5 Pesos

Masbate is a small island province in the Visayas, and its wartime emergency currency occupies a genuinely obscure corner of Philippine guerrilla note collecting. When Japanese forces occupied the archipelago in late 1941 and early 1942, provincial governments and military units across the islands began issuing their own emergency notes to keep local economies functioning — Masbate among them. These issues were produced under improvised conditions, often on whatever paper stock was locally available, with printing quality that varied considerably even within the same series.

Pick S459 falls within the Philippine Commonwealth emergency issues cataloged under Shafer's provincial classification. Survival rates for Masbate notes are lower than for larger provinces simply because the island's population and administrative infrastructure were smaller.