On this page:

• A postcard from Fukuoka
• A package from Dorking
• Links

Postcard from Fukuoka

This is the unmistakable style of the great master of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock printing, Hokusai. There are fishing boats like these under the looming Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), from Hokusai’s masterpiece Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji. Here too is the dynamic heave and dip of a great swell, and the coral-like foam of the breakers, as the tiny boats are skilfully guided to surf down the mountainous seas.

It is always a lovely surprise to receive a postcard from a stranger, through Postcrossing (see the link below), which I signed up to late last year. I love sending at least as much as I love receiving cards and greetings, but this one from Mina in the city-port of Fukuoka in the South of Japan, is one of my favourites.

The modest little 70 Yen stamp used to send this lovely postcard 5,909 miles in 24 days is another masterpiece. It is a detail from Hokusai’s Yellow Bird Changchun (also known as Yellow Bird and Roses) of 1834. This was one of a series of stamps designed by Akira Tamaki | 玉木 明 and issued on 7th October 2022 for International Letter-Writing Week.

On today’s exchange rates, 70 Yen is about 44p. To send a postcard from the UK to Japan by airmail costs £1.85 – that’s over 4 times as much! (Surface mail would be £1.60.) Hmmm. I love these exchanges, but it’s not a cheap hobby, unless you compare it to the price of beer, of course.

Package from Dorking

It is just a plain brown reinforced envelope, 16.5 x 11.5 cm. But the use of vintage stamps to make up the 68p second class franking, together with the “Please Do Not Bend” printed in red, hint at treasure inside. And I was not disappointed – here (some days before I had expected) were two very attractive sets of mint stamps, both issued in Ethiopia in 1989.

The first shows musical instruments. This falls into a strong theme from the Ethiopian Postal Service, which has commissioned many designs to show traditional aspects of the variety of minority cultures in the country. The 30c and 50c both feature rattles, one worn round the ankle, from Gambella which is the Westernmost region of Ethiopia, and the other worn round the waist, from the Konso culture in the somewhat clumsily-named Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) in the highly diverse South-West. You can imagine how the swoosh of these rattles enhance the traditional dances.

Also from Konso is the fanfa, which is a type of over-blown “pan-pipes”, pictured on the 40c, and is the only non-percussion instrument in this group. Finally, on the 85c stamp is the negareet drum which is pictured being played on horseback. It is from the traditional culture of Ginde Beret in the highlands of Oromia, just an hour or two West of Addis Ababa.

The second set of stamps are beautiful illustrations of four of the endemic birds of Ethiopia. There are 20 bird species that are endemic to the country. Here we have the yellow-faced parrot (on the 10c), white-winged cliff chat (35c), yellow-throated seed eater (50c) and the black-headed forest oriole (1 birr). The list does sound like they have been generated by a random bird name algorithm, but there you go.

The Yellow-faced (or Yellow-fronted) parrot and the Yellow-throated seed eater are endangered, due to habitat loss. As we all shall be unless we collectively get our ecologically sustainable heads sorted out pretty soon.

Links

Postcrossing – “It’s a project that allows you to send postcards and receive postcards back from random people around the world. That’s real postcards, not electronic!“

StampWorld (Ethiopia 1989) – “The most complete stamp catalogue in the world…”

Bittergrounds – The excellence of Japan’s 2022 stamps – Bittergrounds is a lovely site with beautiful feature pages like this – “Bittergrounds: espresso, stamps and conversation“