Lotte Bikkuriman 2008 Stickers

In the last month or so, since the Jingu Bleacher Bum made a post about them on japanesebaseball.com, I have been collecting the Lotte Bikkuriman 2008 pro yakyu stickers. (Strangely, I don't have either of this year's new Lotte ones yet, though.)

Bikkuriman Chocolates are these wafer cookies with chocolate in the middle. They cost about 80 yen, and in the case of Bikkuriman Pro Yakyu, each one comes with one sticker. The stickers are REALLY cute caricatures of the players. I believe they started in 2006; each year now they make two players per team and a third "gold sticker" of a former design.

I'm going to try to keep this post updated fairly frequently with my current have-list and want-list. So here it is (updated as of August 8th).

(Edit Aug 8: I went to Ikebukuro's Mint store, they have some of these and are willing to trade either 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 depending on the player. So I traded two Nishiguchis and a Murata for a Darvish. They didn't have GG Satoh though.)

Deanna's Bikkuriman 2008 Want/Have/Trade List

Players I have a sticker of, but only one, are in black.
Players I have doubles of are in blue.
Players I want are in red. ALL I NEED IS GG SATOH! ARGH!

Giants: Hisanori Takahashi x4, Yoshinobu Takahashi, *Shinnosuke Abe x2
Dragons: Kenshin Kawakami x2, Motonobu Tanishige x4, *Hitoki Iwase
Tigers: Keiji Uezono x2, Makoto Imaoka x5, *Kyuji Fujikawa
Baystars: Hayato Terahara x3, Toshihisa Nishi x2, *Shuichi Murata x3
Carp: Kan Ohtake x2, Kenta Kurihara x5, *Katsuhiro Nagakawa x2
Swallows: Hirotoshi Ishii x3, Shinya Miyamoto, *Norichika Aoki x2

Fighters: Yu Darvish, Atsunori Inaba, *Hichori Morimoto x4
Marines: Yoshihisa Naruse, Tsuyoshi Nishioka x2, *Tomoya Satozaki x3
Hawks: Takahiro Mahara x2, Hiroki Kokubo, *Kazumi Saitoh x8
Eagles: Masahiro Tanaka x2, Yosuke Takasu x2, *Takeshi Yamasaki
Lions: Fumiya Nishiguchi x2, G.G. Satoh, *Hiroyuki Nakajima x5
Buffaloes: Tuffy Rhodes x3, Daisuke Katoh x2, *Kazuhiro Kiyohara x2

Last night when grocery shopping, I bought a few more of them (I still will only eat one per day though -- it's my new snack/junkfood bad habit, I suppose, replacing Calbee Pro Yakyu Potato Chips), and managed to take the last ones out of a box, so I asked the cashier if I could also take the empty box, since it had the artwork of all the players together. It was kind of difficult explaining why I wanted an empty box, and she was like "I do not understand why you want this empty box that should be thrown in the trash, but sure, go ahead and take it."

So here's my current collection (July 10th) plus the box. They are SO CUTE. The artwork is just amazing, both in the sense that they do a really great drawing of the players' faces, but also that the caricatures are so funny or appropriate.



If anyone happens to be collecting these, and wants to trade, let me know. I do tend to get one or two more per day, so there's a decent chance I'll collect the set on my own this month, even if it takes drastic measures like making my children students eat chocolate wafers for me (a la Willy Wonka).

Or if anyone has extras from past years I'd love to trade for some of those too...