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Reference.
11. The revised proposal was submitted to The Committee No. 2: Economic and Financial Affairs, which approved the following policy proposal:
"No Japanese currency held outside Japan whether by governments or by individuals, however acquired, should be converted into Japanese legal tender."
It also recommended that :
"the question this currency
Reparations.
"
of damage arising from inability to convert should be considered by Committee No.
1:
This would suggest that the currency question, at this time, was considered best handled as reparations, which were eventually
dealt with under Article 14 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty.
12.
be
In 1949 because when the Treasury was asked what should done with holdings of Imperial yen held in Malaya, it referred back to this FEC proposal and to a statement made by SCAP in 1947. The latter stated that "
SCAP knows of no arrangements for converting these notes (but) cannot advise the holders to destroy them." The Foreign Office, when asked for its view, stated that military notes could be safely destroyed while ordinary Imperial yen notes should not be destroyed for six months, when the question of their destruction should be raised again. This would suggest that military notes were already considered to be valueless and that it was doubtful if normal Imperial yen notes would ever be of any value. It is not clear how the Foreign Office came to this view.
13. In
the Philippines an association was formed to try to get 6,400 million military fiat pesos redeemed. Representations were made to the US to advance part of the sum because it was unlikely that Japan, in its impoverished state, would be able to provide any payment in the short term. A bill passed by the Philippines Congress validating such payments, was vetoed by the US President. The Americans consistently put forward the idea that it would nonsensical to validate all transactions made in occupation currency since at the end of the war the military peso was worth nothing and it would be equally nonsensical to invalidate all transactions since it did have some value at the beginning of the Occupation. The FO had heard from the Acting Consul-General in Manila that "many Filipinos managed to pay off considerable debts in this Mickey Mouse currency." According to the Imperial War Museum the Filipino association was unsuccessful. (I hope to have this information, with its source, confirmed in writing in the near future.)
14.
The letter from the Hong Kong Reparation Association, that initiated your enquiries, on page 3 claims that "Singapore, also a British colony, got refunds from the Japanese Government for the Military Bank-Notes and Wartime Japanese Bank-Notes. Besides, it was stated in the peace-treaty that all Military Bank-Notes in Singapore had been solved." There is no mention of military notes in the San Francisco Peace Treaty and I therefore doubts about this claim.
bank
have
15. Article 14 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty deals
with
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