Definitive Overview of Japanese Sumo Wrestling Cards & Menko - 20 Different Types from 1890s to 2022

[Music] so [Music] genki genki fellow sumo card collectors i hope everybody's having a great weekend um things are getting pretty interesting over in japan as far as this uh march tournament a lot of rikshi they actually have a kovid so it'd be interesting to see which ones actually still compete who might be kyujo and uh and really if we are going to have a tournament i've heard rumors out there we might not but i think at least most of the rickshaw be nice and healthy by time the tournament starts so hopefully that's the case but but certainly getting excited for uh for that i do have fantasy sumo card game cards coming in the mail here this week hopefully on monday and i'll get those out this uh this following weekend pretty excited about that and i'll get more information on our channel the bbm sumo card collectors group on facebook if you're interested in that uh this time in take a look we might have a slaughter 2 still open for those interested okay well today i wanted to give everybody an overview of sumo cards really the top not top really the 20 sumo card types that are out there i just recently released my fifth edition of the book sumo menko and card checklist which which has all 20 of these described in there this is a 16 series given they're really kind of a type if you will and i'll explain that in a little bit but uh but really there are 20 different kinds of sumomenco in cards and so i wanted to highlight those here today and you can see all 20 different ones in front of me and i'm going to walk through each one of those just in a short little segment on this video so i hope everybody finds this nice and informative certainly was fun digging through everything and putting it all together uh but uh but exciting to be able to present to you all the different types of sumomenco and cards that are out there so and and really they're in order of how i present them in my book um so so not any particular order really other than just kind of alphabetical by the the roman characters um so that's that's really how i'm going to present them today uh and so hopefully that makes sense to everybody and hope everybody enjoys the video without the further ado let's go ahead and step into the first one first series of cards that we have are a series cards or candy cards and these are cards that were issued in gum packs candy packs or anything that was just associated with candy and distribution so here we have the a602 set this is the 1960 kabaya candy this is sekiwaki onnenyama and so you can see here issued by kabaya which was a candy manufacturer confectioner in japan popular uh in the i believe probably from 40s maybe even a little bit early all the way up to the 60s uh and into early 70s so you can see here you what you'd do for this particular set you would um you would redeem them you've got numbers on the front you can see 100 here but you would collect so many of them and if you've got the top prize right i can't quite read what that says but you would redeem them for that prize so these are actually really hard to find any a series cards just because a lot of them were deemed or destroyed all along the way of collecting so yeah again a very difficult set to find and certainly a very difficult series to find so if you find any of these certainly pick them up the next series i have are b series cards or these are really bookmark cards i've only been able to catalog a few of them um very difficult uh again i don't think very popular so there's just a few made at least as far as i could tell this here is the b5 62 or the 1956 shiori series 2 set there was a 2 series in 1956 this being the second one there was photographs of each of the rikshi sekitori on the bookmarks and then the third bookmark actually had a dohyo iri of the of the four yokozuna at the time as you can see here you got matsunobori wakanohana um asashio uh tokitsuyama so i i catalog these um in again in the book as the b series again i think i've only seen about four or five of them so if you can find any uh certainly pick those up as well the next series is the bb series these are black and white bromide manko and cards so this is where you start blending styles was in the uh in the 1950s where you started blending bromide with mencos to get these bromide manco cards they used the halftone printing process on the front so again it wasn't the silver bromide process as i'll explain here in just a minute but then it it blended that with the menko style you can see guccioki paw or rock scissors paper you've got the fighting number on the bottom and just stylistically amenco so these are black and white bromide manco more popular in the 1950s this one happens to be the bb 574 or 1957 maru ichi sagari 7 black and white set this is yokozuna kagami sato here card number two five one four thousand and so this is a very difficult set to find but you can see uh about this a little bit smaller than the size of a regular card um but uh but printed on thin paper stock you can see bend here but we're were used to play menko and so that's why we've categorized them as the bromide black and white bromide mango and cards okay and similarly we have the color bromide manko and cards uh just as you saw with the black and white bromide bank on cards this is the bc series this is uh this is a representative of this series this is the bc591-1 set so the 1959 maruya kimarite six set type ones so these are the ones with the gray paper stock on the back and green ink there are several different versions of this and types there's some with the brown ink on the back and some with a tan paper stock so i've been able to type three different variations of this set this is a mai gashida kashiwado future yokuzuna in the 1960s and so again you start to blend uh the styles of bromide onto menko and you get these bromide menko and cards uh series and you can see the gucci pie you've got the kimorite here in the middle and then you've got a fighting number at the bottom very popular this is the most common series of menko out there so pretty easy to find all all sorts of sets from this series okay next we have the bp series of cards these are the silver bromide photograph cards and these were actually photographs printed on cardstock material or photographic cardstock and then they were not meant to play any games but they were really meant to collect put in scrapbooks put in photo albums and really really collect very popular in the 1940s extremely popular in fact they were the dominant form of of cards in the 1940s and these were printed using the silver bromide photograph property where you would you would expose silver bromide on photographic paper you get your image then you would freeze that from any further really exposure and then you would wash away that that bromide leaving really the silver on the paper and you can see here you know it reflects and you can see the the black areas are really actually just dark silver exposed on the paper and most of these are blank backed but but this is a very common representative set here with the bp422 or 1942 four column full name bromide set you can see the four columns of statistics full name you've got the full shikona here and then this happens to be as everybody probably recognizes yokozuna futabayama and so very popular you're going to see hundreds and hundreds of these in the 1940s dozens and dozens of different sets and in fact there's so many of them i haven't even been able to catalog them all very difficult to catalog as you can tell with uh having a blank back so but but really a fun set to collect and you get some great images of rick sheet from the 1940s let's move over to a very recognizable set these are the c series menko circle series menko not very many of them i've been able to catalog really only about six different sets from the c series this particular set happens to be from the c481 set or the 1948 large disk this is yokozuna terukuni this set also had military figures that had baseball players and some other popular figures of the day most of the c-series are blank-backed in fact i think all of them that i've been able to catalog so far have been blank-backed very recognizable obviously you can tell the the circular shape very difficult to find so don't uh don't hesitate to buy these when they do pop up because um you're not going to see them very often another series is the game series these came in all sorts of shapes and sizes but any any kind of card that was used to play a game not besides menko was catalogued as a g series now this is the g 593 set or the 1959 douche ki 5 series 1 set these these actually came in panels of two they were actually meant to cut in half and this was an i will say game or a matching game so you put these upside down you can see all the backs are the same so you wouldn't know what the front was you'd put these upside down and you would just really try to match them you tried to find a touch nishki as in this case with another tochiniski or an yama in this case with another ononeyama you could also play you could see the playing card pips here you can play them use them as regular cards or you could use them as menko here at the bottom we've got the fighting numbers so just a variety different ways to play but i've cattle categorized all game series cards as g series and again these are pretty common to find this particular set and a lot of g series are still a ton out there that i haven't been able to to see or catalog so it's certainly fun to to um to hunt for those this is a really unique series this is the h series or as i call the brick series now these are meant to be slammer so when you played the game of menko you would actually use these as your slammer manko very much like pog you would have a slammer pog that you would slam down it's meant to be many times heavier than a regular manco you can see printed on very thick cardboard stock these came in all sorts of different thicknesses now this happens to be a kind of a thin one but but h series come in again a variety of thicknesses now this this is a representative uh set of an h series that says h552 or the 1955 ranga 89 type 1. so this is the thick paper stock of this set there's actually a thicker one that's about two to three times as thick so again this is the type one so h552 dash one or the type 1. see yokozuna kagami sato here these are menko meant to play menko you you can see guchoki pi you've got the shikona you got the fighting number you've got height and weights and you've got fighting words and then you've got the rank uh yokuzuna for for this particular card so again you'll know um when you have an h series again it'll be very thick and and i'll pull it up here kind of next to as you saw earlier a little bit bigger most of them than a regular um size bc or bb series menko but yeah these are kind of difficult to find certainly not many of them are in good shape just because they were used to slam so there you go h series minko next we have karuta cards or k series now the kharta is a very specific game in in japan so that's why i categorize these as their own category k series not part of the g series but karuta was really if you don't know is a matching game where you put all of your picture cards face up you've got a reader card that's going to read a clue on another card and as they read the clue you've got to look at all the pictures and you slap your hand on the picture that represents um the reader card and what they're reading at the time this happens to be oh the uh the the japanese hiragana 4-0 we have magashira waka haguro here and this one and this is from the k581 or 1958 star karuta set baseball players a lot of stars of the era in 1958 are represented in this set i can't remember how many specific sumo wrestlers are on here most of them are all blank backed and on occasion you'll get one that has a different kind of picture on the back as a variation but um so these are karuta so again what you're looking for is the japanese characters uh somewhere on the card and you'll know you likely have a kaduta set here so again uh k series probably the most popular besides the bc series menko are these m series menko um smaller you can see here let me pull up a bc series i'll just use that for comparison they're all about this size printed on fairly thick most of them are printed on fairly thick cardboard stock and they're actually just um they're they're literally menko and um square menko is is what the um the translation is so i've categorized them as the m m series here and many of you probably recognize this type so this is the set or 1953 cargo mace sun and shoe 7. this happens to be the type 2 version of this set it's got the gray paper stock some of them have tan paper stock but this one has the gray paper stock it's got the dull front kind of see here it doesn't reflect there are some versions that have got a shiny front uh on this particular set and it is a pretty thick paper stock some of them have thin there's like three or four different types from this m531 set this happens to be wakanohana very famous in the 1950s and early 60s he was a komosubi ranked at this time you can see the kagume mark here you got a fighting number it says television here on the right you've got titan weight on the left and then you've got the gucchoki par and then the rank the sun entry series you'll see in my book if you have it uh sun and chew just refers to three columns so many different sets of the 1950s m series have three columns so i've just categorized them all as as the sun into so again very popular many of you will encounter these at auction and so there's just uh dozens and dozens of different uh m series sets a unique card these are prize cards price sheet cards they were only issued on price sheets and so as you win a prize from a regular menco you would go to the price sheet and you get to choose a free prize card so these were meant again not issued in packs or topper packs or boxes they were issued with strictly on a price sheet this happens to be the p571 set or the 1957 marukami prize cards so you got mygashida naruyama so again these are these are categorized as p series cards and you'll see that in the upper left hand corner what you're looking for for these again printed on pretty thin paper but what you're looking for is is these somewhere where the um the glue stuck to the card and then to the price sheet so that'll pretty much tell you if you've got a prize card here so many of these are still easy to find um and again because they were meant to be collected really not meant to be used in the game or at all very similar to the bp series where you meant to collect them and put them in albums very similar what you would do with these prize cards because they were a little bit bigger than a regular menko so there you go these are p series price guards very uh i guess common and should be recognizable pc series cards or postcard series uh very popular in the 20s and 30s were postcards to issue pictures of your favorite wrestler should again should be very recognizable many of them will say postcard and and they'll be recognized as a postcard a place for a stamp you can see here this one obviously unused many of them are black and white but you do on occasion get color ones those are pretty cool but this happens to be the pc 361 set or 1936 say kaido postcard set this is a giulio chachino sato and these are pretty common actually kind of expensive you know you're gonna pay five to ten bucks per card per postcard at auction but they are actually fairly common if you go on any auction site you're going to see dozens of different kinds of postcards i haven't dove into these a lot in my book you know on occasion i'll pick them up if they're a good price but just because they are pretty spendy they are still pretty popular i haven't been able to categorize or catalog a lot of them but um here you go pc series cards okay how's everybody doing out there hopefully you're sticking with me just a few more to go through but the next one i wanted to highlight is r series everybody loves the r series and you'll see why here in just a second you can see these are the die cut in the shape of the the sumo wrestler and very unique everybody loves r series or rikishi series menko this one happens to be from 1939 as the r392 set or the 1939 rickshee four five set type one this one happens to have purple ink on the back i think there's a the one that has a blue ink on the back so this is the r39 2-1 set this happens to be mygashira goku but again these were extremely popular in the 30s and 40s and into the 50s and again not difficult to find certainly some of the older ones are more difficult to find but but yeah just the die cut really makes these extremely unique you can see here on the back you've got uh typical menko you've got your shikona in the middle this one doesn't have the gucci paw mark but you've got the fighting number you've got fighting you've got the rank you've got height weight you've got um um fighting words on the left there so just a really cool uh r series that never pass these up if you can find them especially from the 1930s so there you go our series okay next up is s series i've actually got two s series cards here these are stadium series or kokugikon series cards so they came in two different forms in the 1920s they came in these accordion books um performed you can see rick she uh looks like uh popular for tokyo picture rikshi cards so you can see here they came in these accordion forms picture of the cards i don't know if they were meant to really cut out but they call them cards so you can see them in this accordion style this happens to be uh s the s two s251 set or the 1925 east kokugi concept and these accordion ones they would actually typically be um representative of one side of the bonzouk or not this one happens to be in the 1925 east side of the banzuke not extremely uncommon you know they every you know a couple months you'll see one or two of them pop up uh it just depends uh certainly uh certainly pretty cool to be on the lookout for but so this is the esses series again 1920s series and then in the 1930s and early 40s they went to these boxed cards that had blank backs this uh hopefully is recognizable by many this is a futabayama i think this is actually his deca or debut card so the very first futabayama card ever made this is when he was ranked as a mayagashira so pretty cool to to be able to see this card be able to catalog this this is the s 331 or 1933 koku kikon black and white set and again all of the stadium or kokuku kon series cards are cataloged as s series here we go we've got z series cards or magazine cards so these are cards that were issued in magazines um so a lot of them are hand cut they were they were meant to be cut out by kids that would buy the magazines this one happens to be the z573 set or 1957 zashi type 2 brown ink there's one with a blue ink on the front this brownie is a little more difficult to find so this is a z573 one set this happens to be sekiwaki um later on went on to be a yokozuna so i've again categorized all of the magazine cards that came in magazines as z series now there are a few exceptions um but for the most part if it came in a magazine in the 1950s or 60s i catalog categorized it as a z series the next one i kind of got them out of order here let me pull up so these are tc series or telephone cards um so in the 1980s late 80s early 90s telephone card collecting was huge just a multi i would argue probably a billion dollar industry collecting these cards so people would actually buy these not even use them so the i mean the telephone card companies were just making money hand over fist there were clubs out there there were they're super rare editions and certainly sumo wrestling was caught up in that as well so this this set actually happens to be the ct 901 or the 1990 ntt pastel set you can see it's got ozeki konishki he should be pretty familiar with most everybody out there you can look on the back in about 1990 1991 they went from these individual serial numbered ones here you can see to actually just a generic um barcode and then and then that makes it much more difficult to to categorize them or catalog them after 1991 or 1992 but ct series um very cool and uh the jr rail passes and orange cards they're going to be categorized under the ct series as well i haven't done that yet but i've got a few sets i'm going to categorize probably not even probably just maybe rename it the t-series or or telephone or train series actually just to make it generic so but anyway there you go the ct series now we really don't have um any uh identifiers as far as series we just lumped them together these these last four into just kind of genres so we've got the 1970s and 1980s cards and so there was just a good handful of cards made in the 1970s and 80s and just lumped together um in this this not even a series again just kind of a genre so this happens to be a 1975 ausato mini card yokozuna wajima many of you might recognize this set takamiyama was in that as well from 1975 so pretty popular set i'm pretty easy and pretty common to find but you can see here this particular set had a blue back and then would have statistics of the wrestler uh in that set so any any card that was printed in the 1970s and 1980s outside of telephone cards and trump cards were categorized in this 1970s 1980s genre similarly we've got what i'm going to call foreign cards so these are cards that were made outside of japan depicting sumo wrestlers and so i was finally able to categorize foreign cards this year or this series this set actually happens to be from 1986 it's a 1986 portuguese calendar card set you got sekiwake konishki here at this time you can see the back here it's got the calendar from 1986 and calendar cards in the 1980s were huge these were really kind of really unlicensed cards they made them from movies to personalities to sports to uh to just all sorts of different subjects i wrote many of them probably unlicensed and as probably as the case here you can see this looks like it was probably taken from a screen grab but categorize this as the 1986 portuguese calendar card set and there's probably about six to ten maybe even uh a couple dozen all the way a different kind of foreign cards that were made depicting suma wrestler so there you go four foreign cards wrestling cards these last two likely recognizable by many trump sets were extremely popular from 1973 and even to today they're still being made and so these are made annually by the kokugikon and issued for sale to kogo kikon and they they picture every wrestler all the popular wrestlers of the time when the card set was produced this happens to be from 1989 the 1989-2 trump set this is juno fuji um king of king of diamonds was typically the number one um or the highest ranking rikshi at the time in this set so these are common uh they all have um the common unique backs as you would expect from from playing card sets or trump sets and so uh so categorize these as trump sets and then finally many of you or probably everybody here is familiar with the bbm sumo cards made by baseball magazine this happens to be from 2018 mygashida takakesha who who is now ranked as an ozeki but um but these are are very popular started in 1997 and they're being made several different sets a year and so those obviously weren't their own categories any cards made by bbm issued in packs is categorized as a bbm set so there you go everybody thanks for tuning in hopefully this overview was really helpful just to give you uh at least an idea of what kind of different sumomenco and cards are out there certainly reach out if you've got any questions i'll be happy to answer them and i wish everybody happy hunting out there and enjoy the next sumo tournament sayonara everyone [Music]