Japan: Stamps

Rod:  I'm just catching up to you on this post, but I thought you might be interested in knowing that there is a folder that accompanies this souvenir sheet.

• exterior of folder:
  

• interior of folder:
  

You can right click on the images and select "view image" to view it at a larger size.  But I'll also post individual scans of each "page" below.

Someday I hope to have a website that documents all this ancillary material.  (I have most of the folders for the National Park souvenir sheets, among other stuff like this.)

-- Dave

Hello Dave, the image is still there.
You may have broadband problems?

The write up would be a mish mash of info, part Forbin, and possibly, a Japanese Specialist on SCF?
However, if I get information from a forum member, I (usually) broadcast it on my album sheets.
Thanks anyhows. 

Japan
Revenues
Naikoku Transport 1889



Revenues : 1948

Japan Sakura catalogue 2010

Lovely free gift from Moderator Steve.  (Thanks Steve)
CV $10





Japan
The Chrysanthemum Crest of the Imperial Family
(On Genuine Postage Stamps [16 petals] from 1876)
Used from Antiquity, prized as a herb for longevity, called “nissei” = Spirit of the Sun.
1871 the Chrysanthemum was adopted as the Imperial Family Crest.
Paulownia flowers and leaves were chosen for the Emperor’s robes, and later
adopted as a Crest of the Imperial family.
(see stamps of 1872)


wiki:
The genus, originally Pavlovnia but now usually spelled Paulownia, was named in honour of Anna Paulowna queen consort of The Netherlands (1795–1865),
daughter of Tsar Paul I of Russia. It is also called "princess tree" for the same reason.

1949
Inuyama Children's Exhibition  "Boy"
Sc# 456a

Imperforate Stamp cut from Souvenir Sheet

Full Souvenir Sheet $350 / $275  2009

Tax Receipt Revenue   1948 Onwards         Shunyu Inshi

Cancelled 1968
20 Yen Green

1909
General Revenues.

Checks:  1909 are unwatermarked, 1915 (similar) are Wmkd.
Note: different Burelage overprint colours, Azure, Yellow and Violet on subsequent values.
Cancellation dots are also pin punctures, rending the stamp unusable again.

Thanks to Mr. Unechan, Osaka,  Japan for ID.  (Other values than shown in Forbin, are "shape changers" , name borrowed from "Monkey Magic" )  

Japan 2008
150th Anniversary of the Iron and Steel Industry



Not much to say about this set, except that I think they are the very first stamps that I bought as a set when I decided to start collecting.

First of all, I want to salute Bombadil for this post among his many others!  Jad, with the high quality of so many of your posts, you come across as a much more experienced collector than what the calendar might suggest that you are.  Well done to you, my friend!  I know very well that this 25th Wedding Anniversary issue is not so easy to find well centered, so this is a very nice copy.

As I have travelled many times to Japan over the years, and have found a couple of good dealers there, it has become one of my favorite countries from which to collect classic stamps.  So, thanks to you and more recently to my personal meeting with Dave (Philatarium ) in June, my interest in doing something with my classic stamps of Japan has been rekindled.  So, here goes.

Back in 2013-2014, together with a good friend, I bought a collection of classic material from a dealer at a stamp show in Ohio.  We paid 5-10% of catalogue value for the group of classic stamps, most of which were pre-1900.  We knew that there were condition problems with some of the stamps, as well as questions about the authenticity of others, but overall, it still seemed like a reasonable deal, so went through with it, and then catalogued all the stamps and divided them up as evenly as we could.

As things worked out, I ended up with these three early stamps from Japan.  I have never checked them for authenticity, and would welcome any comments.  The catalogue numbers were determined by my friend, and I have only briefly checked his identification, which seems at least generally correct.

For all I know, all three of these could be worthless forgeries.  #5b is certainly repaired in the upper left corner.  I do not have the stamps with me at the moment.  I scanned them after meeting Dave in June in California, when he encouraged me to post some images of these stamps.

So, to all of you Japanophiles out there (Philatarium , seigaku , butterfly , etc.), or those enthusiasts in classic stamps and/or skilled in telling genuine from forgery (@falshung , jkjblue , classicalstamps , etc.) or anyone else, let me know your thoughts on these....


Japan, Scott #1


Japan, Scott #5b


Japan, Scott #7a

I recommend buying the Forgery CD from ISJP. It's a goldmine of information. I've posted a few screenshots here:
stampforgeries.com/forged-stamps-of-japan/

ISJP:
www.isjp.org/forgery-cd

Nelson and Morten (classicalstamps), thank you very much for your excellent responses.  I will look for the cited CD when I get home.  I may have actually received a copy of it years ago.  It is probably buried somewhere amongst my stuff.  I will have a look over year-end holidays.

Sorry about the quality of the scans.  These are 600dpi which I did in California last month, but when I cropped these for posting, I saw that they were small enough in size that I could have done these at 1200dpi.  I am always trying to stay below the 1MB size per image file, and for larger stamps, this is a problem.  I will give it another try in December.

In the meantime, thanks for at least giving me hope that these may not be forgeries after all.  I won't get my hopes up too much, as I suspect that the dealer would not have let them go so cheaply if he had really thought that they were genuine.

Thanks for posting these, Chris!

Do you by any chance have your original scans? If so, you could always email them to me (or I can arrange a way for you to upload them to my Google Drive space if they're each more than 25mb). Some of the artifacts from the image (I'm not sure if it's just from compression or if jpgs have been edited) make it hard to make out some of the details.

(Otherwise, please definitely do them at 1200 dpi when you're back here. And I can always host an image larger than 1mb which could still be posted here (unless there's a prohibition against that on this site?). I do also have the full version of Photoshop, which has some tools in it that help with image compression without (too) much degradation of image quality.)

Although the numbers vary, some of the people I know who know this area well say that forgeries outnumber genuine examples by as much as a factor of 10, if not more, perhaps even 100:1.  So no one should be offended or surprised that they have forgeries of early Japan. 

I will make one somewhat perhaps nuanced comment about the ISJP forgery cd.  It is excellent.  But its purpose was to identify all the known forgeries of the Dragon, Cherry Blossom ("Sakura") and Koban issues, which it does outstandingly.  But it's also not exactly a guide to how to distinguish between genuines and forgeries (although the disc does address this a little bit).   Nevertheless, it's an essential tool in the toolkit for these earlies. 

Note that the 2nd edition is significantly updated from the 1st, and is the one worth spending time with, imo.  They haven't issued a 3rd edition (and I'm not sure they will), but they do post corrections and additions to it on their website:

www.isjp.org/CD-Corrections
www.isjp.org/CD-Additions

They've also added quite a bit of introductory explanatory information on their website, and it's not a bad first lesson on identifying the easy forgeries (especially those with the tiny little printing that says some variation of "forgery").  Once one learns those tricks, it's relatively easy to rule out a fair number of stamps as forgeries right out of the box.

www.isjp.org/ForgeryGroup

Some of the nitty-gritty starts from this page:

www.isjp.org/Forgeries