Otakon is taking place this week in Baltimore. Otakon is a convention that celebrate Japanese pop culture, especially anime and manga. My youngest daughter is a big fan of many different mangas and animes and attended the convention with a friend and my wife the last two days. Funny thing happened this morning - my wife had a schedule conflict this morning and I had to deliver my daughter and her friend to the convention and pretty much hang around until my wife could meet up with them. My daughter gave me strict instructions not to wear any Japanese baseball stuff - no jerseys, no t-shirts. She was OK with me wearing my Dragons hat because she figured no one would really notice it. So of course, as soon as we got in line to get into the convention this morning, the guy in front of us turns around, looks at my hat and says "Hey, another Dragons fan". Turns out that he used to live near Nagoya and was a big Dragons fan. We spent the next ten minutes or so talking about how much we preferred Ochiai over Takagi as manager and how the entire Dragons lineup was freaking old. My poor daughter, she can't take me anywhere. I posted this story to Facebook this morning just after it happened and the story then took another humorous turn - the Dragons fan is a friend of Deanna Rubin's. It's a small world and apparently Deanna knows everyone in it... In honor of Otakon, I thought I'd show off a couple of cards that are related to anime and manga. There's lots of baseball manga out there and a couple of the characters play for professional teams. I know of at least two that have ended up having cards. There's Toru Yamada from the Dokaben who had a card in BBM's Seibu Lions 20th Anniversary set in 1999: #SL29 The main character from Abu-san, Yasutake Kageura, has actually had his uniform number retired by the Hawks. Here's his card from 1998 BBM Hawks boxed set: #FD74 (I featured this card in a Card Of The Week post a few years ago.) In 2011, the BBM 2nd Version subset for Ceremonal First Pitches included a couple of cards that were related to manga/anime. One of them featured Konan Edogaawa, the primary character from Case Closed: #721 The other was actress Suzuko Mimori, who is pictured wearing the costume of a character she does the voice for, Sherlock "Sheryl" Shellingford, in Tantei Opera Milky Holmes (at least I think that's who she's dressed as): #722