1994 Chiba Lotte Marines Menko (JCM 25)

     Back around 2008 or 2009, I decided to seriously pick up the slack in my Hensley Meulens collection, and I started exploring the world of baseball outside North America.  I learned that Meulens had played in Japan for a few years, and upon discovering Robert Fitts' website, learned that he also had several Japanese baseball cards.  I emailed Mr. Fitts and as I had exhausted his supply of different Meulens cards, he suggested I look into purchasing a copy of Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide, 6th edition, so that I could become more familiar with the hobby and get a better idea of what was out there.

      I ordered the 6th edition (about 2 months before the 7th edition was due to drop, but I didn't want to wait that long) and I found that Hensley Meulens had 9 cards from Japan over three years with the Marines and Swallows.  About 6 months after that, while more methodically browsing through the book, I ran across the 10th card of Hensley Meulens from Japan.  This one was right up my alley.  Not only was it a Japanese card, but it was Japanese ODDBALL card!  From my years of chasing cards for my Winfield and Williams collections, I loved finding oddballs.



     This Meulens, however, would be a completely different animal.  It was from most of a continent, plus an entire ocean, away.  I didn't actually know what it looked like, I just had a small black & white sample scan of another player, and the description from the book to work with.

     From the pages of Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide, 7th Edition comes this description of the set:

These full color modern menko contain photos of most Marines players.  A word such as "pitcher", "batter", or "catcher" is written in Japanese on the front of the card.  The back contains the player name, uniform number, player data, a paper/scissors/rock symbol and a seven digit number all printed in blue ink.  All information is written in Japanese.  These cards were sold in uncut sheets encased in plastic.  R3

   The 7th Edition added that last little bit; the 'R3'.  That was the scarcity factor.  R3 meant "between 10 and 99 copies known of most cards."  So now, not only was it scarce by any normal North American collector's standpoint, but it was even rare in Japan!  However, the hunt was on.  By mid-2012, I'd found a reference to the set here:

http://anaemon.blog.so-net.ne.jp/2007-02-11

    Just to the left of the bird's right foot was the Meulens I was looking for.  On one hand, this set had long been sold on Yahoo! Auctions Japan, as this blog entry was from 2007.  Flash forward forward to December 2012, and I happened across a completed (argh!) listing on Yahoo! Auctions Japan.  But at least that let me know that there were still copies on the market.  And then, just a few months later, BOOM!   Well a few weeks ago, KuboTEN came through with this beautiful work of art for just under $30:

     Similar to menko of the 1950s, the player photos are airbrushed over to look more like paintings.
 
     While the Guide does list the dimensions of the individual cards (2" x 4 1/16"), that actual size didn't really sink in until I finally had the set in-hand.  Altogether the sheet measures some 12" x 16 1/4".  Given that it is much larger than the average scanner bed, and larger than a 11"x17" piece of copy paper, I had some difficulty getting an scan.  I tried getting a scan of this with my nifty new handheld Magic Wand scanner, but couldn't keep my hand steady enough over the wrinkled plastic bag.  I ended up taking the set to work and scanning it in pieces on the Canon imageRunner 2020, and then using Microsoft's great (FREE!) Image Composite Editor to tie the individual images together to form the large images seen above.

     The checklist, from top to bottom, left to right is below.

1st Row 7016010  80  Soroku Yagisawa 6610410  23  Mel Hall 5135501  14  Satoru Komiyama 6017016  18  Hideki Irabu 4160603  4   Susumu Aoyagi 6326106  89  Futoshi Nakanishi 2nd Row 4331076  34  Takayasu Kato 5673310  11  Yukinaga Maeda 4061035  7   Tokitaka Minamibuchi 6121701  24  Norihito Yamashita 6315107  27  Yasuyuki Kawamoto 5064103  44  Shigeru Shimada 3rd Row 5108636  8   Ken Hirano 6641032  31  Hensley Meulens 5011335  55  Iwao Omura 6321610  46  Mike Hartley 4103506  6   Kiyoshi Hatsushiba 5107633  49  Masaru Uno 4th Row 3651086  3   Norifumi Nishumura 4103066  1   Takeshi Aiko 5011335  45  Masahiko Jozume 6106326  5   Koichi Hori 7016321  28  Kazumi Sonokawa 6010701  57  Yukihiko Sato

Here, in all its glory, is the last of the Japanese cards of Hensley Meulens to complete my collection (for now).

 

(enlarged to enhance texture)