The Rare Japanese Tama 6yo Stamp?

Hi Guys, no Japanese stamp expert here. Just need a confirmation if this is the rare stamp in question...

This gives an idea of the value we are talking about...

https://www.paulfrasercollectibles....-postiljonen

pennyblackie, for this one we'll definitely need a scan. You probably know these stamps have been so extensively forged it's not funny. If memory serves I'm sure I read somewhere that 9 out of every 10 examples out there are forgeries.

Half a million dollar stamp, comes with crappy scans.
Seems a common occurence. The old David Copperfield Illusion trick.

Was reading on another forum, a $30,000 West Australian 2d Violet just purchased off Delcampe for 5 Euros.
Supported by a beautiful scan.
Exciting things can happen.

There are currently 6,184,974 stamps listed on ebay USA. If I buy all 6.1 million of these stamps, how many would result in an exciting thing?

Don

Another KUT clone

Don,
depends on experience, a newby collector starting today...probably 6.1 million.
An old Philatelic hound as yourself... 300 ? 3000 ?

With the WA example, I was certainly excited, only 6 previously known.
I felt happy for the purchaser, for the vendor, goodness knows what he/she is feeling, ...if they even know.
I would have missed it, and it's even shown (in blurry form) on my Specialists West Australian Catalogue.

pennyblackie: It's not the overall design of the stamp that makes that one stamp rare. Rather, it would depend on a tiny little character near the center bottom of the stamp. That little character is called a "syllabic".

The rare stamp has the katakana character of "yo", which looks pretty much like a backwards "E". It's extremely unlikely that the image you've shown has it. Not only is that scan not high-resolution enough to evaluate it, but there's also a cancellation obliterating that part of the stamp.

From the link you provided to the rare stamp, I've circled where the character is located. Only the "yo" character (called syllabic #15 in stamp catalogs) is rare for this stamp.



Here's a chart of the Japanese katakana. The "yo" character is in the far-right column, third from the bottom.

Nice work Philatarium,
further reading

https://goscf.com/t/53225

Thanks, Rodney!


Here is the actual chart from a recent Scott catalog of the syllabics along with their reference numbers, which is the way they're referred to in the Scott catalog listings.

I'm not sure how universal those numbers are, but these are the same numbers used in the Japanese Sakura catalog (and I would imagine in the Japanese JSCA specialized catalog, which I don't have handy at the moment).

Just to clarify, this stamp belongs to part of a huge world lot that I intend to bid. The stamp was zoomed in from a larger page filled with old Japanese stamps, explaining the low res. It is part of an entire page of old Japanese stamps which have been neatly mounted with other different values as well. The album looks like it has been untouched in a long time.

The numerical sequence corresponds to the "iroha" ordering of the kana, which is based on a poem that employed all the characters of the Japanese syllabary and used each one only once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha

Side note: When I was in Japan in 2011, I saw a performance by a rock band called Chirinuru Wowaka. That's kana #8-14 in the chart shown above.

Thanks, Erilaz! I was aware they were in iroha order (I thought it was perhaps too technical to bring that up here, but I'm glad you did), but I wasn't sure that all stamp catalog publishers honored that sequence in their numbering.

However, I didn't realize that the order was based on an ancient poem. Many thanks for that little lesson!

I would love to see a better scan of this stamp to make out the syllibic character, but it would be foolish to single out one stamp in the whole lot of thousands of stamps to ask the seller.

Philatarium, thanks for the info on the syllabic numbers. Assuming the syllabic number isn't a yo and it is some other number, what would be the range in terms of value?

Pennyblackie, the 2018 Scott catalog value for a very fine (vf) used example ranges from $25.00 to $55.00, depending on the syllabic.

Again, that's in vf condition. I can't tell a lot about the condition of this one from the scan, other than it seems to be reasonably well-centered, but the condition of the back would also factor into it.

But please bear in mind that the stamps in this definitive series have been forged, sometimes expertly. It's not as extensive with this series as it is with even earlier definitive sets, but they're there.