Chihiro Hashimoto Autographs from Yahoo! Auctions

I don't have it in me to blog about everything I got in the big box of cards I recently got from Japan, so I'm breaking the contents into somewhat manageable chunks. Today I've got three different autographs I picked up for one wrestler, Chihiro Hashimoto - 橋本 千紘.

First up is her card from the 2016 BBM True Heart set. She made her debut at the end of 2015, so this might be her first signature in a True Heart product. She was an amateur wrestler in high school and college, so she brought that persona to the world of professional wrestling, joining Sendai Girls' Pro-Wrestling and training under Meiko Satomura, who I talked about in my last post about this shipment. Her ring gear is a wrestling singlet.

I found it interesting that her 2017 autograph was a sticker. I hadn't seen any sticker autographs in True Heart until I pulled one from my 2018 boxes and bought this one. The cards with on-card autographs have a matte finish on them, but the sticker autograph cards are UV-coated and glossy like the base cards.

With her wrestling experience and her stout build, she is a force to be reckoned with in the squared circle. She's held the Sendai Girls' belt several times, and was the 2016 Tokyo Sports Rookie of the Year. Her star seems to be ascending, and I was happy to land these three autographed cards for my collection.

Two Wrestling Box Breaks from Puro Central Shop

I opened these boxes of cards a long time ago, so long ago that the shop I bought them from, Puro Central Shop, has closed down. The guy who ran it still has a smaller shop on another site, though. You can find his inventory at the Joshi City store. It looks like this was a break of one box of 2016 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Wrestling cards and one box of 2017 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Wrestling cards.

These are just the hits from the box of 2016 cards. If you want to see more from this set, you can look at all of my posts about it by clicking here. In the upper left is an autograph from KAZUKI. KAZUKI wrestles for Pure-J, which was formerly known as JWP. In the upper right is an autograph of Hikaru Shida ( 志田　光 ), who I believe currently splits her time between wrestling and some form of theater which includes singing, acting, and wrestling.

In the lower left is the signature of Maya Yukihi ( 雪妃真矢 ), who wrestles mostly for Ice Ribbon. She also recently re-Tweeted a post from BBM previewing some of her kiss cards from the 2018 BBM True Heart set. It's only about two more weeks until that set releases. I have three boxes on order, but they'll take a while to get here from Japan. Here's the picture from the Tweet:

The autograph card in the lower right is Ryo Mizunami ( 水波　綾 ), who wrestles for Pro Wrestling WAVE, but also makes appearances with other promotions.

The last autograph in the box was a cheki photograph card of Yuki Miyazaki, who retired in 2010, but came back in 2014 and has been wrestling pretty regularly ever since. She is listed as a freelancer, but the vast majority of her matches are in the Pro Wrestling WAVE promotion. This photo is numbered # 2 /7. In most years the photos are the most limited cards in the set, but in 2016 there were special ink variations of the base autographs, numbered out of # / 5.

There were six autographs in the 2017 box. For more pictures and words about this set, you can click here to see more of my posts with 2017 cards in them. The first card in the upper left of the scan features Dump Matsumoto ( ダンプ松本 ), one of the bigger names in Japanese women's wrestling. She would be considered a Legend in a WWE set. I think she is semi-retired, but still makes plenty of appearances at various events. In the upper right is Tsukushi ( つくし ), who is 20 years old but has been wrestling since she was 12. She most recently made the news for getting arrested after an altercation with another wrestler.

The next row starts with Misaki Ohata ( 大畠美咲 ) on the left. She is a fairly popular wrestler with a lot of matches under her belt. On the right is Police Woman ( ポリスウ～メン ), an alter ego of Yuki Miyazaki, who appeared in the 2016 cards posted above.

On the left of the third row is Yuina ( 結奈 ), a wrestler for REINA who is either retired or recovering from injury. I'm not sure exactly which. Next to her autograph is the signature of Konami ( 小波 ), a freelance wrestler who is mostly affiliated with Stardom these days. Stardom has their own card set that is pretty difficult to get, so it is nice whenever a Stardom wrestler's autograph can be found in True Heart.

That does it for these boxes. There were some pretty good cards in this batch. These posts are pretty time-consuming to research and write, but the research is fun and the autographs are a lot more inventive than the ones we generally get on our baseball cards.

Some 2016 BBM True Heart Autos, and the 2018 Set is Announced!

It's been quite a while since I posted any cards from the BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling sets. The posts can take quite a while to research and write, so I slack off on them. This one was originally scheduled to go up on April 4th last year, so that shows how long I will put these things off.

These autographs all come from the 2016 version of the True Heart product. Given that there are five of them in this post, I am guessing that this is the result of a box break.

In the upper left is Erin ( えーりん ) , who wrestled from the end of 2012 until the middle of 2016. I don't think she is still active, but I don't know for sure.

The wrestler on the upper left is KAORU, who has been active since a few months before my 5th birthday in 1986.

In the lower left is Miyako Matsumoto ( 松本　都 ), who wrestles for the Ice Ribbon promotion.

On the lower right is Emi Sakura ( さくらえみ ), who founded Ice Ribbon and is credited with training Miyako Matsumoto. She left Ice Ribbon a few years ago, though, and does matches with a lot of different promotions now.

The last autograph is a Cheki or Polaroid photo, signed on the front and numbered on the back. This one features Sawako Shimono ( 下野佐和子 ), who is associated with Pro Wrestling WAVE, but also wrestles frequently for other promotions.

This wasn't a bad group of autographs, although it could be said that you can't really pull a bad group of autographs from these products. It's always nice to pull a Cheki photo, as they are the hardest things to get out of these boxes.

I was pretty excited to see today that pre-orders finally went up for the 2018 True Heart product. It looks to be scheduled for a late February release, with around 150 base cards in the set, and the usual assortment of autographs and cheki photos. I'll probably be ordering at least a few boxes, and I'll post my usual review when I get them.

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.

Maybe My Best Box of 2016 BBM True Heart Wrestling Cards

Today was my first day back at work after 11 days off. It was hard to wake up early again and it stunk to drive back and forth in the cold and snow (my drive home took almost twice as long as usual), but in some ways it was nice to get back into the groove of my usual routine. I didn't get nearly as much done during my break as I wanted to, but I did rent a giant dumpster and throw out most of the stuff from my garage. I also got mostly caught up on scanning cards and processing images for this blog, so I've got well over a month's worth of drafts in my queue. I should have sorted more cards for my great reorganization project, but I didn't ever drag myself down to the basement to do it.

When I ordered my box of 2016 BBM P★League bowling cards, I also added a box of 2016 BBM True Heart wrestling cards to my order. It turned out that this would be one of the best boxes of True Heart cards I opened this year.

The first autograph out of the box was the Kaori Yoneyama 米山香織 in the upper left. I had to look her up to get her name, as she isn't a wrestler I follow.

Things picked up after that, though, with Raz Card Blog favorite Command Bolshoi コマンド・ボリショイcoming out of a pack. I already had a copy of her autograph, but I will take a double of one of my PC wrestlers any time.

The next two autographs are special inscription autographs, which are distinguished by extra writing and colored ink. I don't know a lot about Erin えーりん, the wrestler on the bottom left, but she definitely went all out on her inscription autograph card. She also owns a dachshund, if her Twitter account is to be believed.

Last up is Makoto 真琴, who is another favorite wrestler for me. She is currently the REINA World Women's Championship belt holder. I've pulled her Cheki (Polaroid picture) and inscription autographs now this year, but not her base autograph.

The first two autographs were base autographs, so they have print runs in the 80's, but both of the inscription autographs were numbered # 4 / 5. These things are pretty rare. It's definitely beating the odds to pull two of them in one box, but this box wasn't quite done yet.

I also pulled a rare Cheki autograph out of the box. This one features Kyuri 弓李, and is numbered # 3 / 7. I also have a Kyuri photo autograph from 2015, so this is turning into an annual pull for me. She is a young wrestler, but not nearly as young as she looks. She's already got several years of wrestling experience.

I was excited to see a preview of the 2017 BBM True Heart autograph cards on Makoto's Twitter feed. At least I assume these are the autographs, as they have a nice big blank spot on one side of them. Most of the base cards in recent years have two photos on the front, with the autograph cards reusing one of the photos and leaving room for a signature. The 2017 cards are brightly-colored, and rumored to have a release date in mid-February. This is the only preview I've seen of them. I'll probably be good for several boxes of them throughout the year.

Click Here to View Cart 18: Chasing an Elusive Joshi Dual Autograph

This card and I have a (relatively) long history. Not anything like Night Owl and 1975 Topps or anything, but at least several months' worth. I am bad with timelines anyway, but a while back one of the premier sources of Japanese wrestling cards in the United States, Puroresu Central Shop, listed an Ayako Hamada / Kana dual autograph from the 2013 BBM True Heart Wrestling set. The price was a little higher than what I will normally pay for a card, but I really wanted that card.

Ayako Hamada is a pretty famous second-generation wrestler. She is the daughter of Gran Hamada, and she has wrestled in various Japanese, Mexican, and U.S. promotions. Kana is another famous wrestler. She has wrestled in many Japanese and U.S. promotions, and is currently the WWE NXT Women's Champion under the name Asuka.

So these were both some pretty big names, and I wanted the card. The owner of Puroresu Central Shop announced a few months ago that he was going to close up and reevaluate some things, and that this might be the last time much of the inventory was available. I fiddled back and forth for a while (probably a week or two), and finally decided to go and buy the card in early August. Oh snap! It was gone. I tweeted my dismay at the development, and he tweeted back, reminding me that he'd given ample warning that this would happen. That was true. He had been tweeting about the inventory reduction for a while.

At some point the store was re-opened and some of the inventory came back, including the elusive dual autograph. They also ran a special code word sale in November, and this time I pounced on it. The card is numbered # 76 / 84, and it is one of the best cards in my Joshi collection.

In the same order I also added a Neko Nitta Hall of Fame autograph from 2016 BBM True Heart to my cart. You can see that she added a retirement inscription to the card. I don't know a lot about her, to be honest, but she was pretty easily recognizable as the cat-themed wrestler. She held the Triangle Ribbon Championship (an Ice Ribbon promotion belt that is won in a 3-person match) six times and the International Ribbon Tag Team Champion twice during her relatively short career (2011-2015). This one is numbered # 025 / 100.

Puro Central Shop has been pretty good to me, and the guy who owns it and the Joshi review site Joshi City recently tweeted out some hype for my blog.

I'm bad at recommending stuff but anyone into sports cards I really recommend @chonk34's blog at https://t.co/XNAHYgx26K. Always a fun read.

— Joshi City (@JoshiPuro) December 6, 2016

When I saw that, I realized that it had been a while since I posted any Joshi content (my last Joshi post also dealt with an epic purchase from Puro Central Shop), so I dug into my scan folder for these cards. Thanks for reading!

Click Here to View Cart 17: A Box of 2016 BBM True Heart Wrestling Cards

For a Halloween post there are plenty of trading cards I could post featuring people in costumes. There are comic book cards with their caped superheroes, wrestling cards with their spandex-clad personalities, movie and film cards with a wide range of characters, and even sports cards with their colorful uniforms and equipment. Today I am going to feature some of the most colorful wrestling cards around.

One of my favorite US-based card shops, The Puroresu Central Shop, deals specifically in Japanese wrestling collectibles. I've picked up some very cool things from them, including a very rare figure (from a series of wrestling figures I haven't shown here yet) and several autographed cards for my various player collections. They recently posted on Twitter that they had one box of the 2016 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling cards available in the shop. I wasn't sure whether or not it would be worth going after it, as I'd picked up a bulk lot or two of the autographs in the set and I've got plenty of base cards from the boxes I busted earlier in the year. The price was in the ballpark of what I'd spend to import a box on my own. I finally caved and placed my order. #YOLO

For the full review of this product, you can read my post from February, when I placed my initial order for a few boxes. For this post I am sticking with a handful of base cards and all the hits.

水波　綾 - Ryo Mizunami; 志田　光 - Hikaru Shida
雪妃真矢 - Maya Yukihi; KAZUKI

Collation is the worst part about this product. You get 140 cards in a box with about 5 of those spots being a hit. So 135 base cards should be enough to complete a set of 126 cards. Instead, the boxes consistently give out 110 / 126 cards, with around 25 doubles. Argh! #FirstWorldProblems

紫雷美央 - Mio Shirai

Most True Heart sets have a subset or two after going through all of the individual active wrestlers. Usually these include tag teams, Hall of Fame or wrestlers who retired the previous year, and modeling or casual photo shoot cards.

Here are four of the autographs I got in this box. They match up with the base cards I selected to scan. Often I will pull a wrestler who I don't know well, and I match up the autograph to the corresponding base card, then I use the checklist to search for their name on the internet. 

I didn't know who Maya Yukihi was, so I matched up her picture up with card # 106 on the pdf checklist from the BBM website. Having it in text form allows me to copy and paste the text directly instead of trying to find out how to type the characters, and a quick search (usually) takes me to something I can work with. Those numbers to the right are the print runs for various autographs. The leftmost column is the base autograph, the middle column is the special inscription autograph, and the right column is the Cheki, or Polaroid-type photos that are signed and labeled. The print runs can vary quite a bit, and not all wrestlers have all of the variations.

The backs are pretty standard, with the Certificate of Authenticity and the serial numbering. And now I know why Hikaru Shida wrote # 54 by her autograph on the front of the card. It's card # 54 / 85 in her print run. You can see that KAZUKI's card is extremely limited, as it is one of the special inscription cards. Each wrestler who did those only has 5 of them, and they are usually identifiable by the extra writing and different-colored ink.

Getting a limited # / 5 auto is pretty cool, but the Cheki photos are the biggest hits in the product. And I may have pulled the biggest one of all in Mio Shirai. I've mentioned before that the Shirai's (Mio and Io) are some of the most popular wrestlers around. Mio retired last year, but Io is still active. I've seen rumors that Io has an offer from WWE to join their ranks, along with another popular wrestler named Kairi Hojo. Io and Kairi don't have True Heart cards because they wrestle for a promotion called Stardom that doesn't have cards in the True Heart sets. Stardom recently (sometime in the last year or so) made their own trading card available in their international store, but they are expensive and shipping makes them even more so. I did buy one pack of them a while ago from an eBay seller, but I haven't posted them on the blog. Their brand emphasizes modeling more than other wrestling promotions, and the cards reflect that. They are one of the more English-friendly promotions out there, though. They have a video subscription service that has all of their shows, plus other video events, and every video has English subtitles. The other promotions don't have that, to my knowledge.

Back to the card, Mio Shirai doesn't have a # / 5 inscription card in this year's set, so this is her most limited card in the set. It's a pretty big deal. I guess it would be like an extremely limited farewell year hit of David Ortiz, to compare it to baseball.

The card shop's owner shut down the store a few months ago, citing a need to reorganize and decide what his plan for the future was. During the shutdown he contacted me and we discussed some of the sources for True Heart cards. I guess there aren't a lot of people collecting these cards, and he didn't want the knowledge to be lost if he decided not to reopen. One of the sources he uses is the same one I use, but my e-mails with him were what convinced me to try out the Buyee shopping service. He e-mailed me again after I purchased the box, expressing surprise that I had been the one to jump on it as I know how to get the cards elsewhere. He was a little remorseful about selling the cards when he heard what I had pulled, which I think would be the really hard thing about selling products for a hobby you enjoy. On the one hand, you get to earn money from something you enjoy. On the other hand, the things you enjoy can double as inventory, and you either don't make money because you hold onto everything of value or you have to watch cool stuff move on to new owners. I am glad that someone out there does it, but I would have a hard time owning a card shop just because I'd want to always be busting boxes of stuff and hoarding the cool singles that came through.

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.

Click Here to View Cart 12: 2016 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling Autographs

I was able to get a couple of 2016 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling autographs featuring some of my favorite wrestlers from an online shop that specializes in Japanese wrestling memorabilia. They have an eBay presence, too, but their website often has better prices and cheaper shipping.

The first card is autographed by Rabbit Miu, who is currently nursing some kind of leg injury:

I pulled that picture from the JWP Facebook page and cropped it a bit. I believe the wrestler whose face is in the foreground is Leon. Rabbit Miu is super-short and has a ton of energy. It's too bad she's out of commission for a while.

The other card I got in this purchase was for my main Japanese wrestling player collection, Command Bolshoi. Earlier I got her short-printed 2016 autograph with pink ink and an inscription, but until now I hadn't picked up the base version. I've got a good head start on her autograph timeline, but I'm missing a few years in the mid-2000's.

Rabbit Miu might be injured, but that doesn't stop her from goofing off while Command Bolshoi puts in work at the gym:

I took this photo from Command Bolshoi's Facebook page. She posts a lot of gym and food photos, but I put up with that because she also posts plenty of wrestling stuff and a lot of other wrestlers make cameos in her feed, like in this photo.