Cagayan Isabela

Description

EXTREMELY RARE.  A seemingly unrecorded Japanese whiteprint (reverse blueprint) map of North-eastern Luzon, made during the WWII Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (1942-5). It is made by the whiteprint method, being a form of blueprint whereby the colours are reversed to produce a purplish colour on an off-white background. This technique could only produce a small number of examples, but was cheap and technically undemanding, perfect for a wartime environment. The map was published by Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., a large Japanese textile company (founded in 1920) that had major commercial interests in the Philippines during the occupation, and which had a division that published maps. The firm still operates today under the name Tomen Corporation. The map is derived from American sources and almost all the text is written in English, with only Japanese text being found in the lower-right corner.