Japanese Datestamp On Doolittle Cover

I'm trying to "interpret" the "4, 4, 18" in the Japanese cancel on the following cover:



The date is supposed to be the 50th anniversary of the April 18, 1942 Doolittle raid. So April is the 4th month, but how is the year indicated in this datestamp?

Most Japanese date stamps which use Japanese characters in them (as opposed to Roman-letter cancels) use this methodology:

Regnal year . month . day

So the first "4" in this case is for Heisei 4, or 1992. The regnal year counts as 1 in the year when a particular emperor ascended the throne. In this case, that's the current emperor, Akihito, whose reign is called "Heisei". He became emperor in 1989, when Hirohito (the "Showa" emperor) died.

So, in regnal years, 1989 is both Heisei 4 and Showa 64 (since Hirohito was long-lived).

Hope that's helpful!

To elaborate a little bit more, that means that, without context, the regnal date is ambiguous.

For example, without knowing anything other than those digits "4.4.18", it could have been Heisei 4, April 18th, but it also could have been, working backwards from the current emperor, Showa 4 (1929), Taisho 4 (1915), or Meiji 4 (1871). (I'll stop there, since the first Japanese stamps appeared in 1871.)

Clear as mud, huh? :-)

Thanks for the quick response. That is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for!

Basil

This is a weird cover. Were I Japanese, I don't think I'd care to cancel it.

Glad to be able to help out!

By the way, that is a commemorative cancel from the Japanese Diet (Parliament Bldg) in Tokyo. (Not sure if there is some intended irony in that or not, following on KGB's comment.)

I'm wondering if the covers were blank when the Japanese cancel was applied. The date of the Japanese cancel is several months prior to the date of the US cancel. Knowing that a second WWII commemorative minisheet of 10 stamps was coming, it probably wasn't a stretch to expect one of them to commemorate Doolittle's Raid, so blank covers were used to get a Japanese cancel on the date of the actual anniversary of the raid. That's just a guess. But given the flap three years later over the Hiroshima stamp, I'm not sure that the Japanese would have knowingly done a "joint release" commemorating Doolittle's bombing of Tokyo!

b, I think you've got it!

Today Jimmy Doolittle is perhaps best known for his leading a flight of 16 stripped down B-25 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet in 1942 on a bombing raid of Japan. The raid itself caused very little damage and all of the bombers were lost since they could not land on an aircraft carrier. Most of the pilots and their fourman skeleton flight crews did eventually make it back home. The substantive impact of the raid was to boost US civilian morale since Pearl Harbor happened less than a year earlier and the US was not well prepared for a war with Japan then.

Back in the day, I think that Jimmy Doolittle was best known for his many first flights and his National Air Races experieneces. In the 1920s and 1930s famous pilots like Jimmy were the rock stars among the public. Just one example of Jimmy Dootlittle's first flights is the below example from my collection. In 1928 Jimmy was the chief pilot for Curtiss Aircraft and to promote his company's sales he went to five South American countries and flew experimental flights. The cover below is one of the 800 that he flew on his flight from Peru to Bolivia. This example is one of a handful that he also autographed for VIPs. The other four countries for which he flew experimental flights this year were Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay.

Kimo, very neat!

By the way, one of the aircraft landed in Russia.

Kimo,

I have a Doolittle autograph on a VJ Day cover. I once won a Doolittle signed cover from the racing era at a Mccusker auction, but they "lost" it (it never arrived, and they could never determine if they'd even sent it). Here are two pages on Doolittle from an exhibit I'm working on:




It is an exhibit about Hap Arnold, not Doolittle. But Arnold knew Doolittle so I wanted a page or two on Doolittle for the exhibit. The first time Arnold and Doolittle crossed paths was at a air show in which Arnold grounded Doolittle for flying dangerously over the crowd.

Basil

Edit: Yes, I know, I have the year wrong on the two VJ Day covers! I'm fixing that now.

Here is a cover from my National Air Races collection that includes Jimmy Doolittle's autograph along with autographs of some of the other really big names in aviation at the time. This one is from the 1931 National Air Races which were held at Cleveland. The person who prepared this cover at the Air Races then was able to get 7 of the air racing pilots to sign this cover before he mailed it on September 1, 1931. In addition to Jimmy Doolittle who won the Bendix Trophy that year, this included Lowell Bayles who won the Thompson Trophy in his Gee Bee racer in the 1931 National Air Races but tragically just a couple of months later, on December 5, he died in a crash of his Gee Bee trying to set a new speed record. It also included Vernon Roberts who came in 4th flying his Monocoupe aircraft in the 275 cubic inch engine free for all race. John Livingston who entered 12 of the races and won first place in 7 and came in second in 2 more. Jimmy Haizlip, who was a former partner of Jimmy Doolittle and who did not win any of the races in 1931but he did go on at the 1932 National Air Races to beat Jimmy Doolittle and take first place in the Bendix Trophy. Tex Rankin who was one of the most famous aerobatic pilots and his record for outside loops has never been broken, and Dorothy Hester who at just 19 years of age was one of the handful of women air racing pilots along with greats such as Amelia Earhart and who was the first ever female stunt pilot to to be invited to fly at a National Air Races which happened in 1931 when she signed this cover

And while it is not a stamp or cover, I also have hanging in my den a copy of the William Phillips limited print that came out in 1982, "Inbound, the Giant Begins to Stir" which is a not only a great painting by Phillips depicting the 1942 Doolittle raid but it is especially cool in that it is autographed not only by Jimmy Doolittle himself, but also the pilots or other senior officers of each of the other 15 B-25 bombers that flew on that raid. Of course they have all passed away by now, but the print is really well done and having their actual autographs all together on this print is humbling.