Pictorial Postmarks: Worldwide

A few Japanese pictorial postmarks I obtained for my Ukraine project:

(1)



This sunflower postmark was from a post office located in a shopping mall called 'エミフル MASAKI (Emifull Masaki)' in the town Masaki of the Ehime Prefecture.

(2), (3)





These 'Autumn's Greetings' (秋のグリーティング) postmarks were obtained in Yokohama City of the Kanagawa Prefecture. Notice the bird symbol in the cancel. It's in fact a dove that only appears on the first day postmarks (i.e. 24 August was the first day these pictorial postmarks were available). The dove might have represented Japan Post or postal agency or something else. It's not exactly known why a dove, but I find it a nice coincidence with the dove representing peace in Western arts.

(4) 



This is a pictorial postmark that illustrates Yushima Tenmangu, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. 

Japan Post offers a lots of pictorial cancellations for collectors. This webpage shows many of them although it's not necessarily up to date.

Beautiful, Linda!!

Perfect placement of this humorous postmark! Made me laugh 😆

I happened on this one in a bourse. I don't collect any of the Pacific Islands and my pictorial-cover accumulation is as haphazard as I can make it, but this one from the Marshalls caught my eye.



Am I being overly sensitive or is this cachet seriously strange?

I honestly didn't know that International Pancake Day was a thing.

The bicentennial of Herkimer County, New York, whose southern part is between Albany and Utica, but its northern part reaches well into the Adirondacks.



Van Hornesville, noted on this sprightly, extroverted commemorative cancellation, is tucked way into the southeastern corner. It would probably take three hours to drive to the northern border of Herkimer County, except I don't think there are any roads that go that far north. Besides Van Hornesville, Herkimer has villages named Russia, Norway, Poland, and Ohio.

The postcard that somebody chose for this cancellation is fitting for the bucolic nature of much of Upstate. However, I don't associate the area with buffaloes - the mammals, I mean, not the city.

I normally don't pick up Cook Islands philatelic materials, but this is a nice pair (covers) or quartet (stamps).

The Cook Islands were relevant to the Apollo 17 mission! I don't know if the capsule landed in Cook Islands waters (even NASA is vague, and I couldn't find geographical coordinates), but if it didn't it was close: between the Cook Islands and Samoa. (It also landed a mere 4 miles - 6.4 km - from the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, which was there waiting for it. The precision of some of these missions in space just leaves me dumbfounded with awe.)



Apollo 17's flight commander, Gene Cernan, later wrote an autobiography titled Last Man on the Moon, which he was, so far.

Goose Day.



This is one of the happiest commemorative cancellations I've ever gotten. Because why not Goose Day?

It came back to me in a business-size envelope with the same awesome postmark - though of somewhat lesser quality. If you want it, message me and I'll send it to you.

Here's one from Iraq.



Al-Kindi was a fascinating character. He translated a number of the Greek philosophical classics into Arabic and kept up a running commentary on the metaphysics expressed by Aristotle. If your interests turn to that sort of thing, you can check out more about Al-Kindi at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

When attacked for importing ideas from "foreigners", he wrote back:

We must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples, there is for the student of truth nothing more important than the truth, nor is the truth demeaned or diminished by the one who states or conveys it; no one is demeaned by the truth, rather all are ennobled by it.

You can't really put it better than that.

It's a cool cover. This is the type of thing it's excellent to find in the buck bins at stamp shows.

(On edit: I just realized that the postmark here isn't pictorial; I put my .jpg in the wrong folder. I'd like to leave it here and will endeavor to be less spaced out in the future.)

This arrived in today's mail, and my cover collection is instantly improved a thousand-fold (if not more), on the scale of how many geese it contains. Thanks eggdog!

Early in this century, Germany extinguished its venerable and honorable tradition of place-name postmarks and moved to the Briefzentrum system, which is the philatelic equivalent of Communist apartment buildings: cold, gray, and faceless. But at least a few Briefzentrums (Briefzentra?) are having a good time with it.



It's a Battle of the Briefs! (Actually a Battle of the Zentrums, but that isn't as much fun to say.)

Here are a couple of pictorial cancels I have collected during my journey across Japan:

(1) 浦上天主堂 (Nagasaki City)



(2) Peace Monument (Nagasaki City)



(3) 大浦天主堂 (Nagasaki City)



(4) (Obihiro)