foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good day everyone I would like to talk about the issue or the subject of money and currency during the second world war in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation so I've titled my presentation resisting Mickey Mouse Philippine emergency and Guerrilla currency during World War II so first of all we are probably familiar with Mickey Mouse money it is a common term that is given to the Japanese invasion money or the Japanese military script or the Japanese money that was brought here these were currency these were bills that were printed by Japan even before the war and as early as March or April 1941 now the war started in December the Japanese Ministry of Finance was already giving orders to print money for the areas that they were in planning to invade the Philippines was just one of many so they printed Mickey Mouse money for what was then Malaya British Malaya Netherlands East Indies even Oceania so there are different even Burma so they had different types of this so-called we what we would call Mickey Mouse money the common thing with all of this was that the first issue had some thing that was common to a particular country in the Philippine case it was abaca so many people think that it's this is this is coconut or whatever or fibers but it's abaca because that was grown by the Japanese in Davao in the case of Malaya for example they had bananas and they had fruits so if we call the Japanese money here Mickey Mouse money in Malaya it's called banana money it also became worthless in the end so it was called Mickey Mouse money most probably because it did not look real the first issues of this Japanese money did not have serial numbers the second issue had looked more like money it had serial numbers it had the statue of it had the Monument of Jose Rizal but as the war went on the value of this money dropped very very significantly by the end of the war nobody was accepting the money anymore which is why Mickey Mouse who was a fictitious character is probably why it became known as Mickey Mouse money other people called it gurami gurami is a small kind of fish that there are thousands of so the first issue was something that really looked like play money this was printed in Japan it came with a Japanese invasion forces and they began to buy things with it right away but people did not want to accept it because it had no serial numbers it had no guarantee of payment the pre-war money that we had in following the American money would always say you can redeem this in the bank for silver content and so forth the Mickey Mouse money did not have any of that only said Japanese government one peso five pesos fives and towers and so forth Now by late 1942 they came out with a second edition or a second issue which was issued by a Japanese Bank the so-called Southern Development Bank and this one was the one that had serial numbers already by the late part of the war the serial numbers were used up so they were what were called replacement issues which which started with a number one and that the numbers got longer and by 1944 as the money became worthless before the war the biggest Bill we had was 20 pesos a 20 peso bill could buy a lot of money a lot of things we even had the kusing or the half cent hour before the war so 20 pesos was a big amount of money the biggest Bill we had was 20 pesos if you said you had 100 pesos Miami so during the Japanese time they issued money for five cents that was one centavo and all the way up to 20 pesos by the middle of the world 20 pesos was almost useless so they came out with a 50 peso bill then they came out with a 100 peso bill and then they came up with a 500 peso bill and at the end of the war they had 1 000 they had a 1 000 peso bill nobody in the pre-war Society ever imagined we could have a 1 000 peso bill because you were counting centavos so that's how deflated the money was by the end of the war so there was severe inflation nobody wanted to accept it and it was relatively easy to forge in fact within one month of the Japanese Occupation in Manila there were reports already that there were four juries and then Japanese were Banning people from using these forgeries the Americans were able to capture some of this so the first part of the resisting Mickey Mouse we would say the Americans would have done some of it because the guerrillas here were able to send some of the samples of the money to Australia and they studied it and they found out that the paper that was used for Mickey Mouse money was actually made in the states and that they found out they had large stocks of that particular paper in the states and so they were able to reproduce in very great detail this Mickey Mouse money so this was counterfeit Mickey Mouse money which you can tell in some ways is very difficult to tell you need a very detailed analysis some of the curls were different and some something the colors were different and of course if they were newly made they would look very mint they would look fresh from the from the printer so what they did in Australia before they sent it over to the gorillas here was they put it in washing machines and turn it around so by the time it got here midnight was already worn and that could pass it was very difficult to detect even today it's very hard to detect this fake Mickey Mouse bills of course they get us made some of it also so these are some examples this is the the one on top with the PD is the first issue the p is student for Philippines the D was supposed to represent the area in which it circulated the one that you see below the five peso bill was the one that came out in 1942 later on with a serial number and the statue of Jose Rizal so there were other forms also and then so the 500 peso bill that we see is here is that was inflation very severe inflation but what's interesting also is that during the Laurel presidency during the so-called second Republic the second Republic knew that one sign of sovereignty was control over money and if the Japanese controlled the money or the Mickey Mouse money then that made Independence useless so the Laurel government wanted to take in all of that Mickey Mouse money and issue their own money which was by the newly created Bank of central non-philipinas that was something that was first created during the Royal regime so the other money that we see here was unique because it says Banco Central and Pilipinas and it's all in Tagalog what's all in Filipino the money that was used before was all in English so the Banco Central notes they were never actually circulated they were printed in Japan but the Japanese did not want to lose control of the currency so they did not the only thing we have actually are specimens of that particular node but it was one way of Laurel saying I want Financial autonomy and if the war had lasted longer maybe would we would have gotten to use it so one form of countering the Japanese was to put slogans behind them and try to show how useless the money was so this is an example the five peso bill that was captured by Americans or guerrillas and they stamped in the back the prosperity sphere what is it worth because by that time it was useless and so the Japanese were talking about co-prosperity sphere we are brothers and all of this so to print this on the money was really to say the core Prosperity sphere is totally useless it has no value whatsoever just like this bill so that was one way of sabotaging the Mickey Mouse money actually and aside from this there will be other bills that also came out so one wonder is when the first use of Mickey Mouse was actually when it actually came out today we take it for granted everyone says Mickey Mouse but money but I went looking for the earliest times that it was printed and this is I think the earliest one I found March 2 1945 it says Mickey Mouse money Mickey Mouse currency will not be redeemed it is totally useless it was probably in Vogue even before this to see it in print in 1945 already means that it was common knowledge that the people were calling it Mickey Mouse money but aside from that and one way of challenging this Japanese control of the currency was what we'd call emergency currency and so emergency currency was something that was issued because it was needed when the war started all of the money that the provinces were using came from Manila most of this was actually printed in the U.S and it came to the Philippines and it was stored in Manila and then it was distributed to Auckland some guanga and elsewhere in the Philippines but when the war started the shipping ships were no longer able to move from Manila to Cebu to Mindanao there was no more Transportation so places that were relying on money from Manila suddenly found themselves short of currency so this is why we have this emergency currency that came around because Cebu for example had to play pay its government employees and how could you pay them if no money was coming in you could not give them IOU or utang Muna you had to give them something that looked like real paper and that was authorized by the government so president Quezon was in Korea at this time and Quezon gave authority to the different provincial currency boards made sure that each province basically had a currency board and those that did not would have money coming from those that did so the big provinces that had big currency boards and that came up with this emergency currency would have been Cebu would have been Iloilo would have been Negros I think Bacolod and lanao in Mindanao or misamis misam is Occidental all of these were big hubs for this emergency currency to be issued since there was a war going on people had to be paid and Mickey Mouse money people didn't want to accept the Mickey Mouse money before and these were places that the Japanese had not yet reached so there was no money coming from Manila and the people needed to be paid there was a war going on so there were military contractors there were bus drivers soldiers had to be paid to make things even more complex complicated before the end of 1941 when December 1941 Quezon issued a decrease stating that all government officials will be paid a three-month Advanced salary that would help them tied over the difficulty so if you were receiving one month you would get three times that in one big bonus and you needed money for that so the emergency currency filled that and this was all authorized before the fall of Bataan so Quezon was still in koreidor and it was for payment for salaries and so forth and it's interesting to look into how these were designed how they were printed in many cases the provinces or you know Hilo and Cebu they had big printing presses so they were able to make this in the case of Cebu the person who actually designed the Cebu bills was a he was an artist by himself and so he was designing he knew how to design builds so that they would look like money so his grandson I think is still in Cebu they operate a butterfly Haven in Cebu City and it's a very interesting story about how they designed the bills so that they would look real and they had of course they all had serial numbers they all said this is authorized by the government this is temporary for the emergency but when the war ends you can redeem it you can go to the banks and the banks will pay you genuine money for areas that did not were not able to print their own money they would rely on let's say Cebu leytech could not print its own money so Cebu would have some of its money stamped for distribution in Leyte in Tacloban and so forth so if you look at this one of the most common bills is really the ones from Cebu you know Hilo and Negros and sometimes they have stamps behind them telling you where they were authorized to circulate so since this challenge the Japanese directly because if you were working on the economy using this emergency bills the Mickey Mouse money would really look like play money so the Japanese decided to issue a decrease saying that this is illegal but since so many people were using it in the visayas in Mindanao then what the Japanese did was you turn it to us we will replace it with Mickey Mouse money so they tried to replace it with their own money but some of it was never redeemed some of it was actually stolen in the case of land now there's a case where or there was a warehouse of that and some some looters managed to get it so that had to be demonetized very quickly so today for collectors if you look at the serial number you'll know if it was the part of The demonetized Horde or not so that was for the Emergency currency then go to the next one so this is one of the earliest ones this is emergency currency usually it would have the date where it was issued by what Authority there's a serial number this is in the mountain Province so you see even in the mountain Province they were they needed money and again the story of how these were printed some of them were mimeographed some of them used printing presses the use of color was very important because you have to make the money look like real money those that were memograph were simply black and white so this this one in particular you see the serial number is a different color the color of the bill itself is quite different they had to have signatures in fact some of them have real signature so you imagine that the provincial board would sit down and sign all of those bills and if they're signing thousands of bills and it had to be in a certain format that you have certain serial numbers block of serial numbers will be signed by this particular person so if you knew if you had a bill that had a serial number and someone else signed it you knew it as a forgery it was a fake so this is money that and then this one is from Cagayan what is interesting about the kagayan note is to make it look even more real because this was the kagayan note was only mimeographed mimeograph was using just mimeographing paper but you see the very clear sign to pesos shown that this is real money and to make people believe that it was more real they actually put a they put a a custom stamp on it so that meant that it was really this is real money it will be redeemed later on and what's also interesting about this particular bill is it was signed by the governor of free Cagayan Marcelo aduru so Marcelo adur was one of the first Guerrilla leaders in Northern Luzon and so if you look at this bill it's it's really very it tells a very important Story the governor himself signed it it has that stamp to show its genuine and then it's two pesos so this other one is this is in Bohol now in Bohol they had several this was I think this used the regular printing press but what you see here again is a mixture of actual signatures so again depending on the depending on the serial number you have a number of signatures and these are actually real signatures so each Bill had to be signed in person but this is part of the emergency bills that we're talking about this is another curious one uh this one is in Ilocos Norte so this one is this is mimeographed again but this time they did not put a seal on it what some of these bills did was they folded them into two they were a piece of paper folded into two and in the middle they would put threads of different colors so that this if you wanted to make sure it was real you opened it up and if you'd see the different threads ah this is real this is an important bill also because the one who signed this is row k b a blunt governor of Ilocos Norte if you have aduru in kagayan you have you have a blunt in Ilocos Norte a blonde was never found he was he remained governor of free Ilocos Norte until then Japanese hunted him down they surprised him and he disappeared and he's never been found so he's one of those missing in action so when you can when you can identify the people who actually signed these bills it makes the bills speak out a little more okay apart from the emergency currents you know the emergency currency was essentially issued before the fall of Bataan and korehidor so the government was still in existence in the Philippines but once but fell that placed the Philippines under Japanese control and so you now have Guerrilla resistance movements moving out no longer did they have contact with Quezon because Quezon was now in the United States so we can say that this Guerrilla currency was now the currency of a free people because now it was the people themselves who were making this currency they were issued by various Guerrilla organizations or civil governments in what was called free areas in the case of Panay Island for example there was a military government but there also was a civil government in Negros Occidental there was a military gov there was a military structure there was a guerrilla structure but they also had a guerrilla they had a civil government as well well so those were called the free areas and they were provincial and Municipal and even Island issues so what is interesting in this case is some of them were authorized by the Commonwealth government some of them managed to establish radio contact with Quezon in Washington DC or through Australia and they were actually given permission you print only this much amount of money very specific one peso one thousand bills two pesos so many thousand so all of this was truck you could track all of them down others however were not authorized so guerrillas needed money to operate and sometimes they could not get in touch with the Commonwealth government so they had to print their own money regardless and what is interesting about most of these Guerrilla currency is that they are used these were not mint things that were fresh from the press or they were kept in people's homes they were actually used if you look at many of the bills they're even torn they're they're bent so they were actually used in the Guerrilla areas so some of these here is usually they were used usually they were small denominations centavos even one centavo 10 centavos but this is one of the bigger examples this is 100 pesos and this is in Iloilo so sometimes they were getting that big also particularly if the military needed to buy large numbers of equipment or food or things like that but again you have the date here and we know that this is Guerrilla money now because it's December 1942 so Bataan has fallen foreign although it also sometimes says emergency currency but apart from this the other provinces also had their currency imagine that you would have as far down south as Zamboanga even in Hollow they were printing money like this and again the system it's very crude money this was probably mimeograph you can imagine them doing this in the jungle in the mountains with a mimeographic press in this in the in this in the malls the the the forums for that so there's a story behind all of this all of this money this one is interesting because this is from this is the one from balangiga I think this is balangiga so if you remember Philippine history one of the big events that took place during the Phil American war was the so-called massacre at balangiga in which case did American the American Garrison was killed by Filipino Freedom Fighters and after that they declared some are no man's land and they killed everyone they could so it started with balangiga but during the war you have this money that was even being issued in balangiga to show that they were not anti-American anymore that they were fighting on the side of the Americans too very crudely done again but this shows that again this is very much used it's very worn so it's it shows that it was actually handed from person to person and then this is a higher denomination note this was issued in Northern Luzon in Ilocos Sur or so by the gorilla group of Walter Cushing it's very well printed so they probably had access to a press they had good paper and again the story of the process used some of them had good presses some of them were using wood block prints some of them were handmade so it's a very interesting comparison to show how again this was the currency of a free people and the for design and production there are stories about all of them who were designing them to make them like real look like real bills what were they using wood block pins it's relatively easy to see this is made by a wood block print so someone carved it and they stamped it on the paper the mimeograph was very often used we don't use that anymore today but it was the form of mass reproduction in the olden days some places actually had small presses and they did they used that manually and since some of these were easy to copy they were also counterfeit Guerrilla notes but since the gorillas were very strict on how the gorillas were how the guerrillas used their money it's now actually harder to find these counterfeits because the guerrillas punished anyone that was found with a curve counterfeit note so today finding a counterfeit note is sometimes a treasure it's more expensive than the real bill because it was really banned and so we mentioned the security features the serial numbers the counter signs the colored threads in the middle and they used all kinds of paper they used coupon Bond they used Manila paper they even used paper bags what they had to use were paper that was that could stand being passed from person to person so if you you were using thin paper onion skin that would not last so there was one group of people who in aklan were actually using cardboard as a paper money and so we can look at this of people who are making the Guerrilla currency as heroes in themselves acquiring paper and ink printing finding the printing equipment transferring the location from one place to another hiding in the mountains printing this the Japanese tried to stop the printing many times try to look for where the print where the presses were they try to capture them so the process had to move from place to place and sometimes if they were lucky a submarine would come from Australia bringing more paper more ink and even presses so the money that we find in mindana now is usually of very good quality because a press managed to reach Mindanao with paper and ink so the quality is very good but again the counterfeits sometimes they're easy to detect and in fact I've included an example here that will show you what the count this is genuine this is from the Mindanao currency board so this was printed by a press that a submarine brought in they brought in the ink they brought in the paper very good quality this is this shows you how people had to make do with paper if you did not have enough paper you used government forms so the front part is looks like money but the back part is a government appropriation form that they used to print the money on I think this was in Zamboanga hours in summer and after that this is one interesting bill this is in Negros and it shows that it came from a paper bag because you see the Jagged Edge on one side that was the top of the paper bag that they were using for to print the money usually they would also put in colorful designs here you have the face of Quezon the face of the face of Roosevelt sometimes you'd have Heroes and so forth so very imaginative how they tried to make the money look like real money then you'd have stamps and seals as I mentioned to you had all that series of personal autographs or signatures so again it had to match with the it had to match with the serial number if it did not match with the signal we did that much with the serial number fake Yan so again can you imagine that this has three people signing or four people and how many would they have to sign so boom happens and this was just one of those again Mountain Province so it means as a boondocks and they are they need money so after this this one I chose because it uses a particular illustration that showed that they were optimistic that they would win The prominent V in the center of this note is a symbol for victory so every time you show the V for victory sign and anytime you put Z anywhere else that meant victory for the Allies for the Americans following upon eventually so this is an interesting note this is from this is from Panay because in Panay there was a government that there was a military government and there also was a civil government so they were actually Rivals the military governments and its martial law so we have all the authority but the civil government it was governor Confessor who was there at the time said no it's still civilian authority over the military so the military side under Colonel Peralta issued their own currency but on confessor's side he issued his own currency and this is an example of the civil government in Panay currency that was issued by the treasurer grigno so these are called grigno bills and that was declared invalid by the Peralta side because in martial law we're under martial law we cannot have rival money like this so these are very hard to find actually because the military would say you cannot use this so this this is a rather difficult Bill to find this is an example of counterfeits so even though there were this counterfeit or the security provisions there were counterfeits that were being made and as I mentioned earlier sometimes it's harder to find the counterfeit because if you are fine with counterfeit you were jailed you were tortured or even you were killed so this is an example of a counterfeit the one on top is real this is that 100 peso bill showing Mount Mayon and you'll notice the you can tell it's real because the drape that you see on top is draped Over the Bar the counterfeit has the bar running through the drip so if you're if you look at the bills and you see one like that this is counterfeit others I showed illustrations of uh actually the illustrations of Roosevelt and illustrations of Quezon sometimes the counterfeit illustrations were not that good so you could tell ah this is fake this is fake very crude Illustrated but sometimes in some cases the illustrations were even better than the original so if they became so nice ah this is counterfeit also so it's it's a whole interesting subject on detecting this counterfeits themselves so we round up we round this up now by going into what happened to all of this after the war so all of them were if they were legitimate if they were genuine the banks were supposed to take them in after the war and issue real money after the war so many of the bills were actually redeemed in Banks but many more were not because I think there was a limit and I think many were not able to reach the banks in time so a large number were redeemed but even more I think were not redeemed and those that were not authorized by Quezon or those that were not authorized by the Commonwealth government were of course never redeemed so the earlier bill that I showed Walter Cushing that Guerrilla unit was never officially recognized although Walter Cushing was real he was executed by the Japanese but the government refused to recognize that and so that was one group of currency that was not recognized now long after the war now these bills have become collectors items they are collectors who really are very very serious about them they follow the serial numbers they look very well for they look very well for the forgeries for the counterfeit bills and some of them can really reach very large amounts of money if you go to eBay for example and you try to see how much a bill from Summer costs it can easily go to a hundred dollars or 150 dollars and I think as summer is one of the rare bills anywhere from the towns of Summer Zamboanga is rare uh later the bills from late they are also very rare and usually they're in very bad shape so collectors are very very possessive about this and some of them don't even want to show their collections because people might want to get them from them so some of them are really worth a lot of money now especially when you realize that some of them were only issued in let's say 500 issues or so forth when you look at the serial numbers you can actually see how many were issued and because of that the scarcity or the plentifulness of a bill will determine its value today but you look at what the prices are in eBay nowadays and it's really amazing how expensive these things go and sometimes people really buy them and there are auctions in the Philippines and abroad where you really have these serious collectors and they really are after some of these very very rare bills some bills are very common but the others are very rare so it is an interesting thing to start a collection of this because each bill has its own story and even the Japanese money even the Mickey Mouse money has its own story if you know how to read through it so with that thank you very much and good day [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music]