How do you read a Japanese phone card?

Japanese telephone cards were working objects, printed by the million, and they were printed to be read by machines and clerks rather than collectors. That is good news: the identification is all there, if you know the order to read it in. Start with the denomination, the large number on the face: standard NTT cards are 50 units (the ¥500 card) or 105 units (the ¥1,000 card, the extra five units a small bonus built into its face value). The denomination is part of a card's identity: the same design at a different denomination is a different card.

Next, the face: the artwork names the promotion, and the small print around it names the issuers, the publisher, toy maker, magazine or airline whose campaign produced the card, with copyright lines for Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak on Pokémon designs. Turn the card over: the back carries the magnetic stripe the phone read, usage instructions, and a printed card code, the production number by which documented checklists file individual designs (one 1998 movie card, for instance, is filed under the code PH505-0053). Finally, condition of use: cards were sold and given unused, and a phone marked the card as its units were spent, so collectors describe surviving cards first of all as unused or used.

None of this requires a database. Denomination, promotion, issuer lines, card code: four readings, all on the object, and any Pokémon teleca in hand can be placed in its year and its campaign, which is where the year-by-year page in this shelf takes over.