5 Sen - P.O.W. Canteen Ticket

These canteen tickets were issued by Japanese military authorities to Allied prisoners held in Taiwan camps during the Pacific War — a system ostensibly complying with Geneva Convention requirements that prisoners be permitted to purchase goods. In practice, the canteen stock was thin, often nonexistent, and the scrip functioned more as a bureaucratic formality than a functional currency. Officers received small wage disbursements in this form under the convention's provisions; other ranks rarely saw it at all.

Surviving examples are genuinely uncommon. Few prisoners had reason or means to preserve them, and most camp documentation — including scrip — was destroyed or abandoned in the chaos of the August 1945 surrender.