are two bolts I won in the same auction.  I haven't unrolled them (and don't plan on it), but they are probably around 30 feet in length.  You can see them folded up here.  The material and card on the right are Ozeki Tochihikari....the material on the left is attributed to an unknown wrestler.

Here is the inside of the first fold.  You can see the round Tokyo Yukata seal at the bottom.  One of the neat things about Tochihikari's is an attachment for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  I haven't translated that yet to see what it says exactly.

An end on shot here of the bolts....there is a lot of material there!

Thanks to Paul F. for this picture....a bolt that was sold on eBay of Yokozuna Taiho.  You can see the similarity in all the cloth patterns making the bromide very useful and important.




Thanks for stopping by and I hope I am able to share more of these in the future.

35mm Film Slides - Collectibles, Cards, or Crazy? --1963 Sumo Wrestling--

We've all heard, or maybe even experienced, the agony of being invited over to a friend's or family member's house for the dreaded minute-by-minute pictorial walk through of someone else's vacation.  A fancy 35mm slide projector was set up and everyone would gather around as the vacation was described and broadcast in painstaking detail.  I was never subjected this torture, but recently I stumbled across a set of 35mm slides produced by the Nippon Bunka Film Co in 1963.  These were mass produced and sold as souvenirs to tourists and travelers....so I guess you wouldn't have to take your own pictures and have them processed at the local store saving you a bunch of time.  This particular auction lot had 15 different boxes of various Japanese topics including Japanese sumo wrestling.  In each of these boxes is 10 35mm slides related to the box topic.

This series was marketed for English-speaking tourists as each box contained an English-language brochure highlighting all the different series (works) you could buy.  Additionally, there is a small booklet that describes each of the 10 slides in the box written in both English and Japanese.

Anyone have any crazy slide stories?

And the big question....should these be collectibles in the sports card arena or am I just plain crazy?

A big bowl of Sukiyaki! - New Set 1963 Amada Famous Stars Trump (G631)

Everyone knows the feeling of reaching into your winter coat pocket after you put it on the first time during winter and discovering a long-forgotten $20 bill, getting surprise present from a fellow trader or friend, or finding out the latest episode of The Walking Dead is an hour and a half instead of an hour.  This newly discovered set is all those joyous feelings wrapped up into one.  Due to oversight or carelessness, I thought I had picked up a 4-card auction of Japanese sumo and baseball cards.  Low and behold, I realized that I was bidding for the entire 54-card set (52 cards plus 2-jokers).  And what a set it is in the sheer amount of famous stars from Japan from 1963.  However, as I was thumbing through the set I realized that there was one card in here that stood out from the rest as I saw the telltale kanji of 九 in Kyu Sakamoto's name.  Kyu Sakamoto had some semblance of Richie Valens' life in they both had successful singing careers early in their life and both died in plane crashes: Richie tragically in Iowa and Kyu in the mountains of Gunma Japan on Japan Airlines Flight 123...the deadliest single plane accident in history.  I had a chance to visit the crash site and memorial when I lived in Japan and a somber rememberance of all the lives lost.

Why am I mentioning Kyu Sakamoto?  This card is the earliest known of him (although my research against this statement is very limited) and printed just a few years after his breakout single Ue O Muite Aruko (Sukiyaki in Western Countries) made him a superstar in Japan and the United States.  Sukiyaki was the first Japanese song to climb to #1 on the American Top 100 charts which did so in 1963.

On a brighter note, these are two previously unknown baseball cards of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima...hopefully they'll make it into the next edition of the Japanese Baseball Card Checklist.  This set also has Yokozunas Taiho and Kashiwado which I'll get into the 5th Edition of the Sumo Menko and Card Checklist.....Pro Wrestler Rikidozan is in this set and was was unfortunately murdered not too long after this card was printed.