1 9 4 7 / J A P A N
Dear friends !
During the twelve months of 2006 I will present interesting items of the
twelve oldest Volleyball stamps. I hope you will be
interested in them. Today we continue with the second part, a stamp from
Japan. If you have any interesting covers or other material to
enrich this site, please let me know.
Gunter
The second Volleyball stamp issued worldwide comes from JAPAN. Actually, it was issued in a se-tenant block of four sports stamps on October 25th, 1947, more than two years after the first Volleyball stamp from ROMANIA, presented in January's ITEM OF THE MONTH. These stamps were commemorating the 2nd National Meeting of Athletes in Kanazawa, Japan, held from Oct 30th to Nov 3rd, 1947. They were designed by Minoru Hisano and have a face value of 1.20 ¥en each. 500.000 stamps were printed in photogravure.
I do have a First Day Cover, which was not used postally.
The four stamps are not even cancelled by the commemorative cancel. You can see it here.
There exists a very interesting perforation variety: In this variety there are two gaps of perforation on the horizontal line. The first one is between the volleyball stamp and the diving stamp. The other one occurs between the two athletics stamps.
detail
I can show a wonderful cover here. It
was cancelled on Oct 30, 1947 (five days after the issue fo this set of
stamps) in Osaka and sent to the USA. On it's way it passed through
censorship (censor cancel C.C.D. J-5893), where it was officially opened
and sealed again. It might have been influenced philatelically, because
the whole set was used to frank it (I do not know the correct postal rate
from that time). Still, it is a wondeful item.
An interesting fact is that the form of the date of the cancel used was
the western form, and not the Japenese form, where the year of the reign
of the monarch is used. In Japanese form it would have been 30 10 22 which
means 30th of octobre in the 22nd year of the reign of Showa.
