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!

2005 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling

I hadn't filled any holes in my BBM True Heart set collection for a while, as some of the sets just don't show up very often. I get most of my sets from the same eBay seller in Japan, so I am limited to whatever they have in stock at any given time.

As far as I know, BBM's sets for women's wrestling were branded as Fighting Beauties for 2000, 2001, and 2002. I have the 2001 set, but not the others. In 2003 they transitioned to the True Heart name, which has come out annually since. With today's pick-up of the 2005 base set, I am still missing 2003, 2004, and 2009 for the True Heart cards. I do have 2003 on order, though, so it should be in my hands soon. I'm like 80% sure that I have the 2007 set, but I don't have scans in my folder or a post on my blog about it. I'll have to dig through my boxes and see what's going on with that. So I still need:

2000 BBM Fighting Beauties

2002 BBM Fighting Beauties

2004 BBM True Heart

2009 BBM True Heart

Based on my limited research, it looks like the women just got subsets in BBM's other offerings prior to the year 2000. I've got a handful of those cards from 1997 and 1998, and I've seen some of the others listed online.

The 2005 BBM True Heart set has 108 cards in the checklist. The first 93 cards are the standard wrestler cards. The wrestlers are grouped by promotion, with the organization's logo on the front and color-coding on the back. In the earlier years of these sets, the card fronts showed the wrestlers in street clothes with wrestling action shots on the back. More recently, the cards have retained the wrestling action shots on the card backs, but they feature posed photos on the front with the wrestlers in their ring gear.

The lower left on the card front has the BBM 15th Anniversary logo, and the logo for the promotion the wrestler is affiliated with. The lower right has the wrestler's anglicized name, the name of the set, and in tiny little text it also lists the promotions included in the checklist: All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, JWP, LLPW, JD Star, NEO, A to Z, M's Style, GATO-ku-nyan, IWA Japan, DDT, NIGHT-MARE KAIENTAI DOJO, Shinma Office, and Free Lance wrestlers at the end of the set.

Azumi Hyuga's card also shows a cat who wasn't too interested in having its picture taken. The move to featuring wrestlers in their ring gear has eliminated some of these fun photos, like Command Bolshoi on a unicycle or wrestlers with their pets.

The card backs feature a wrestling action photo, a biographical paragraph, and some of the usual data like height, weight, blood type, birth date, debut date, and a few other things I'm not sure about. Also up at the top you can find the card number, the wrestler's name in kanji characters, and the wrestling promotion's name. Again, I tried to pick some of the more interesting pictures for these scans.

Kana is the big name in this set of scans. She is currently taking the WWE's NXT developmental division by storm, with rumors that she might soon jump up to the main WWE roster. I just thought the other photos were cool, with a phone, a horned mask, and a compact car all making guest appearances.

I thought the Rei (Ray) photo was interesting because it shows her wearing a mask differing from the style I am familiar with. The other cards were chosen for their photographs. I have some miniature blind-pack figurines that I need to show off one of these days. Ofune is one of the wrestlers in that set.

Here are a few freelance wrestlers. Jaguar Yakota, Dump Matsumoto, and Ayako Hamada are all pretty famous, and all are still actively wrestling. Sumie Sakai lives and wrestles in the US now, mostly with the Ring of Honor/Women of Honor promotion. She also tried MMA for a while, and I am not sure if she is still pursuing that. Her debut MMA bout in 2006 was in my neck of the woods at a show in Boise, Idaho.

Cards 94-99 on the checklist make up a Ladies on Film subset, which feature a few fashion-shoot styled photos and a little box on the back with some of the wrestler's characteristics in English. Cards 100-102 are the cards for wrestlers who retired in 2004. Usually the wrestlers will get a final show from their promotion, with plenty of gifts and a whole lot of streamers. The photos on these cards appear to be from those retirement shows. Finally, cards 103-108 make up a Precious Memories subset. I'm sure that I would have a better idea about what this set means if I could read the card backs. All of the wrestlers in this subset retired in 2003 or earlier, and this might be a, "Where are they now?" kind of thing.

That's my quick overview of the 2005 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling set. I am hoping to have the 2003 set pretty soon. I will have another post to go along with that one, as it marked the first time I used a buying service to purchase products from Amazon.jp and Yahoo! Auctions in Japan.

2010 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling

I picked up this set quite a while ago, like maybe in early 2015, but I never got around to posting about it. The 2010 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Pro Wrestling cards were distributed as a boxed set, with a 96-card base checklist and 3 insert cards (I believe there may have been inserts and autographs, but I am not sure). My boxed set was advertised as complete, but upon opening it I found that the three extra cards were missing. I worked out a partial refund with the seller. This top photo is a scan of the box lid.

The bottom of the box contains a checklist for the base set. This checklist is broken down by promotion, so you can see that each section has a header like JWP, LLPW, and NEO, which are all different wrestling leagues. The last portion of the checklist is made up of the freelance wrestlers who might wrestle for several different promotions in a given year. There aren't any subsets for Hall of Fame or retired wrestlers in the 2010 edition. Maybe they were included among the inserts? I don't really know.

The inside of the box lid has a few casual pictures of popular wrestlers, which for the most part I believe are taken from the backs of their cards. It also contains the set serial number, with this being box # 1542 / 3000. Later sets would move from the box set format to random pack-based distribution. The 2016 set just released and some of the cards have hit eBay already. I have been anxiously awaiting my three boxes, which left Tokyo the day I wrote this post. I am working a little ahead on my blog posts, so I will hopefully have them in-hand by the time this goes live.

I picked a few of my favorite wrestlers to show what the base cards look like. They are color-coded by promotion, so looking at the stack of cards from the side produces a nice stratified rainbow effect. Command Bolshoi is probably my favorite wrestler, which means she will probably retire soon and leave me to look for some other favorite. She is also a bodybuilder and musician, so she's got quite a bit going on.

Command Bolshoi & Makoto vs Kyoko Kimura & Hanako Nakamori

Posted by Makoto - Fan Page on Sunday, January 31, 2016

Makoto actually posted some photos of a tag team match the other day where she teamed up with Command Bolshoi to wrestle Kyoko Kimura and Hanako Nakamori. Most of the wrestlers' affiliations with a specific promotion don't necessarily tie them down from working with other promotions or making guest appearances all over the place.

While the card fronts are largely anglicized, the backs are in Japanese. You can parse out some of the biographical data pretty easily, but I haven't taken the time to try translating the blocks of text at the bottom. If I'm going to keep buying stuff from Japan I really need to take a few years to learn to navigate the language. I get by online with lots of guesswork and online translators, but there is a lot of contextual stuff that just passes me by.

I thought that Dash Chisako's shirt was interesting, as it commemorates Super Bowl XXIX between the San Diego Chargers and San Francisco 49ers. It's just an interesting choice of ring gear, especially as it is appearing in a wrestling card set released 15 years after that Super Bowl was played.

While the front of Haru Miyako's card is relatively boring, the back is anything but. I don't know why she is wearing football gear and flanked by a Sasquatch and a Yeti, but it makes for an interesting photo. Kana is now with the WWE as Asuka, which I imagine is a career path that many wrestlers hope for. Some of the other Japanese wrestlers posted photos mocking the move, stuffing their bras and strutting around like the stereotypical WWE Divas that come to mind when you mention the women's division of the WWE. There's probably a bit of jealousy there as well as a sense of betrayal.

Toshie Uematsu took her hairstyle straight out of There's Something About Mary. She and Dump Matsumoto represent earlier generations of wrestler. Someone in one of the Facebook groups was lamenting that there aren't a lot of heels in the current Japanese promotions. I think a lot of the heels from the past, like Dump Matsumoto and Toshie Uematsu have retired and no one wants to step up and fill that role. I don't know enough or watch enough matches to know if there really is a heel void that needs filled, but I think it would be hard to run a story line where everyone is a hero and no one is the villain.

That's all I scanned for the 2010 BBM True Heart Women's Pro Wrestling Set. I still have a few years that I haven't covered, as well as a few years that I don't have sets for. I'll probably be getting to 2011, 2012, and 2016 in the relatively near future. I'm still missing sets from 2000 and earlier, 2002-2005, and 2008-2009. I'll keep filling them in when I can, but the older stuff just doesn't pop up that often from sources available to the US.