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Baseball Menko
Baseball menko are an early type of Japanese baseball cards, originally designed for use in the children's game of '' menko'',Menko
on D.King Gallery website
but now avidly collected by baseball fans and card collectors. The word "menko" is used in both the singular and the plural form.


History

The earliest known baseball menko, a generic baseball player, was from 1897. The menko card set in Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide is from 1929, depicting black and white (or sepia) images of Big Six University players. They are called the "1929 Nichieido Seika B&W Photo B ...
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Trading Card
A trading card (or collectible card) is a small card, usually made out of paperboard or thick paper, which usually contains an image of a certain person, place or thing (fictional or real) and a short description of the picture, along with other text (attacks, statistics, or trivia). There is a wide variation of different types of cards. Trading cards are traditionally associated with sports ( baseball cards are particularly common) but can also include subjects such as ''Pokémon'' and other non-sports trading cards. These often feature cartoons, comic book characters, television series and film stills. In the 1990s, cards designed specifically for playing games became popular enough to develop into a distinct category, collectible card games. These games are mostly fantasy-based gameplay. Fantasy art cards are a subgenre of trading cards that focus on the artwork. History Origins Trade cards are the ancestors of trading cards. Some of the earliest prizes found in ret ...
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Hanshin Tigers
The Hanshin Tigers (Japanese: 阪神タイガース ''Hanshin Taigāsu'') are a Nippon Professional Baseball team playing in the Central League. The team is based in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, and is owned by Hanshin Electric Railway Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc. The Hanshin Tigers are one of the oldest professional clubs in Japan. They played their first season in 1936 as the Osaka Tigers and assumed their current team name in 1961. History The Hanshin Tigers, second of the oldest professional clubs in Japan, were founded on December 10, 1935, with the team being formed in 1936. The team was first called "the Ōsaka Tigers". In 1940, amid anti-foreign sentiment, the Tigers changed the name to "Hanshin" and in 1947 changed the name back to "Ōsaka Tigers". The current team name was assumed in 1961. The Tigers won four titles before the establishment of the two league system in 1950. Since the league was split into the Central League and ...
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Potato Chip
A potato chip (North American English; often just chip) or crisp (British and Irish English) is a thin slice of potato that has been either deep fried, baked, or air fried until crunchy. They are commonly served as a snack, side dish, or appetizer. The basic chips are cooked and salted; additional varieties are manufactured using various flavorings and ingredients including herbs, spices, cheeses, other natural flavors, artificial flavors, and additives. Potato chips form a large part of the snack food and convenience food market in Western countries. The global potato chip market generated total revenue of US$16.49 billion in 2005. This accounted for 35.5% of the total savory snacks market in that year ($46.1 billion). History The earliest known recipe for something similar to today's potato chips is in William Kitchiner's book '' The Cook's Oracle'' published in 1817, which was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and the United States. The 1822 edition's recipe for ...
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Calbee
is a major Japanese snack food maker. It was founded on 30 April 1949, and its headquarters are located in the Marunouchi Trust Tower Main in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo. It launched operations at a new plant in the United States for making its mainstay products "Kappa Ebisen" shrimp chips and "Saya-endo" snow pea crisps on 18 September 2007. Another popular snack they sell are potato fries, called "Jagabee". Its snacks are hugely popular in Asia and are well known in the United States. History The company was founded in devastated post-war Hiroshima by Takashi Matsuo in 1949. His first product was the Calbee Caramel, named after the word "calcium" and vitamin B1. Due to the product's popularity, the company name was changed to Calbee in 1955. In 1973, Calbee Moh Seng (previously the Moh Seng Importer & Exporter Private Limited) was integrated into Calbee. It occurred on 13 September 1973 on a Thursday. It started off as the sole distributor of Calbee goods in Singapore. In ...
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Takara
Takara Co., Ltd. (株式会社タカラ) was a Japanese toy company founded in 1955. In March 2006, the company merged with Tomy Co., Ltd. to form Takara Tomy. The Takara motto was 遊びは文化」("playing is culture"). Products Toys In 1967, Takara produced the first generation of the Licca-chan doll, which was 21 centimeters tall and had the last name of Kayama, inspired by the musician Yuzo Kayama and actress Yoshiko Kayama. In 1975, Takara produced the Diaclone and Microman Micro Change toys. In 1984, the toy line was rebranded by Hasbro as " Transformers", which made Takara waste no time joining in. Takara continued to sell Microman and used it as the basis for the Micronauts toy line. Micronauts were sold internationally by the Mego Corporation. Other transforming toys made by Takara include Brave, Dennō Bōkenki Webdiver, and Daigunder. Both Webdiver and Daigunder toys could interact with TV screens, which proved only but a fad in the early 2000s. Takara ...
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Karuta
are Japanese playing cards. Playing cards were introduced to Japan by Portuguese traders during the mid-16th century. These early decks were used for trick-taking games. The earliest indigenous ''karuta'' was invented in the town of Miike in Chikugo Province at around the end of the 16th century. The Miike karuta Memorial Hall located in Ōmuta, Fukuoka, is the only municipal museum in Japan dedicated specifically to the history of ''karuta''. ''Karuta'' packs are classified into two groups, those that are descended from Portuguese cards and those from ''e-awase''. ''E-awase'' originally derived from ''kai-awase'', which was played with shells but were converted to card format during the early 17th century. The basic idea of any ''e-awase karuta'' game is to be able to quickly determine which card out of an array of cards is required and then to grab the card before it is grabbed by an opponent. It is often played by children at elementary school and junior high-school level d ...
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Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or ''kana'' in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "''a''" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "''ka''" (katakana カ); or "''n''" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English ''m'', ''n'' or ''ng'' () or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician. In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in E ...
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Kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of '' hiragana'' and '' katakana''. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in comm ...
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Hiroshi Ohshita
, also spelled Oshita, was a Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame outfielder who began his career after World War II. Known for his trademark blue bat, he hit a record 20 home runs in a season and was home run king and leading hitter three times for the Toei Flyers. Ohshita was also a heavy hitter with the Nishitetsu Lions of the Pacific League during the 1950s. Early life Ohshita was born in Sannomiya, Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture on December 15, 1922. His father died in war when he was a child; his family moved to Gaoshun, Taiwan, where he grew up. Ohshita graduated from Gaoshun Commercial High School, and was recruited by Tairiku Watanabe to attend Meiji University, a private university in Japan which was noted for its baseball program. Meiji University belongs to the Tokyo Big6 Baseball League, an intercollegiate league with five other schools: Waseda University, Keio University, Rikkyo University, Hosei University and the University of Tokyo; Ohshita played for the Meiji University ba ...
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Tetsuharu Kawakami
was a Japanese baseball player and manager, known for his red bat, and his nickname . He was a professional player for 18 years, winning the batting title five times, two home run crowns, three RBI titles, and had six titles for the most hits in a season. He was the MVP of the 1953 Japan Series. He was the first player in Japanese pro baseball to achieve 2,000 hits and was named the league's MVP three times. As manager of the Yomiuri Giants from 1961 to 1974, he led the Giants to nine consecutive championships. Kawakami was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1965. Biography Player Born in Hitoyoshi, Kumamoto, he played for Kumamoto Tech (Kumamoto) in the 1937 Summer Kōshien. Kumamoto advanced to the championship game, but lost. After the game, Kawakami grabbed a handful of dirt from the playing field of Kōshien Stadium and put it in his uniform pocket as a memento. This became known as the original scooping of "the dirt of Kōshien" (甲子園の土 ...
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Yomiuri Giants
The are a Japanese professional baseball team competing in Nippon Professional Baseball's Central League. Based in Bunkyo, Tokyo, they are one of two professional baseball teams based in Tokyo, the other being the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. They have played their home games in the Tokyo Dome since its opening in 1988. The team's owner is Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, Japan's largest media conglomerate which also owns two newspapers (including the eponymous ''Yomiuri Shimbun'') and the Nippon Television Network (which includes flagship Nippon TV). The Giants are the oldest team among the current Japanese professional teams. They are also by far the most successful, having won 22 Japan Series titles and an additional nine in the era of NPB's forerunner, the Japanese Baseball League. Their main rivalry is with the Hanshin Tigers, a team especially popular in the Kansai region. The Yomiuri Giants are regarded as "The New York Yankees of Japan" due to their widespread popularity, past do ...
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