China/Japan Postal Stationery 1940's Postmark Identification Please

Hello Community Members,

Just returned to collecting postal stationery from China & Japan after an absence of 10 years and looking through an oddments box I can across the following stationery card which I had put aside to check up on the postmark at the time.

All I know that this item was used by the Japanese in 1941-45?

You help is sought in the translation of the postmark

Many thanks for looking

It looks like a postmark but there's no date. Even the pictorial cancels had/have dates.

Thanks hy-brasil for your comments.

I have been searching the web but to date I could not find anything remotely similar, maybe its some kind of commemorative cancel ending the war in 1945?


Here is another query regarding the three kanji figures below, whats the translation?

At best I think the 1st figure reads Osaka ? ?

Hope someone out there could help?

Thanks

That one's easier. Oeyama or (properly the "O" should have a macron which doesn't display correctly here and most places), a mountain and area in Japan, in the Kyoto area. This was the location of a POW camp in World War II.

Thanks for the translation hy-brasil, it was much appreciated..

No wonder I put the above two items to one side. Looking through my folder of pending items, I think this postal stationery card came originally with the two above pieces. The only translation that I managed was the date 29th July 1944, hope this is correct?

I would very much appreciate a jist of what this postal stationery card is about. It looks as is a piece of pow mail from Japan it is rather creased and a little grubby..

Thanks

It looks like the post stationary PC38 issued in 1944. The 2013 Sakura catalog price is 80 yen.

See attached catalog page. Yours is 3sen.

Where does this POW mail idea come from? It's written in Japanese to a Japanese addressee named Komoto. The purple marking is a standard censor marking, "signed" with the red orange personal seal of the censor. The addressee is in the military (the sender might be also), accounting for the censoring.

Mail to and from POWs in the World Wars was handled by the Red Cross mostly, sometimes neutral countries. Otherwise basically no such mail would have been exchanged between warring countries.

Thanks TangStamps & hy-basil who responded to my queries

I am so grateful that you both are prepared to share your knowledge and time to answer queries, which help to point us collectors in the right direction in order to further our interest in philately - thank you.

I was only guessing that it may have been a POW mailing, it shows how one can make the wrong assumption with a little knowledge on the subject like I have...
Nevertheless this is a learning curve for me, I will need to seek out some handbooks on the web on the subject

Many thanks

Hello again list members,

This was in amongst my pending box.

Has this fragment with postmarks and orange seals any postal significance? It was found behind an old picture when I had the watercolour reframed

There are two different seals and one type of postmark repeated on thin rice paper.

Could someone help in the translation of the postmark and the orange seals.

Thanks

This looks to be a sheet to test postmark devices daily. One strike of each device is made daily. They are individually numbered by the Japanese phonetic method (bottom right character). These are devices numbered 4-6, so there should be three more rows above this.

The cancel is from Kogawa (characters above dividing line). To the left of the crease are the strikes for 8-22-1896 -- each column is a new date going from right to left. Apparently device number 6 wasn't required much so was not tested every day.

The orange markings are personal seals or in warped English, "chops". They are still used instead of or with signatures on documents, and are unique to the owner -- positive ID. So here, signatures were required to approve the device each day/blame someone if the date was set wrong. Nearest to the left of the crease are the seals of someone named Maruyama. I can't read the others.

Interesting item.

A small correction: the name of the place is probably Koga, in the old kuni of Shimotsuke.

I still can't make sense of the first character in the second seal - if it worries you, perhaps a larger scan of just that seal would do it.

Thanks hy-brasil & Tonymacg for your comments.

It was interesting to learn that the piece in question is from a post office test sheet or maybe a page out of a sort of post counter test book detailing the postmarks used on a particular day.

I wonder if many of these test sheets have survived, I assume that were probably destroyed after a certain time period?

I have enlarged the chop marks and hope the clarity is better for identification. I presume that the chop marks are by postal officials? It would be good to know the names of the two postal counter workers?




Just added a further scan of the postmarks

That obscure seal is certainly a ripper! It appears that the first, legible, seal is indeed 'Maruyama'; the second, barely legible, seal appears to read 'Ochiai'. Thanks for the blown-up version of it - without the expansion, it was simply unreadable.

I presume they were both postal officials: there is nothing more in their seals to identify them.

tonymacg is correct on the town name. I couldn't figure out the first broken character of the kuni nor the old-style character at left. My apologies.



Maybe, maybe not. The country ran and still runs on bureaucracy which could mean it could be kept somewhere for years if not forever. And the sheet probably originated from a book intended for testing. Bureaucracy again.

The seals are probably of whoever changed the dates ("I did this") and his supervisor ("He did it right"), which might be the local postmaster.

There's another seal with four characters at the bottom belonging to someone else.

Appreciate your comments, hy-brasil & Tonymacg.

Very interesting, just for completeness of the piece, I have scanned the extra seal mark that
was mentioned.




Also I have noticed some brush written lettering on a piece of paper stuck to the reverse of the sheet which may be from a document. I hope it reads the right way up? This may add a little more information about the sheet?