5 Centavos

Basey is a municipality in Samar, in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines. Notes like this one were issued under Japanese occupation, when the destruction of normal banking infrastructure and the imposition of Japanese military scrip forced local governments, municipalities, and guerrilla units across the archipelago to print their own emergency currency to keep local commerce functioning. Hundreds of such issues appeared between 1942 and 1945, varying wildly in quality and authorized backing.

Municipal issues from Samar are among the harder provincial emergencies to document — surviving examples are few, and administrative records from the occupation period were largely lost or deliberately destroyed.