Random Japanese eBay Haul

     Occasionally, I'll just do random searches on eBay's Sports Cards and Memorabilia section for "japanese" and see what pops up. A few weeks ago I did that, caught a seller unloading a nifty assortment of random Japanese baseball goodness and put in a token minimum $.99 bid (+$4 S&H). About a week later, this is what turned up:

Three 1988 Calbee cards and six 1988 Calbee wrappers:

     The blurry one is card #117 of Rick Lancelotti. Until I saw this card, I don't think I'd ever seen a worse photo on a baseball card. And that includes some of the truly bad photos from some of those Venezuelan stickers I looked through while working on that earlier post. It really looks like a capture from a television screen. Or an actual photo of a television screen.

     The other two are #122, Toru Sugiura of the Yakult Swallows and #134 Shuji Fujimoto of the Nankai Hawks. 1988 Calbee were 2" x 2 5/8" or roughly the size of the Topps Leaders cards from 1986-1990, or your average Topps sticker from 1986-1990.

     Next in the package were three cards from the 1987 Amada Heat Sensitive Yomiuri Giants set, and what I'm assuming were the three packs they came in (mainly because the photo on the back of the pack matches the card of Kuwata, along with his signature):

#7 Sadaaki Yoshimura
#8 Tatsunori Hara
#18 Masumi Kuwata

     According to Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide, 7th Edition, these cards are intended for some sort of combination of baseball and paper/rock/scissors game. Holding a finger on the black boxes at the top reveal the outcome of some sort of play, and the bottom three circles reveal paper/rock/scissors symbols.  If you click on the scan of the back, you can faintly see the results under each heat-sensitive box. He also says there were three different cards of each of 9 players, for a total of 36 cards. The cards are 2 5/16" x 3 3/8", so they're slightly smaller than a standard card. The packaging is about 3 1/8" x 5 1/4", and has a puncture in the top, as if it had been displayed on a pegboard hook, instead of in a box.

     The last few items present something of a puzzle, as I can't find them listed in Mr. Engel's guide, and they are unlikely to be connected due to the large difference in size. There are three small (1 1/4" x 1 9/16") magnets of Yomiuri Giants players. Two of #6 Toshio Shinozuka and one of #45 Kaoru Okazaki. Help identifying these would be much appreciated.

     The remaining packages, I'm guessing, are not what the magnets were packaged in as they are 3 3/4" x 6 5/8", about 4 times the size of the magnets.  Though having said that, I notice the Shinozuka photo from the magnet in the middle is on the lower left of the back of the wrapper.  Who knows? 

     Since measurement numbers don't always correlate to an good visual of size, I scanned each of these cards next to a standard sized card for comparison.