50 Centavos

Basey is a municipality in Samar, and like dozens of other local governments across the Philippine islands, it issued its own emergency currency during the Japanese occupation after regular Commonwealth and pre-war Philippine National Bank notes became scarce or were deliberately withdrawn. These municipal guerrilla notes — or emergency circulating notes, depending on which authority sanctioned them — occupy a peculiar legal grey zone: some were backed by nothing more than local authority and community trust, while others were loosely coordinated through provincial or guerrilla command structures.

Samar saw sustained and brutal guerrilla activity throughout the occupation. Whether Basey's emission was produced under Japanese-tolerated civil administration or in defiance of it is not conclusively established for this denomination.