April-December 1977, Vol. 3, No.s 2-4 - International Philippine ...

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1 may take the liberty at the outset of correcting, and adding to the explanations of the Japanese inscoptions,
deficiently reproduced in Fig. 1 of the article, on fieklf,0st. The four large characters in the upper
left (1) stand for Gunji Yubin, precisely translated "Military Mail '; there are no characters denoting "Free".
They would have been superfluous because since the Russo-Japanese War (l904..QS) all gunji yubin posted
by soldiery in the field were conveyed postage free. (2) Yubin hagaki, "postal card" is conect. (3) the three
characters above the square mean ken-etsu zumi, "passed by censor"; into the square beneath, the censor
placed his personal name seal, and not the sender.
The characters "gunji yubin", military mail, on any postal cards or letters did not render them in any
way official. Anybody could place those characters on practically anything, and there was no law preventing
him from doing so. In fact, the vast array of military postal stationery, as it was employed in innumerable
varieties by millions of Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War, they were an privately produced. There was
not a single such "official" fieldpost stationery released by the Japanese Communication Ministry.
Therefore, nobody was breaking a law even in Manila when he ovetprinted, or handstamped, wah
"gunji yubin", for instance a bundle of Philippine pictwe viewcards. But the practice did naturally not render
them in any way "official".
The cards here presented appear to be of that type. It may well be that somebody perhaps in Mamla.
imprinted with Japanese inscriptions ordinary viewcards, produced somewhere locally in the Philippines, in
an effort to render them "more interesting for use fU FOes of Philippine occupation stamps. And this conviction
must stand until such a card is encountered which was factually conveyed as military mail to the
mainland Japan. It would have to bear the censor's chop, an indication of a Japanese military unit stationed
in the Philippines, the name of the soldier who dispatched the card, and an address in Japan. But frankly, I
am pretty certain that such a card does not not exist!
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