I enjoy a lot of the regular trading card fare just as much as the next guy, but I also really like collecting things that practically no one else collects. I guess it makes me feel special; like I belong to some sort of secret club that collects things no one else cares about. Or maybe I just like being frustrated because the things I collect are hard to find and overly expensive. And in the case of the collection I am discussing in this post, I can't even read the cards I collect.
It all started when I stumbled across a thread on the Blowout Cards forums with the title '
Anyone else collect BBM True Heart cards?' The True Heart cards are Baseball Magazine's (BBM) card set based on women's wrestling in Japan. There are several different promotions covered, and the promotions seem to have agreements in place with each other, so that one wrestler might wrestle with different companies at the same time or move back and forth. I still don't fully understand the structure of it all, but I am working on it. Some of the promotions post their matches on Youtube or similar video sites, and a lot of the wrestlers have their own channels or Twitter feeds. I read on a Facebook group that one of the promotions recently celebrated an attendance record with around 150 people attending an event, so this isn't a huge group of leagues. I guess it would be similar to the amateur wrestling here in the United States, where hopefuls compete with each other for a chance to join the WWE and become famous. I like it because it allows for the wrestlers to be a little more varied, especially on the women's side. The men in WWE tend to cover a wide range of gimmicks and appearances, while the WWE Divas are a pretty homogeneous group.
I found a shop in Japan that sells boxes of the BBM True Heart cards at decent prices and doesn't kill me too hard on shipping, and I have made a couple of orders with them. I am not sure how hard these cards are to get, but they've had boxes of 2013, 2014, and 2015 available at different times and they go in and out of availability frequently. I imagine they will dry up all the way soon enough, but hopefully the 2016 set will be released by then. I also was able to pick up a few sets from the 2006-2012 time frame on eBay. In this post I'll be talking about the 2013 set, starting with the packaging:
The top of the box shows off a few popular wrestlers, samples of some of the cards, and information about the contents. The woman in the upper left is Mio Shirai, who is a pretty popular wrestler that recently announced her retirement.
The bottom of the box is actually pretty useful, featuring a checklist and showing off a few more photos of cards that can be found in the product. This set has 117 cards in the base checklist, and also features rarer stuff like autographs, cards with multiple autographs, and Polaroid photos that have been signed with inscriptions and stamped with the BBM logo. I didn't pull any of the Polaroids from the two boxes of 2013, but I did pull four autographs per box with one being a dual autograph.
The front of the pack features the same design as the box lid, and the back appears to show a simplified breakdown of the checklist as well as all the company information.
The 2013 base cards feature a swirling tie-dyed design, using mostly posed photographs with a full image in the foreground and a second cropped image in the background. Most of the cards use the same picture for both photos, but there are a couple that have different pictures. The top two cards in the scan feature the youngest and the oldest wrestlers featured in the set. Kurumi is shown on the left, and Jaguar Yokota is the name of the wrestler on the right.
There are plenty of costumed characters among the wrestlers. One translated checklist I found says the cat's name is Nyanba, although I haven't been able to verify that against any other websites. I really don't know yet. The wrestler dressed as the Mario Brothers' sister is Yapper Man No. 3, an alter ego for a wrestler named Misaki Ohata.
The card backs have biographical information, most of which I cannot read. The parts I can make out are birthdates, height / weight statistics, and an additional date that I presume is the debut date for the wrestler. The lines at the top of the cards are, I believe, the promotion the wrestler is affiliated with followed by the wrestler's name. Many of the alter-egos and costumed characters have birthdates that do not match, are missing, or consist of just the month and day without a year. You can see that Kurumi was born in 2000, making her about 13 when this set was released. Jaguar Yokota was born in 1961, making her about 52 when this set came out. The wrestling cat does not appear to have the usual statistics outside of a debut date in March of 2012. Yapper Man No. 3 is featured in another costume reminiscent of Catwoman, and you can see that her birthdate is omitted.
Here are a few more cards to show the different types of wrestler you can find in this set. In the upper left is Misaki Guriko, who is another alter-ego of Misaki Ohata, the wrestler shown in the previous scans as Yapper Man No. 3. Confused yet? I am. In the upper right is Sayaka Obihiro, a technical-style wrestler who used to play baseball. The wrestlers run the gamut from the very gimmicky and supernatural types to athletic and technical wrestlers.
In the lower left is Ayako Hamada, a wrestler who spent some time wrestling in America in the Total Nonstop Action promotion. Her birthday is February 14th, so I believe
she has been featured over at
Sportscards From The Dollar Store as part of that blogger's series on
athletes who share his birthday. I have a few doubles of 2 / 14 wrestlers from these sets to send his way as soon as I can get my act together. Next up is GAMI, who it appears has retired but still helps to run the wrestling scene from her laptop.
The previous set of scans showed mostly posed shots on the backs, but here we can see a couple that look to be taken from actual event action.
Some of my favorite cards show wrestlers wearing masks. There are a variety of masked wrestlers, and many of them are alternate identities for other unmasked wrestlers. I am having some trouble finding names for the masked wrestlers, although with some more research I will probably be able to figure it out. The wrestler wearing the cape and hood in the lower left is Miyako Matsumoto, who is apparently quite accomplished and has won several different championship belts.
Here are a few more card backs, showing the usual mixture of photos and information. There are 105 cards in this base portion of the set, with a couple of subsets following.
The first subset is the Hall of Fame and features three cards from # 106 - 108. Most years have a Hall of Fame subset, so my assumption is that they feature wrestlers who were elected to the Hall in the previous year. The backs of the cards show scenes that seem to come from their respective induction ceremonies. A lot of the Hall of Fame cards show scenes where the wrestler is covered in a boatload of ribbons, so that must be a pretty important part of the celebration. The card fronts depart from the base set in that they show the wrestler's name in anglicized form, with this particular scan showing Toshie Uematsu and You-You Ran. I am having trouble finding information on You-You Ran, so there may be some kind of mix-up in my assumption on that one. Toshie Uematsu does show up when Googled, though, and it looks like she wrestled in the WCW at some point. Doing a little more searching brings up that a wrestler named Ran Yu-Yu was Toshie Uematsu's tag team partner and retired in late 2012, so I guess it is just a matter of formatting and spelling that kept me from finding her at first.
After the Hall of Fame subset comes a group of 8 cards with the Story Fact designation. They feature some rather risque images. I chose a tame one to show here on the blog, as this is supposed to be a family-friendly affair. They aren't overtly sexual in nature, but they do show a fair bit of skin. I could probably do without them in this set. I think Story Fact might be some sort of idol card producer or brand who partnered with BBM to create these cards? I'm not sure. Anyway, they are part of this set.
Closing out the base set is a checklist, which features what I believe is a prominent tag team on the front of the card.
Up next are the autographs that I pulled, which fell at about 4 per box. The woman in the upper left wielding a chain is Mayumi Ozaki, who has been wrestling since August 1986. In the upper right is Moeka Haruhi, who is apparently a teen model turned wrestler. That is not her real name, and Wikipedia tells me that the name was chosen to evoke her cutesy, cosplaying persona. She has held several minor titles in a career that goes back to 2005. The wrestler in the cape in the lower left is Hikaru Shida, a former idol and actress who became a wrestler in 2008. Finally, in the lower right is Rydeen Hagane, who debuted in 2012 and might have a background in Judo.
Most of the autographs are serially-numbered to around 100 copies, although a few wrestlers vary from that number by a few cards. I am told that there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the differences in numbering. Maybe a handful of cards from those wrestlers got damaged in transit or something like that.
In the upper left is Hanako Nakamori, who has been wrestling since 2006. In the upper right is my dual autograph, which features signatures by Kyusei Ninja Ranmaru (apparently a fan favorite known for appearing in comedic skits and matches) and Apple Miyuki / Hibiscus Mii. I had a heck of a time locating that second name, as the 2013 checklist has her under one name and the 2015 checklist in English that I've been working from has her under the other name. This might prompt me to actually work on learning a new language, at least on a superficial level. On the lower left is Yuu Yamagata, who has been wrestling since 2002. Her profile says that she loses more than she wins and has not necessarily been an extremely popular wrestler, but she apparently has got something keeping her in the game. Her last match, a team victory, happened today, so she is still relevant and active as a wrestler. Finally, in the lower right is Sakura Hirota, who doesn't have a lot of information out there, but does have a few match videos posted. It seems to me that she appears in some of the more comedic matches rather than more serious wrestling.
You might notice a lot of inscriptions, emojis, and doodles on the autograph cards, especially as I move into the 2014 and 2015 sets. The 2013 cards are on a glossy stock, while the later years feature a matte cardstock that takes ink better. Again, you can see that these cards are all numbered to around 100.
I hope you enjoyed reading about the BBM True Heart Wrestling cards. I still have a lot to learn about them and I may have butchered some names or been misinformed on some details. They are certainly a lot of fun to sort through and you get enough autographs in a box to feel like you're getting your money worth, even if I don't really know yet the relative popularity of the different wrestlers. Based on costume and demeanor, though, it is pretty easy to build impressions and imagine what their storylines might look like.
