Robot Claw

It’s time to open another topical stamp pack, and this time it’s this one:

This envelope contains 100 Japanese stamps and – as with most of the packets I’m going through here on the blog – was purchased inexpensively from a Canadian seller. I was looking forward to opening this one since I knew it would contain mostly postal-used and canceled stamps, and not just the ones printed for collectors like we saw in mushrooms or trains.

The pack contained 102 stamps in total, including one repeat (can you find it above) and one unusual stamp that I didn’t include with the others in the pic. I’ll get to that one in a bit.

As you can see it’s a very colorful selection, and there’s a good variation in size as well. A few seem to be matched pairs from series, but the vast majority of these seem unique.

The above shows the largest and smallest stamps in the pack, both of which show traditional art which seems to be a popular topic of Japanese stamps. There’s quite a few stamps in this selection showing painting or pottery or more unique Japanese forms of artwork like flower arranging or origami.

There’s also a very large amount of commemorative stamps, often released for specific events. Many of these are scientific topics – such as the one on the right celebrating electron microscopy – but there’s also a lot of stamps commemorating organizations like Rotary or the Olympics.

As with most countries the most common type of stamp seems to be based around nature or animals. Despite growing up in Australia I somewhat associate cicadas with Japan now, so this is a fitting example.

Very few of the stamps are dated, but those that are seem to be from the 1960s through 1990s. This beautiful goldfish stamp is from 1966, and shows the high level of detail common to the older Japanese stamps that were in this packet.

Quite a few stamps feature metallic inks, including this origami stamp from 1996. Fancy inks on stamps are always nice, and I know from recent visits (and Postcrossing) that Japan still uses metallic inks quite commonly today.

This was the unusual stamp that I first thought was mistakenly included, but this is actually a Malaya stamp issued during the Japanese occupation of 1943. It’s not canceled: the black inked marking is an overprint applied by the Japanese forces on the native stamps. For all it’s historical interest these are apparently quite common; I suppose there wasn’t much postage being used in Malaya during those few years?

This last pic is of stamps on cards I’ve sent myself from Japan these past few years, and you can see the colorful designs have continued. Japan seems to issue an astonishing amount of stamps, but as a tourist that can’t speak the language its difficult for me to buy them when I visit! That said I’ve tried hard to use a variety of stamps on the cards I send from there, so take a second look at the ones I sent you to see what you got!

This was a good topical pack, and I enjoyed seeing the variety of included stamps. If I could get one, I’d like a second pack of stamps from 2000 onwards (although self-adhesive stamps don’t seem to be collected or sold this way).

In another month I’ll open another themed pack. What will it be? Come back next month to find out 🙂