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.
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.
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.
When the 2017 BBM True Heart wrestling cards came out, I ordered three boxes right away. While I got some good autographs from those boxes, I missed out pulling signatures from most of my favorite wrestlers. So I headed off to Buyee, a purchasing service that allows me to get things from Yahoo! Auctions in Japan. With the cards being a recent release, there were plenty of listings, and I picked up just about everyone I wanted from the set. I'll probably still wind up ordering a couple more boxes during the year in hopes of pulling a cheki (instant photo/Polaroid) autograph, but now I've got the base set and most of the autographs I really care about. BBM made it easier on me by doing away with the short-printed autographs they tested out last year. I did think those were pretty fun, though, so it's a mixed bag. I don't have to chase them down, but I felt like they added value to the product.
Command Bolshoi (top) is the primary Japanese wrestler I collect, so her autograph was near the top of my list of signatures to chase. I've been building a run of Makoto (bottom) autographs, too. She usually signs her cards with a lot of flair, and her Twitter account is where I got my first look at the 2017 cards.
Dump Matsumoto (top) has been wrestling since around 1980, and even spent some time in the WWE back when it was called the WWF. She's a pretty big name in wrestling, so I was happy to land her card. DASH Chisako (middle) is a wrestler I like, so her signature card was on my list of cards to chase. She's wrestled in America recently as part of the Chikara King of Trios events. I don't know much about Chesca (bottom), but her Wonder Woman-inspired costume meant I had to chase down her autograph. The internet tells me that she was trained by Makoto and is the first Filipina wrestler in a Japanese promotion. She also really likes selfies.
Cassandra Miyagi (top) is also a Chikara King of Trios participant. I am not really a fan of her gimmick, but she's definitely got a striking look. Her autographs get pretty wild, and usually seem to feature something similar to the design on this one. Another wrestler I enjoy collecting is Rabbit Miu (bottom), but she retired last year and gets a Hall of Fame autograph instead of a regular autograph. It has the same print run as a regular autograph, but wrestlers who have retired in the last year usually get a Hall of Fame subset card and a Hall of Fame designation on their autograph cards. It's too bad that she is retiring after just a few years, but that's how it goes.
The final autograph that I really wanted to get was Ray. She is a high-flying wrestler who has stepped away from the ring due to an inoperable tumor in her head. Her autograph run in the 2017 set was about half of what the other wrestlers signed. A fellow True Heart fan who lives in Japan and knows many of the wrestlers personally said he was surprised that she signed at all, given how her health has been lately. While I was building this order up in my Buyee cart, I also came across a Ray autograph from 2009, so I went ahead and got it.
There are probably still a couple more autographs I'd like to get from this year's set, but this order took care of the bulk of my wish list. I'm glad that I was able to get so many of these checked off of my wish list all at once. The various fees that Buyee charges mean that this was not a cheap venture, but it was probably cheaper than busting boxes or hoping that all of these cards would eventually pop up on eBay. You can't beat the selection that comes from shopping for Japanese products in a Japanese marketplace.
BBM True Heart is one of my favorite releases each year. It is produced in Japan, and features wrestlers from most of the Japanese women's wrestling promotions. It usually releases early in the calendar year, in January or February. I get pretty excited for it as previews start to show up, and even more when pre-orders open on my favorite retail sites. This year I pre-ordered 3 boxes. Collation is usually not great, but three boxes traditionally has netted me a full base set. BBM opened three boxes on their Facebook page, and the boxes this year seem to drop 6 or 7 autographs for hits. My math suggests that there were between 1800-2000 boxes packed out for the 2017 BBM True Heart product.
Each box contains 20 packs, with 7 cards per pack. The box lid has had the same basic format for the last few years, with a group of images of the more popular wrestlers. The line of text in the upper right seems to talk about the set containing newcomers/rookies. The line in the middle talks about popular tag teams. The stuff at the bottom, just above 'BBM,' appears to discuss the rest of the checklist, which contains veterans, popular wrestlers, and the most complete lineup ever. The vertical lines of text along the right side seem to talk about the inclusion of autographed cards. I am translating this all with an app on my phone, so I may be missing some of it. The box flap traditionally features that cat wrestler in the white mascot uniform, but this year another cat-themed wrestler appears alongside. Her name is Kuroneko, and she recently made an appearance on the This Card is Cool blog. The MSRP on a box is 8,000 JPY, which at current rates is about $72. You can usually find them a bit cheaper at release, but you also have to account for overseas shipping if you are not based in Japan.
The bottom of the box has the checklist. This year's set has 135 cards in it, broken up into a few subsets. Last year there were base autographs, special ink inscription autographs limited to 5 copies apiece, and cheki (Polaroid-style) autographed photos. This year the special ink autographs were dropped, and the print runs on the base autographs were normalized, so almost everyone with an autograph signed 95 base autographs. There is a little more variation with the instant photos, with wrestlers signing between 3 and 9 photos. There are 115 different signers in the set, and 54 photo subjects. If you want to view the checklist, you can look at it here.
The box lid also has two of these little perforated hanger tags on the underside. They've got a little hole at the top so that a shop owner can hang them on a peg.
The pack itself mimics the design of the box, and has the usual pack stuff on the back, some legalese and a truncated breakdown of the checklist.
Top Row: Aja Kong - アジャコング, Kyoko Inoue - 井上京子, Manami Katsu - 勝 愛実
Bottom Row: Kyusei Ninja Ranmaru - 救世忍者乱丸, Maho Kurone - 黒音まほ, Command Bolshoi - コマンド・ボリショイ
The base cards have had the same basic design formula for the last few years. You get one or two shots of the wrestler in their ring gear, posed against a colorful background.
The card backs also feature a familiar formula, with a single action photo of the wrestler, a paragraph about them, and a block of information like birthdate, debut date, height, weight, and stuff of that nature.
Top Row: Reika Saiki - 才木玲佳, Meiko Satomura - 里村明衣子, Third Generation Misaki Guriko - 三代目・三崎グリ子
Bottom Row: Sawako Shimono - 下野佐和子, DASH Chisako - DASH・チサコ, Dump Matsumoto - ダンプ松本
Cards 1-129 in the set all feature individual active wrestlers. That only leaves room for a couple of small subsets at the end of the checklist. Reika Saiki has got some interesting stuff out there, like this video game-inspired arm wrestling video.
She's got some arms on her, that's for sure. She is also a member of an idol group called Deadlift Lolita. The other member of the group is the cross-dressing male wrestler Ladybeard. They have a Facebook page, a web page, and a music video. I usually find some pretty interesting stuff when researching these posts, and this certainly didn't disappoint.
I'm still trying to recover from those videos. Wow. They overshadowed some other notable wrestlers from that set of scans, though, like Meiko Satomura, DASH Chisako, and Dump Matsumoto. There are always a couple of wrestlers I regret scanning for these posts, because I can't quite translate their names. I think the wrestler in the upper right is another alter-ego of Misaki Ohata, or maybe someone trained by her? I'm not sure.
There are some horizontal cards in the set, so I had to scan a few of them for this post. Cassandra Miyagi has wrestled in the United States. She was part of the trio that won Chikara's King of Trios event in 2016, which also included Meiko Satomura and DASH Chisako.
Nonoko (bottom left) is the woman who is arm wrestling Reika Saiki in the video embedded above. Pretty much every online profile she has mentions her cup size, and the back of her card mentions it, too. She has a YouTube video that is a spoof of the PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) song that was big a few months ago. I'm not going to link to it here, though. A lot of these wrestlers have other work outside of wrestling. Some are musicians or DJs, some probably have more conventional jobs, some are bodybuilders, and a lot of them do modeling or acting in some form or fashion.
Top Row: Chesca - チェスカ, Tequila Saya - テキーラ沙弥, Arisa Nakajima - 中島安里紗 Bottom Row: Hibiscus Mii - ハイビスカスみぃ, Ayako Hamada - 浜田文子, Vancouver Cat - バンクーバーキャット
There are a couple of comic-inspired costumes in this scan. You've got a Wonder Woman-inspired getup on Chesca in the upper left, and a Harley Quinn cosplay on Vancouver Cat in the lower right. You can see in the background picture of Vancouver Cat's card that she's got a Canadian maple leaf on the front of her regular ring gear. I can't pass up mentioning Ayako Hamada here, as she's done some wrestling in the U.S. over the years. I also have to laugh a little every time I see Hibiscus Mii, as she is sponsored by A&W.
Out of my three boxes I was able to complete one base set. That's kind of disappointing, but that's how it is. I wound up with two or three copies of most cards in the set, but there were a few on the checklist that I only pulled one copy of, and I pulled four copies of a few other cards. I got 117 / 135 or 118 / 135 cards from the set in each box, and pulled 16 doubles from each box. The variance comes from the fact that I got 6 autographs in two of the boxes and 7 autographs from the other. You get enough cards to complete two base sets and most of a third from three boxes, but your doubles have to line up right, and mine didn't. That leaves me with a base set and most of two more.
Akane Fujita is apparently a baseball fan. Ray is a favorite wrestler of mine. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor a while ago. As far as I know, she is in pretty poor health at the moment. The first three-card subset is subtitled 'Hall of Fame,' and features wrestlers who retired in 2016. It is made up of cards 130-132. Rabbit Miu was a personal favorite wrestler of mine. I read somewhere that she retired because she was getting married. That is a pretty common occurrence in these promotions.
The second subset fills the last three card numbers in the set, 133-135, and highlights tag teams. The card I chose to scan shows Hikaru Shida and Syuri.
Zippy Zappy recently (well, kind of recently) announced his intent to collect many cards featuring the Japanese baseball Chunichi Dragons. I couldn't help noticing that Akane Fujita is wearing some Dragons gear on the back of her card, including some blue ears that resemble those of the Dragons' koala mascot. Most wrestlers who retire get a final show centered around them, and the cards usually feature photos from that retirement event. I think that's a cool little touch. That about does it for the base set.
This first scan is the box I pulled seven autographs from. I didn't pull a lot of autographs from the wrestlers I actively collect in this batch of boxes, but I got a nice variety of autographs. Rather than bust a bunch of wax chasing specific cards, I just sought out the ones I was looking for on Yahoo! Auctions in Japan and used a buying service to get them. I got that package the other day, which is really pressing me to get this post done. I'm not 100% sure on some of these names. I can usually find pages or pictures of the wrestlers, but I can't always get the names right.
There are some names I recognize here. It is pretty cool that I got Reika Saiki's autograph. I am not sure why Marika Kobashi signed in gold ink, but her print run is 95 cards, just like nearly every other wrestler in the set. I guess that's the pen she had nearby. I like cards with props in them, like Akane Fujita's glove and ball.
I think I am running out of stuff to say. There weren't a lot of autographs in this last box that jumped out at me. I do like that Hibiscus Mii autograph, though, because of the A&W branding on her gear. If every wrestler had sponsorship logos on their gear, it might get a little old, but she's the only one I know of and that makes it kind of cool.
Those were my three boxes of 2017 BBM True Heart. I've got most of the autographs I really wanted, but I will probably still bust a few more boxes of this stuff so I can chase more base sets and maybe some of the rare autographed photos. I always like chasing this product and adding more True Heart cards from any year to my collection.
