I dug through my uncles old things the other day (He died in 1980), and found these currency notes that had probably been in his wallet for years. He was in the Marines during WWII, but I don’t think he saw much beyond the Aleutian Islands.
Damn. Of course 50 sen (1/2 yen.) I was looking so hard at the date I wasn’t seeing the denomination.
Anyway, I believe the first 50 sen note is Showa 18 (1943). The middle one I can’t recognize the date immediately (it is in the series of characters down the right-hand side) but you can decode it with this and this and this. Bottom note doesn’t have visible date (it would be on the reverse.)
(FWIW, I have examples of all three notes in my banknote collection.)
Current value—I get many of these on a monthly basis. I throw them in a box of notes for 50 cents each U.S. If they were in new condition, I would put in a $2. each box.
Interestingly, you can’t. You are correct that the date is written down the right-hand side, but it doesn’t use the familiar nengou system counting from the start of the shouwa emperor’s reign, but an older system that reckons the years from the accession of the (legendary) first emperor, Jimmu, in 660 BC (神武天皇即位紀元). I did not know that this system was in use in the 20th century.
The text says 紀元二千五百九十八年 2,598 years from the start of the era, which is indeed 1938.
BTW, not really relevant to your note, but an interesting tidbit of history. Sometimes you will find an old WWII era banknote with writing all over it. Soldiers had a hobby of having people that they meet sign them. If one note filled up, they would tape another one to the end of it, so you might even see a strip of banknotes from several nations in the European or Pacific theater. They called them “short snorters.”
Another tidbit–the notes in the OP were for native use in Japan, but as Japan invaded and took over various countries in the Pacific, they would replace the native currency with a new one of their own in the unit of each nation, so you may find Pounds, Rupees, Pesos, etc. issued by the Japanese Government.
(That’s one of the things that interests me about banknotes besides the aesthetics of them–they are portable history lessons.)
English was the local administrative language. The Philippines used English on its banknotes until 1969 (example), and English is still an official language.
The Philippines was an American Commonwealth at the time, and so used English. Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, Singapore, and Brunei were British colonies, as was Burma; they all used English. The Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) was a Dutch colony; their invasion money was in Dutch: Japanese invasion money - Wikipedia.
OK, I see that…but I remember seeing, a long time ago, invasion currency in pesos, apparently for Mexico, printed under the authority of the Japanese Government…I hope my memory isn’t playing tricks on me after more than fifty years…