Japanese Revenue Stamps

That's awesome thank you for finding that!
I didn't wanna leave them with nothing beside them

As others have noted, believe both stamps are from the c 1924 Taisho series. General revenue stamps.

Series included 15 different values. Watermark B (vertical zig-zag). Perforation: 13 x 13.5.

Believe the purple stamp is the 3 sen value. Barefoot 85.

Green stamp could be either the 2 sen or 10 sen value. Will need a Japan expert to differentiate/confirm.

Thank you so much for the help!
temporary label added beside the 3 sen
(I'll get around to printing something out)

I'm afraid I haven't been following the discussion closely enough to determine which Shimomura number it is, but the denomination of the green stamp is 10 sen.

Thank you, Philatarium. Was hoping you would "chime in".

In that case the green stamp is Barefoot #87.

Thank you!!

Philatarium...

Do you know the significance (if any) of the small holes on the lower value stamp?

Believe a single, larger diameter hole signifies Telegraph "service". Correct?

A lot of the numeral kanji in Japanese have been simplified over time, and I often have to double-check a reference source to make sure before I make a determination for an older style one, which these are. (I had to double-check the 10 on the green stamp, since I wanted to make sure I was correct. ... If I work with a lot of older material at the same time, I can "reload" those kanji in my memory, but, unfortunately, they only seems to load into short-term memory and then fade away again very quickly.)

So, I just went looking online now for a reference that we all might use, for any so inclined. This is the handiest chart I could readily find. I took a screenshot of it so that it would show correctly here.



It's from this Wikipedia page, if you'd like to dig deeper:

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

Calstamp, I honestly don't know the answer to your question about the significance of the punches, other than, I assume, a form of cancellation (unless it looks like a perfin), and don't even think I know enough to speculate. Someday I hope to understand this area better ...

So, just to clarify for anyone not too familiar with this area, generally speaking, stamps (and documents) issued before the end of World War 2 usually read from right to left for horizontally-placed text. After the end of WW2, as a part of the Occupation period, one of the language reforms was to switch the horizontal reading to left to right. Vertically-placed text always (at least, I can't think of any exceptions) reads from top to bottom.

If one can learn to recognize the characters for "Japan", then that's usually all the info you need to determine which direction the writing reads.

In these 2 examples, since the numbers read from top to bottom, it doesn't add an additional layer of confusion.

If you look back at the image Rodney posted of the 8 values, you'll see that some of them have the denomination in the middle and go from top to bottom. But others have the denomination at the bottom, and those read from right to left.

Guess...something to do with food rations?
NinMae-Shina-ka

im certain I read something about the cancellation also acting like a hole punch?
I also think it's in English?

Just_fella, I think it's just a general revenue stamp. It paid some kind of government fee. There are types of revenue stamps that paid a specific tax (like tobacco), but I think this is just a general revenue type.

Calstamp or Rodney might know more about this ...

thank you so much for taking the time to help!

You bet!

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