During a recent reorganising of documents at home, I chanced upon this brittle-looking brown card. A closer look revealed that it actually belonged to my grandpa and documents his routine fortnightly purchasing (or was it really rationing?) of oil, beans, fish etc during the Japanese Occupation.
Some of the dates might look odd e.g. 02/02/04 simply because WWII took place within the 40s but according to a reply from National Archives, ” Regarding the years, 1942-1945 was also commonly referred to the years 2602-2065 during the Japanese Occupation. This could be a reason why the numbers were stated 04. “
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4 Responses
Thanks for sharing. Wished I could examine the document in greater detail though, ‘cos am interested in what the words say (but hey, I’m not complaining!) Did you ask why this card was kept?
Posted on April 20th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I’m really glad that I finally got a comment from the readers (yes!). I guess my grandparents had the habit of keeping old things, so much so we had difficulty persuading them to just let go of them. Thankfully they kept invaluable things as well. Haha.
P.S. high res pics are on their way. =)
Posted on April 21st, 2006 at 3:40 am
OK, got them. Thanks! In this case, it was an “old thing” worth keeping. I feel it takes intuition to know what is worth keeping and what’s not. Something common or considered junk today could prove valuable in future. Might not be monetary terms but in terms of emotional value.
Posted on April 21st, 2006 at 11:37 am
My father also have habit of keeping old things. But unfortunately we lost a lot of it. Otherwise, I have more things to blog about.
But good news. I still have his birth cert and citizen cert. My dad born in 1918.
Posted on April 21st, 2006 at 1:40 pm
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