20 Centavos

Loon is a small municipality on the island of Bohol in the central Philippines. During the Japanese occupation, the national currency system had collapsed in practical terms across the islands, and local governments — municipalities, provinces, guerrilla administrations — issued their own emergency notes to keep local commerce functioning. The Loon 20 Centavos is one of hundreds of such hyper-local issues from 1944, the peak year of this improvised monetary activity in the Philippine provinces.

Bohol's guerrilla resistance remained unusually organized throughout the occupation, and the line between official municipal authority and resistance-linked administration was often deliberately blurred on these notes.