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.
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.
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.
I've had these four cards on my want list for a long time, but they were only available from a wrestling shop in Japan with relatively high prices to go along with a big shipping fee. The shop is called Toudoukan, and it carries a lot of cool wrestling and martial arts stuff. Their English functionality is pretty limited, though, especially when it comes to using the search tools on the site. I usually have to find the kanji characters for what I'm trying to find, search using them, and then look through the pictures. I have a pretty long Wish List saved up there, even after purchasing these four cards that were at the top of my 'needs.'
I've been working on collecting the full timeline of Command Bolshoi autographs, and 2008 was a year I didn't have. This card is numbered # 01 / 30. I'm not sure why the 2008 print run is so low compared to other years. In 2009 the print run went up to # / 49, then # / 50 in 2010 and the print runs in 2011 and later have been near # / 100. I don't know if print runs have actually increased, because these days you get more hits per box than you did in previous sets. I don't have any history from prior to 2008 outside of a print run of # / 117 in 2003. It would be interesting to see what 2004-2007 looked like.
I have a few of these Cheki (why are they called that?) wrestling photos already, but I hadn't yet grabbed one featuring Command Bolshoi. Now I've got one! This one comes from the 2012 set, and is numbered # 5 / 7. Obviously since these are actual instant camera photos with stickers slapped onto them, you could call them # 1 / 1 cards, but even a print run of # / 7 is pretty rare.
These two autograph cards come from the 2013 set. One is an alter-ego of Command Bolshoi, which I believe is a uniform she wears when guest wrestling with Osaka Joshi-Pro. I'm not 100% sure of the connection between the wrestlers on the quadrograph card. About all I can find is a 4-way match they all participated in at the JWP Kayoko Haruyama 15th Anniversary Show on January 27th, 2013. I think these sets usually get released around January, though, so this might be cutting it too close as a connection that could realistically make it into the 2013 card set. They also all are relatively young wrestlers who started their careers with JWP in 2011 or 2012. I have to wonder if that caption in the middle of the card explains what this is all about. Counter-clockwise from the upper left, the wrestlers pictured are Rydeen Hagane, Manami Katsu, Nana Kawasa, and Rabbit Miu.
The Bolshoi autograph is # 021 / 100 and the quadrograph is # 90 / 99. Along with several other wrestlers I like, Command Bolshoi is actually going to be wrestling in the United States on Labor Day weekend at the Chikara Pro King of Trios event in Easton, PA. That's a bit of a trip for me, so I'll have to miss it. It sure looks like a good time, though.
