20 Centavos

Guiuan sits at the southeastern tip of Samar, and in 1943 it was effectively cut off from any functioning central authority. Like dozens of other Philippine municipalities under Japanese occupation, the local government issued its own emergency currency to keep small transactions moving — the national Philippine Commonwealth notes had either disappeared into hoarding or were being supplanted by Japanese military scrip. These municipal guerrilla-zone and occupation-era issues were typically produced on whatever paper was at hand, hand-stamped or mimeographed, with authority derived entirely from local trust.

Guiuan would become strategically significant the following year when MacArthur's forces used it as a staging base for the Leyte Gulf operation in October 1944.