My 2,000th Postcrossing arrival

Here's Mama Orange posing with the "Happy Mother's Day" Postcrossing postcard that represents the 2,000th arrival in my mailbox since I joined in December 2012. On average, I've sent and received 13 postcards per month since I started this hobby 12½ years ago to have fun and help keep snail mail alive. 

According to my Postcrossing statistics, I've engaged with 83 different countries while either sending or receiving cards. Germany is the No. 1 country in both categories, with 451 sent and 434 received. Russia is still No. 2 in both categories, even though I haven't been able to send postcards to Russia since the U.S. Postal Service suspended service to that country in March 2022. The Netherlands is No. 3 in both categories.

And it's from the Netherlands that I "met" Marte, one of the many pen-pal relationships I've developed through Postcrossing over the past decade. We still exchange postcards about once per week. I've also had pen pals from Ukraine, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and Mexico, among other countries.

The 2,000th arrival is from Mia in Taiwan, who's been on Postcrossing since 2017. She enjoys map cards and lighthouse cards, and writes on this Hibeetle postcard that plum rain season has arrived in Taiwan and is very welcome. I learn something with almost every postcard! Here in Arizona, we're awaiting monsoon season. Maybe it will come early, maybe it will be right on time. Either way, we will happily welcome the rains.

Snapshots of post-WWII Japan from a photo album

The Papergreat archives are full of hundreds of vintage vernacular photos and real photo postcards. They're snapshots from a fleeting moment of time decades ago, or perhaps even more than a century ago. I love looking at the faces and the scenery, and thinking about what was going on in those people's minds. What had their life been like up to that point? What was it like afterward? Sometimes you can make guesses based on what you see etched in their faces, but they're only guesses.

Today's photos are all from a 20th century photo album from Japan. I don't know anything about it beyond these photos, though being able to read Japanese might have helped. My guess is that most of these photos are from the 1950s and 1960s, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Several of the photos feature Japanese baseball teams; baseball had been popular in Japan since the 1870s and grew even more popular there after World War II.

All of these photos, including the one above, feature great faces. The kind of faces you could guess about for hours...