Sales improves slightly, but not much following his return to Japan.
On September 11, 2018, Hisashi Iwakuma announced that he would return to Japan to play baseball after spending the entire 2018 season in the Minor League Baseball (MiLB).
You'd assume that demand for his MLB trading cards would skyrocket following that announcement, but that's not the case.
Only 11 trading cards featuring Hisashi Iwakuma sold from September 11-17, 2018 (an average of 1.6 cards per day) on a popular auction website.
That's a slight improvement from the 35 cards that sold during the entire month of August 2018 (an average of 1.3 cards per day), but it's not the improvement sellers was hoping for.