[zeprock]

Here's something a little different today. My brother, one year younger than me, is a missionary in Nanao, Japan. He's been over there for nearly 30 years. When he first went over I asked him if he could find some Japanese baseball cards for me. He was successful for a few years and sent me boxes of them for my collection as well as some VHS tapes of Japanese baseball games. They definitely do things different there. I already showed you my oldest Japanese card (Sadaharu Oh) in my 1967 post. Today I am showing nine of the many Japanese cards I have in my collection.

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1991 Kalifornia Kardz Japanese Free Agent Draft #NNO Jose Canseco (This is kind of like a Broder card. The back speculates that Japan would be very interested in signing Jose when he hit free agency.)
1992 BBM Japan #  Hideo Nomo (I pulled this from a pack that my brother had sent me back in 1992. I didn't know who any of the players were at the time but once Nomo came stateside and was a rookie sensation, I went through my Japanese cards to see if I had any of him. I found half a dozen or so.)
2000 BBM Japan #326 Ichiro Suzuki (This one I also pulled from a pack that my brother had sent me.)

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2000 Upper Deck Victory Japan #40 Shigeo Nagashima (Nagashima is a legend in the Japanese leagues second only to Oh. It is the same format UD used on their stateside Victory set although the cards are a fraction smaller.)
2003 Topps Kanebo Japan 2 #5 Derek Jeter (I got this card from Ziveus101. Kenny sent me several cards from this Japanese set that looked similar to the base Topps set on the front although the backs are all in Japanese. Half the set looks like 2002 Topps base cards and the other half of the set looks like 2003 Topps base cards although the borders are green instead of blue.)
2006 Konami Japan Foil Refractors #138 Manny Ramirez (This card also came from Kenny (Ziveus101). It has a checkerboard sparkling foil refractor look to it that unfortunately isn't very apparent in this scan.)

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2007 Konami MLB Power Pros #NNO Alex Rodriguez (In an issue of Entertainment Weekly back in 2007 I found a page containing nine of these "cards". It was an advertisement but I carefully cut the cards out with a paper cutter and saved them. The backs have player info on them. Definitely unusual and they are on a thicker stock than the rest of the pages. I'm guessing there aren't a lot of these around.)
2009 Konami Japan World Baseball Classic #12 Miguel Cabrera (Another one that I got from Kenny. I also have an IRod card like this. It came in it's own protective sleeve.)
2012 Sega-Card-Gen #86 Albert Pujols (Yup. Kenny again. He was very generous trading me several of these in exchange for Yankees cards. Most of them have white borders but some of the stars like Jeter and Pujols have black borders. I'm not sure if they are a parallel or not. I think they just did different colors for the bigger star players.)