A Passel of Joshi Wrestling Autographs

I still haven't done my review of the three boxes of 2017 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Wrestling cards I opened, but that is a post that requires a lot of research and typing. I picked up a handful of joshi autographs from other years to fill out various personal collections recently.

First up is a couple of Dash Chisako ( DASH・チサコ ) cards from the 2016 BBM True Heart set. I didn't really intend to win two of these, but somehow I managed to bid on two copies of this card. I won't complain too hard, as I've been trying to get one of her autographs for a while now.

Up next is a cheki photo of Rabbit Miu ( ラビット美兎 ), who retired at the end of last year. I think I read that she decided to retire because she is getting married, which is a pretty common thing in these wrestling promotions. I think I had most of her base autographs from the 2012-2017 sets, but I wanted to get one of these autographed photos to close out the collection. She was one of the shortest wrestlers in the game at around 4'6" tall. These photos are pretty rare, and this one from 2012 is numbered # 7 / 7.

I also grabbed a couple of Ayako Hamada ( 浜田 文子 ) autographs. She has gained some fame wrestling for U.S. promotions, as well as her work in Japan and Mexico. This one from 2006 BBM True Heart is numbered # 03 / 93. The earlier BBM True Heart sets featured casual photos on the fronts and wrestling action photos on the backs, but a couple of years ago they moved away from the casual photos aside from the occasional subset.

I also got a 2016 autograph, with a couple of ink colors and some inscriptions. This one is numbered # 041 / 100. Her signature remained remarkably consistent from 2006 through 2016. I wonder if I could say the same about mine?

I picked up a few other autographs, with most of this quartet coming from the 2015 BBM True Heart set. The card in the upper left is Hiroyo Matsumoto ( 浜田 文子 ). I don't know a lot about her, but I thought it was funny that she signed as 'Lady Destroyer.' Today I learned that she got that nickname because she broke a wall during her debut match.

Next up is a 2016 base autograph of Makoto ( 真琴 ). I pulled her rare parallel autograph and a cheki photo of her from the set, but I still hadn't picked up Makoto's base autograph. It's nice to complete the set.

On the bottom left is a 2015 autograph of Meiko Satomura ( 里村 明衣子 ), probably one of the more respected joshi wrestlers. Along with Dash Chisako and Cassandra Miyagi, she won the 2016 Chikara King of Trios tournament over a team made up of Command Bolshoi, Hanako Nakamori, and Manami Katsu. I would love to attend a King of Trios tournament, but Pennsylvania is pretty far from me. This year's King of Trios event is even further away, being held in England.

The lower right autograph is Lin Byron ( リン・バイロン ), the unmasked alternate identity of the wrestler known as Ray. Ray / Lin Byron is still fighting a brain tumor, and the JWP promotion holds benefit events for her pretty regularly.

Here are the card backs. Most of the print runs are around 90 cards apiece, with some wrestlers signing more and some signing fewer. In the 2017 set the print runs have been standardized, with nearly every wrestler signing 95 cards. There are a couple of wrestlers with 89 or 90 autographs, and Ray only signed 55 cards.

Using the Buyee Shopping Service to Get Wrestling Cards from Japan

I finally took the plunge and used a buying service to pick up some Japanese wrestling cards from Amazon.co.jp and Yahoo! Auctions. The service I used is called Buyee. They have a browser add-on that allows you to use Amazon.co.jp to add items to your Buyee cart, and their site has a direct link to Yahoo! Auctions that allows you to search, make purchases, place bids, and place snipe bids directly form the auction listings. They have partnerships with other sites, too, like Rakuten and ZOZO. The one seller I use on Rakuten ships directly to the US, though, so I can't see myself using them for that.

I purchased five cards through Yahoo! Auctions and one card set from an Amazon seller. I'll show off the single cards first, and then I'll go into a breakdown of how using Buyee went for me.

I was able to add three autographed BBM True Heart wrestling cards to my Command Bolshoi autograph timeline. First up is the card from 2005. I showed off the 2005 base set just a couple of days ago. This autograph is numbered # 60 / 89.

Here is Command Bolshoi's 2006 BBM True Heart autograph. Her 2012 card also pictures her with a guitar, and many of her Facebook posts show her and some friends on a stage with instruments. I assume they have some kind of band. This one is numbered # 62 / 99.

The last Command Bolshoi autograph I got was the 2007 version. This photo is a little more standard than her usual fare; it's just a posed outdoor shot. This autograph is numbered # 064 / 100. These three cards filled a nice gap in my Command Bolshoi collection. I think the only True Heart autograph I am missing from her now is 2004. I am not certain that a 2004 autograph exists, though. It is likely, but 2004 cards in general just don't show up ever.

I also picked up a couple of Rabbit Miu autographs that I didn't have yet. I haven't made a concerted effort to build her autograph timeline like I have for Command Bolshoi, but I'd be willing to bet that I've got most of her autographs. This is her 2012 autograph. It's numbered # 013 / 100.

I also jumped ahead a few years and got the 2015 version of her autograph. This one is numbered # 61 / 90. I think the sets with wrestlers pictured in regular clothes predate her wrestling debut in 2011, so she only has cards with posed shots in ring gear.

Hopefully you can click the image to enlarge it.

Now that I've showed all of the single cards I bought, I wanted to go into some detail about my experience using Buyee to get these cards. Buyee acts as a middleman for transactions with Japanese merchants. They take care of payment and domestic shipping, and they then forward your packages to you. All of these actions have one or more fees associated with them. So many fees, and I didn't even use all of the services.

For the 2003 BBM True Heart set, I made the purchase from an Amazon Japan seller. Buyee has a browser extension that you can download. When you find an item you want, you click the button to add it to your Buyee cart, which takes you to the Buyee page where you can add special instructions and adjust the quantity you want to purchase. Once the details are all good you click the button to make the purchase. In addition to the price of the item, you also pay a 150 JPY service fee. The yen tracks pretty close to the dollar, so you can roughly read 150 JPY as $1.50. The other fees come later. So making the purchase costs the item price plus the Service Fee. There are additional services you can pay for, like having Buyee inspect your items for damage and correctness upon arrival in the warehouse. I declined these services.

For the Yahoo! Auctions, Buyee is integrated into the auction listings. You can do a number of things, such as Buy It Now, bidding, and snipe bidding. For Buy It Now listings you pay right away, and I think for bids the money gets moved when the auction completes. In addition to the 150 JPY service fee, there is a 200 JPY payment fee that I guess covers the cost of making the payment to the seller and arranging shipment. So just for that you tack on an additional 350 JPY to each auction you win. 

Once you make all of your purchases, you wait for the packages to arrive at the warehouse. This is where the domestic shipping fee comes in. You are paying for the shipping from the seller to the Buyee warehouse. You don't pay this cost until you pay the international shipping fee at the very end. But it's there, and just like with your standard eBay or Amazon sellers, the shipping cost can vary. I paid between 194 JPY and 390 JPY each for shipping on these six items. My totals so far are 4,430 JPY for the base purchase price, 900 JPY for service fees, 1000 JPY for Yahoo! Auction payment fees, and 1,546 JPY for domestic shipping.

Once the items hit the warehouse, you have thirty days to request shipment or you start incurring storage fees. This gives you a decent window to gather items together because consolidation of packages is a big cost saver. You want to wait until all of your packages are in the warehouse before you consolidate, because each time you consolidate it costs more. You can choose not to consolidate, but then you will pay international shipping on each package, and you don't want to do that. For only two items, you can consolidate them for 500 JPY. For three or more, it is a flat 1000 JPY fee. But if you combine two items at 500 JPY and then want to add another item to the package, it will cost an additional 1000 JPY. And then an additional 1000 JPY each additional time you consolidate. I waited until all six packages were in the warehouse and consolidated them all at once for 1000 JPY. I divided it evenly between them in the chart. There are additional services that you can purchase, like protective packaging. I declined them.

Once your package is consolidated, you choose among the international shipping options that are made available based on the weight and size of your package. For my package there were around 8 different shipping services with different delivery speeds. I again went with the cheapest option at 1,190 JPY. There were options all the way up to around 4,000 JPY, if I recall correctly. Once you click that final button, the domestic shipping, consolidation, and international shipping fees all get charged to you and the package gets prepped and shipped out. In my case, all of the packages (PWEs for the single cards and a padded mailer for the set) were placed in bubble wrap and then placed together in a shipping bag. My wife had an appointment on the day the package was scheduled to arrive, so I took some leave from work to stay home and sign for it. Most of my packages from Japan require a signature, so I was expecting this.

In the end, fees and shipping charges wound up increasing the price I paid on my items by more than double. I still feel like I got a pretty reasonable deal overall, but it's tough to see a $45 purchase balloon up over $100 after fees are added. This isn't a service I would use often or casually, but I could see myself doing something like this once a year when I see a few really desirable items pop up. I might have skipped the Rabbit Miu autographs if I had anticipated how much the fees would really cost me, but in the end I am happy to have them in my collection. The price could have been even higher if I had used some of the other services that Buyee offers, like inspection and protective packaging. Overall I did get pretty fair prices for items I couldn't find in the United States, and didn't really vastly overpay on the transaction as a whole. The Buyee site was a little hard to follow, but in aggregate the FAQ pages gave me a pretty good awareness of the fees beforehand, although I don't know if they really sunk in until I made my little chart.

Cheki Wrestling Photos from Japan

I mentioned in yesterday's Tim Lincecum post that I'd grabbed a couple of wrestling cards from the seller in order to take advantage of combined shipping. What I got from him was some of the tougher pulls from the BBM True Heart Wrestling products, the Polaroid-style Cheki cards.

In my quest to better understand what it is I'm collecting, I decided to try figuring out why these photo inserts are called Cheki. It didn't really take me long to find out, as I came across an article about the Fujifilm company's Instax line of cameras, which produce these little instant snapshots. They are marketed as Cheki to young women, apparently with great success. In this digital age, a film camera is seen as a fun novelty, and the Cheki cameras are selling at a pace that nearly outpaces Fujifilm's digital models. Moving on to the actual cards I bought, you can clearly see the Fujifilm and instax labeling on the back of the photos. It all Check(i)s out!

藤ヶ崎矢子 - Yako Fujigasaki

This first autographed photo comes from the 2016 BBM True Heart product. The wrestler is Yako Fujigasaki. She appears in a lot of the photos that get posted to the JWP Facebook page, but I don't know much about her outside of that. This card is numbered # 4 / 8. In previous sets these were the hardest pulls, but in 2016 BBM included special inscription autographs that were # / 5. These photos are probably still cooler than those autographs.

永島 千佳世 - Chikayo Nagashima

This one comes from the 2015 BBM True Heart product and features Chikayo Nagashima, another wrestler that I don't know much about. She's been wrestling for a long time, debuting in 1995. According to Wikipedia her last couple of matches have been against Ayako Hamada, whose cards are collected by buckstorecards as part of his 2/14 birthday collection. This photo is numbered # 1 / 7.

Although I don't know much about these two wrestlers, it was nice to find these photos for such a good price. It would take several boxes to pull even one of these, and after the exchange rate and shipping from Japan it's hard to get unopened boxes right now for less than $65-70 apiece. I haven't purchased any boxes since my initial order when they released. I don't know that I'll be able to pick up any more of the 2016 product in unopened form. I'll need to save my pennies just to be able to buy some of the 2017 when it releases.

When Real-Life Stuff Sucks - Three BBM True Heart Autographs

I bought a couple of 2016 BBM True Heart Autographs off of an eBay seller who seems to have a lot of this stuff. The main thing I was after was this Command Bolshoi limited inscription autograph. These differ from the base autographs because they use different ink colors and most of them carry an inscription of some kind. They are also numbered # / 5 while most of the base autos are numbered around # / 100. I still don't have a copy of her base auto from the set, but I'm working on it. I've been working on gathering her autographs from every set I can, but I'm kind of at the mercy of the online marketplace. Luckily for me the Command Bolshoi cards that come to market tend to stay there until I buy them, so I'm not in a huge hurry to get them. I'm apparently the only Bolshoi super-collector. This one is different from some of her other cards in that she isn't wearing her giant coat. You can see that she's absolutely shredded. She competes as a bodybuilder in addition to the wrestling thing. This one is # 4 / 5 and saves me the trouble of importing more boxes in a futile search for a very limited card.

This one is a base autograph of Rika Tatsumi. It has pink ink for the autograph, but it's a base auto numbered # 49 / 81. I grabbed this one because it was cheap, especially after combined shipping, and because of the little cat picture and the fact that she wrote her Twitter handle ( @doratles ) as an inscription. I don't know anything else about her as a wrestler. You don't get autographs like this from ballplayers, that's for sure.

I picked up this 2015 autograph from the same seller a little while after I got the 2016 cards. This card features masked wrestler Ray, who also wrestles unmasked as Lin Byron. This cards is numbered # 21 / 90.

A little while ago the news broke on several wrestling sites and forums that Ray had gone in for concussion testing and doctors found an inoperable tumor on her brain. For whatever reason that news hit me pretty hard. I didn't flip out or cry or anything, but it's something I've been dwelling on from time to time over the last couple of weeks. It's just kind of weird when real-world troubles push their way into our little cardboard worlds.

Command Bolshoi posted a couple of photos of her and Ray on her Facebook page to help promote a wrestling show that JWP is doing as a benefit for medical expenses and moral support. It's pretty cool that the wrestling community in Japan is so close. It seems like any time a wrestler has some hardship come up in life they get together to do a benefit show in that person's honor. Ray has promised to continue seeking treatment options and make wrestling appearances when she can. A brain tumor is a pretty rough thing to get past, though. I am a pessimistic person by nature, but I hope she can find some non-surgical option that will work out for her.