Category: Stamps

Postcards From Japan

February 23, 2025

All told I sent us 36 postcards from Japan, and the reason I’ve waited on this post is that six of them have yet to arrive. I haven’t given up hope since after my last trip a handful of cards took three months to find their way here but I don’t want to wait that long so let’s review a selection of the ones that have arrived today.

Fuji postcards are very common, and it’s extremely likely I’ve sent you one or more over the years. The image of the Shinkansen speeding in front of Fuji is iconic, and I’ve bought and sent many cards depicting this over the years. The bottom left card is one of several 1950s-era Japanese postcards I obtained at a postcard show last summer, and you’ll see several more of them in this post.

Geisha are iconically Japanese, but aren’t exactly common. And yet they still print postcards of them, which I usually buy since they’re colourful and pretty! We saw a geisha in the wild many years ago in Kyoto. She boarded a bus in full makeup and dress, and it was obvious she was a curio even for the locals. The leftmost card shows a ropeway in Hokkaido, and I should have saved it for a future trip…

The graphic Nagoya postcards were found at a post office, which was a relief since I’d had difficulty finding other postcards in that city. The one on the bottom right came from the zoo we visited, and the bottom left one was found packed with a VHS tape in my attic during a recent cleanout. It’s over 30 years old, very flimsy, and I’m surprised it survived the mail 🙂

Every day I sent us two cards, and as usual the messages were usually a general description of what we did that day on one, and some specific incident or event on the second (like what we ate or bought). This may seem mundane, but after doing this for almost two decades it’s fun going back and reading these tiny diaries.

The bottom left one came from the Alice in Wonderland shop in Nagoya with the tiny door we had to squat down to enter. It’s a lovely card and I should have bought more of their unique designs. Postcards are still very popular in Japan and it’s not hard to find good ones, which is why I was puzzled at the apparent lack in Nagoya.

These were purchased from a tiny store in Asakusa that sold mostly photos of celebrities from decades ago. This is a weird type of Japanese shop that doesn’t have a real western equivalent (maybe I’ll blog about one some time) but I was happy and surprised to see they had a small but incredible variety of (dated) pop culture cards as well!

I sent us two lenticular cards, and the Christmas one in the middle is one of them. Sent on Christmas Day, this described the fun we had shopping the otaku shopping district (Osu) in Nagoya. On the right is our new years card. I sent 14 new years cards on January 1, in four designs. Most depicted cute snakes, but as you can see ours didn’t 🙂

As I understand, you’re not technically allowed to mail shaped postcards in Japan. And yet they print them, and I’ve sent many over the years and they all arrive. Gotochi cards (special souvenir postcards sold at post offices) are shaped as well, and I’ve now sent myself two over the years and neither have arrived. I wonder what’s special about gotochi cards that prevent them from being mailed internationally? (The above card isn’t a gotochi, but was purchased from a popup shop showcasing work by the artist.)

Here’s the other lenticular I sent us. It’s massive: easily one of it not the largest card I’ve ever mailed. It’s more than twice as large as a normal postcard, and I put a bunch of extra postage on it just in case. I was very surprised it arrived, and it’s given me the idea of mailing an even bigger – as big as an A4 page! – Japanese lenticular card that I bought years ago.

As for the six that haven’t arrived, I don’t remember what they depicted or what I wrote on them. I number my cards so I can extrapolate when and where I sent them (Nagoya and Tokyo) but can’t speculate why they never arrived when others mailed the same day in the same mailbox did.

And as for the stamps, here are all the unique ones on the cards I mailed us:

Some good stamps here, but I discovered something interesting at the very tail end of the trip so I think the stamps I send from Japan next time will be a lot more interesting…

All these cards are now put into the big binder titled ‘Japan’, which is so full I think I need to start another. And if you’re wondering, yes I left space for the missing six 🙂

Cat Stamps

August 24, 2024

The other day I received a package from Sue containing over 100 cat stamps! I don’t know the details, but I believe she purchased them from an elderly man selling off his collection. She knew I’d blog these once received, and who am I to disappoint!

Before I begin a brief review: a ‘Cinderella’ is a stamp printed solely for philately, and never intended to be used for postage. These are rarely issued by a government entity; more often made by merchants to profiteer from collectors. Some of these stamps are official in the sense the printer obtains a contract from a country (who receives a portion of sales) but there are also a great deal of fake – illegal if you will – Cinderellas, and it can be difficult even for experts to determine which ones were legitimate and which fake. Some people despise Cinderellas as fake collectibles, but they have their place in philately especially for new collectors, and are still printed and issued today.

As you’ll see many – most? – of these stamps are Cinderellas. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth perusal. So let me put my detective hat on and start investigating…

All five of the above are ‘illegal’ Cinderellas. The ‘State of Oman’ stamp was part of a series printed by a London ~~forger~~ businessman, the ‘Fujeira’ and ‘Manama’ stamps are fakes labeled with obsolete postal services that are now part of the U.A.E and the Sahara stamp printed by insurgents to raise funds! None of the postmarks are real, and simply printed as part of the stamp design. Cinderellas that are labeled as from African or Middle Eastern nations are extremely common, and these are typical examples.

Here’s another large collection of Cinderellas, this time from Benin (an African nation), Afghanistan and Mongolia (two countries who don’t spring to mind when you think of robust postal services). The Benin and Afghan stamps are catalogued as ‘illegal’ by the United Nations Postal Union (and possible printed by forgers in Hungary) and I suspect the same is true for the Mongolian stamps. Note how similar the postmarks are on the Benin and Afghan ‘stamps’? I speculate they were printed at the same time and place. The source material even looks similar!

Fake Cinderellas continue. The five cat photograph stamps labeled as from Niger were printed in France and have been decried by the UN as blatant counterfeits. Equatorial Guinea is infamous in the annals of fake philately, and these five cats seem to have been printed by a Spaniard and have no connection at all to the country. The last Niger stamp – the WWF Cheetah – is also of dubious origin based on the fake postmark, but I can’t find details online.

I’m not even remotely an expert on any of this, and relying heavily on information I have found online, and as a result I’m going to file all of the above in the ‘probably Cinderella’ category. I’m fairly sure the Cambodian stamps were not issued by the Cambodian postal service, but whether they are illegal or not I can’t discover. The same is true for all the others: Laos, Congo, Nicaragua, Chad, Guinea, Cuba, Azerbaijani and Somalia. On many of these the postmarks are obviously not real, but on others (such as Cuba) it’s a little difficult to tell.

Here we have some examples of what I believe are ‘official’ Cinderellas, which means they were issued either by or with the permission of a government to raise funds via philately. North Korean stamps are a famous example of this – vast quantities of stamps are printed as from North Korea despite it not having a recognized postal service. The Bulgarian ones I wasn’t sure of until I found photographs of examples online with identical postmarks, and Togo is a country known to issue all sorts of non-postal stamps purely for the collectors market.

This block of eight stamps bears the name of Grunay, a never-inhabited island far from the east coast of Scotland. This suggests these stamps are fakes issued by the controversial UK stamp dealer Clive Feigenbaum. These were probably issued in the 1970s and may have even been part of a failed tax scheme. These are the very definition of illegitimate stamps: you or I printing something at home and hand-perforating them would be as ‘real’ as these!

From this point onwards – with some exceptions which I’ll mention – I think the Cinderellas end. Which is to say my imperfect philatelic detective skills suggest that all the remaining are real stamps issued by governments. If you detect otherwise, please let me know 🙂

The top row are stamps from Romania, Vietnam, Hungary and Isle Of Man. The first three are postmarked but unused which suggests they were sold directly to collectors. The Isle Of Man one is real and was mailed on January 10, 1991. The second row are all real used stamps from Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Czechoslovakia. The last row has two Tanzanian stamps, and two Angolan. The larger of the Angolan stamps is an obvious Cinderella (the postmark is part of the image) but the other is legitimate. I don’t know if the Cinderella is ‘illegal’ or not.

Three Russian stamps and four Indian ones. I believe these are all authentic, but the postmarks on all the Russian ones seem unusually clear and well-aligned which is typical of Cinderellas. It’s also the case that a large amount of Russian fakes exist, often issued by small Russian states. Perhaps these are examples of that?

The top row are all Malaysian, and were issued in 1922 (the two tigers), 1957 and 1979. The $0.01 black tiger stamp is worth about… $0.01 today!

The Cheetah on the second row was issued in 1963 in Mauritania, and this is a wonderful unused example. The Kenya/Uganda/Tanganyika stamp is from 1938 and features the portrait of George VI.

The three on the bottom are the oldest in this pack Sue sent me. All were printed by France for their African territories (Middle Congo) in 1907. The one on the right bears a Cameroon overprint denoting it was for use in that territory.

And lastly but by no means leastly, five examples from Australia. The middle one is notable: a stamp depicting a Cheetah printed in 1994. Some objectors to Cinderellas say that stamps should by definition have some connection to the countries that print them, but Australia has no real connection to Cheetahs! These days countries print stamps of anything they like and the world keeps spinning (and indeed philately is dying), so maybe all those unusual and random Cinderellas aren’t so bad after all?

Before I end, let’s talk favourites. With so many to choose from it was a challenge to select the ones I liked best, but I finally narrowed it down to the above four. The meowing Manama cat stamp is vibrant and large and – even though it’s a Cinderella – would have looked great on a postcard! Similarly for the Azerbaijani Cinderella: I like the detail of the cat portrait. As for the ‘real’ stamps, I have to give the nod to Isle Of Man showcasing their namesake cats on a stamp, and the engraving of the Mauritania Cheetah stamp is incredibly detailed and the stamp is printed so perfectly it makes me wish we still used lithography for stamp printing today!

This post took many hours and I ended up in many rabbit holes dedicated to illegal or otherwise dubious stamps, which ended up to be a fascinating read. Thanks Sue, for the thoughtful gift 🙂

The Japan Postcards

July 19, 2024

It’s been more than a month since I returned from Japan, and I think it’s time I did the partner post to this one from a few weeks back. I was hesitating because six of the 35 postcards I sent us from Japan have unfortunately yet to arrive. Since it’s been a few weeks since we got the last one, I’ve all but given up on them 🙁

Why so many cards? Three reasons: I like writing and sending cards, the variety in Japan is astonishing and I had lots of stamps! The cards I send from Japan tend to fall into two categories: the tourist ones such as the four shown above, and the pop-culture ones such as these:

From the left we have a Godzilla card, a Junji Ito card and an Ultraman card. All these are metallic and foiled, and look wonderful.

I suppose there’s a third category as well: ‘unusual’ which includes shaped and lenticular cards. I’m beginning to think the Japanese post office has it in for such cards, since a lenticular I sent us back in January never arrived and I believe two of the missing ones from this last trip were shaped and lenticular as well.

Postcards are almost always written in the hotel room of an evening while watching trashy TV, although sometimes I’ll write them at a restaurant or to pass the time while traveling (on a train or plane for instance). Notably I almost always write them in laundromats, and have done so in about seven countries now.

Writing so many cards would be a challenge be for many I suspect, but I have a simple system: one describes the day (what I did, what I saw, what I ate, what I bought etc) and the other is unrelated musings or crazy nonsense. The above is an example of the former. (Yes almost all the clothes I took with me were discarded to make suitcase space!)

And that is an example of the latter. Bernard had sent me a set of (honestly terrible) Star Wars rubber stamps and the Chewbacca caught my eye and traveled with me. One thing led to another and soon enough the stamp was writing his own postcards under an assumed name. Did you get a card from APELINQ?

As I said I had loads of Japanese stamps, both because Sue had given me some in Australia (leftovers from her trip) and because I went crazy in several post offices. The above are the staples that have been in print for years now, and you’ll see them on Japanese cards going back a decade or more. There’s also a dog, but I think he must be on one of the missing cards.

Every month Japan prints a special set of themed stamps, and whenever I visit I buy them and use them. I forget the actual themes of the sets I purchased while I was there, but I believe one was ‘summer’ and another ‘flowers’. The rabbit and moon were from the same themed sheet, but I don’t recall what it was.

I hardly sent any flower stamps to myself, and there was an entire sheet of food stamps I don’t have any photos of because the ones I sent myself were probably on the lost cards.

As with most trips I try to vary the stamps on the cards I send, and since each of these themed sheets has ten unique stamps on it you very likely received some not shown here. Why not check yours and see?

The top left one was from a themed sheet showing photographs of tourist locations. I liked these a lot and since this is the only example on the cards I have received I assume I used them on the missing cards. I hope they one day arrive!

I wonder what the other circular bird stamps were and who got them?

I purchased the above stamps (which came from the same commemorative sheet) in Kinugawa, from a post office that was extravagantly staffed and stocked for such an ‘abandoned’ town. As usual communication was via translator, and the young lady that served me went to extraordinary lengths in giving me printed guides on how to mail items in Japan and how to affix stamps. She also gave me dozens of airmail stickers that I promptly lost, although I notice some of the cards we received have them on which means someone in the postal service affixed them!

I hope writing this post triggers some sort of cosmic reward, and the other six cards arrive soon. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into the postcards of my trip, which for me are always the #1 souvenir 🙂

Robot Claw