Japanese Cinderella ID - “Sympathy Week” 1930s charity event

I tried Google image search and didn’t find anything remotely similar. Any ideas?

Philatarium, do you have any insight here? I believe the Chinese characters are as follows: 同情週閒. The same characters are written vertically on both stamps even though writing styles are different. Google translate recognizes the language as Chinese and gives me a Chinese language translation into English of "Sympathy for Zhou Xian". This is potentially a nonsensical translation,especially if I got the characters wrong. So, the implication is that it is not recognizing this as Japanese language use of Kanji or Korean language use of Hanja.

My gut says these are Chinese cinderellas but from Taiwan rather than mainland China or PRC. Others may have better insight than I.

I just posted somewhere else, and have already gotten a reply from someone I would consider authoritative.

Here is his reply:

They appear to be Japanese cinderellas for "Sympathy Week". This was a charity movement that I think began during the early Showa era (late 1920's - early 1930's), so I suspect these would date from that period.

I can see my mistake with Google translate was to string all the characters together in a line rather than separating them as noted above. Regardless, I don't think Google translate would have correctly identified them though it did get the "sympathy" part correct.

I have found the Japanese people to be the best behaved in the world.

Beryllium Guy , my process for this was not limited to Google but I did not break the string of characters up in Google translate when I searched as Japanese rather than Chinese. My first step was to determine which characters were on the stamps. I only knew one of them, 閒 (mun in Korean) so I used the Naver Chinese Character dictionary draw feature, hanja.dict.naver.com/#/main, to draw the characters and determine what characters I was dealing with. This way I had a correct character to copy and paste into other websites in order to determine meaning. I use Naver because it is what I am familiar with...I have it on my phone and on my laptop for Korean language learning.

After determining the characters I went to the Japanese Kanji Dictionary website, en.ikanji.jp/ and I tried various characters and was actually able to come up with sympathy and week but I could not come up with anything that was able to give me a coherent meaning to the whole set of characters and I am not familiar enough with Japanese to use it correctly, most likely.

I went back to Google translate at that point and could only get a somewhat correct translation in Chinese even after breaking it up into blocks of 2 characters which I thought might be the better way of handling the translate feature. I tried this in Japanese too but I did not even attempt to break it up into separate blocks of 2 characters which is why I went with Chinese as a possible base language. At least one of the characters I put into the kanji dictionary was not recognized which also led me astray so I went with my gut and thought maybe it was Chinese rather than Japanese.

Dave, (Philatarium ) my thinking was that if I was able to get the correct set of characters, which it looks like I did, I would use them in doing a simple google search in the search bar and then look at the images that came up hoping that somewhere along the line an image of either this set of cinderellas or similar had been posted. I did this, several times, and looked through pages of images but nothing...I also went to eBay and looked at Japanese and Chinese cinderellas but again, nothing, though, in hindsight I should have also looked at sold listings but no matter. I did this before I even knew the meaning of any of the characters.

In the end Dave, the best thing to do was what you did and go right to those knowledgeable about Japanese philately on the FB group.

Yes, I am pretty sure Taiwan has kept mostly old style characters as has Korea

If you are referring to the drawing tool, I am pretty sure there are a number of websites available that have that type of character recognition by using your mouse to draw the character on a digital pad. I actually tried a Chinese site for a minute but went back to Korean Naver just because it was easier to use and I understood what I was looking at. The kanji site was a random find and I did not explore it in depth but it might also have this drawing tool feature.