10 Centavos

The Japanese military administration began issuing these occupation notes across the Philippines almost immediately after Manila fell in January 1942. They were designed to replace U.S.-backed Philippine Commonwealth currency, deliberately pegged at par with the peso to ease public acceptance — a parity few Filipinos trusted. The guerrilla economy that ran parallel to formal occupation rapidly devalued them in practice, regardless of official rates.

The series was printed without serial numbers or signatures, reducing production cost and complicating counterfeiting detection simultaneously. Filipino resistance fighters and American propaganda operations both exploited this weakness, flooding occupied areas with forgeries.