This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
It is my sincere hope that once you learn a bit about what we're about here that you will join the community of contributors.
Michael Westbay
(aka westbaystars)
Founder
Bikkuriman Chocolate Home Page (in Japanese)
Here's the list of players featured from each team. There is one pitcher, and one position player (the last player on each team is the all gold colored seal, that was also featured in the 2007 edition set).
Central League
Giants: Hisanori Takahashi, Yoshinobu Takahashi, (Shinnosuke Abe)
Dragons: Kenshin Kawakami, Motonobu Tanishige, (Hitoki Iwase)
Tigers: Keiji Uezono, Makoto Imaoka, (Kyuji Fujikawa)
Baystars: Hayato Terahara, Toshihisa Nishi, (Shuichi Murata)
Carp: Kan Ohtake, Kenta Kurihara, (Katsuhiro Nagakawa)
Swallows: Hirotoshi Ishii, Shinya Miyamoto, (Norichika Aoki)
Pacific League
Fighters: Yu Darvish, Atsunori Inaba, (Hichori Morimoto)
Marines: Yoshihisa Naruse, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, (Tomoya Satozaki)
Hawks: Takahiro Mahara, Hiroki Kokubo, (Kazumi Saitoh)
Eagles: Masahiro Tanaka, Yosuke Takasu, (Takeshi Yamasaki)
Lions: Fumiya Nishiguchi, G.G. Satoh, (Hiroyuki Nakajima)
Buffaloes: Daisuke Katoh, Tuffy Rhodes, (Kazuhiro Kiyohara)
Is anybody else collecting these? I've got a full set of the 2006, and 2007 editions, so I'm going to try and get all of the 2008 as well. This year, they are also doing it a little different, by giving several lucky winners special plastic seal holder pages.
For those of you that aren't familiar with Bikkuriman Chocolate snacks, they are basically a chocolate flavored wafer cookie in the shape of a square. The only special thing is that they always come with cartoon character seals, and children love collecting them. The snacks have been around for about 30 years or so now I think, and while the snacks only cost about 80 yen now, some of the rarest seals from back in the day have been known to sell for almost $1,000 U.S.