30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Friday, March 30, 2012

Domo Arigato: Taka Tanaka-san!

Earlier this month, I met TakaTanakaGiants over on Sports Card Radio Forum in one of the threads and after talking about Japanese baseball cards, he offered to send me some to share with my students. Here's a peek at what he sent:


But if you're interested in seeing everything... just watch this video:


There was a little bit of everything in the package: base cards, parallels, mascots, sumo wrestlers, anime cards, and even a promo card. I asked him if it I could add the mascot cards to my collection and he responded, "do what you'd like with any of the cards".

Well... I hope you don't mind... but I pulled out a few singles from the stack, because they were begging to be added to my collection.

I'll do a special PC Addition post tomorrow, so you can see exactly what I kept. My students won't be shortchanged... I promise. I've already replaced the cards I took out with extras from my Japanese PC.


Oh... he also threw the very cool 1/1 calligraphy card (shown above) personally made for me by his wife. Tell her thank you very much... and let her know that it's now has a permanent spot on my office desk (next to my Kurt Suzuki autographed ball & Kurt Suzuki sketch card... both gifts from fellow bloggers).


Thank you TakaTanakaGiants! Your generosity is much appreciated. I haven't showed them to my students, but when I do... I know they'll think it's cool. Especially those two anime cards.

I'm not sure if you know... but I don't accept "gifts" without returning the favor. I'll be shipping you a package this weekend with some Tony Gwynn cards.

And to everyone else... if you collect Japanese trading cards, I encourage you to check out TakaTanakaGiants's YouTube account or contact him at SCR. He really knows his stuff when it comes to Japanese cardboard. And... he's a class act... who truly cares about the cardboard community.

Happy Friday everyone... and sayonara!

3 comments:

Jason Presley said...

You got me hooked. I just watched about a dozen of the videos TakaTanakaGiants posted and have subscribed. I considered doing a video break of some of those last boxed of the Dominican Lime Rock, but couldn't force myself to do it. I had such a huge pile of cards when I finally found that Brito card, I'm wishing I had done a video.

Fuji said...

Yeah... he's one of the four guys on YT I watch on a regular basis. Congratulations on finding the Brito. How many Pedro Martinez cards did you pull?

Jason Presley said...

I've probably got a dozen or so by now. Pity it's the "other" Pedro Martinez, and not the future HOFer.

I'd see a lot of people talking about trading on YouTube, but never really looked into it. After seeing those Kellogg's cards in his posts, I spent half the day trying to work out checklists for the 2008-2010 sets (Beckett lists the 2007 set), without a ton of luck. In most cases, I found all of the players, but couldn't find all the correct card numbers, and didn't quite understand the 6 "special" cards from I think 2010.