5 Centavos

Bantayan is a small island municipality in Cebu province, and like dozens of Philippine local governments during the Japanese occupation, it issued emergency guerrilla currency when the pre-war Philippine Commonwealth peso became unavailable for day-to-day trade. These municipal emergency notes operated in an economic grey zone — technically backed by nothing more than local government authority, but accepted out of necessity.

Small denominations like this 5 Centavos were the workhorses of that improvised system, used for ordinary market transactions the Japanese military scrip couldn't easily reach. Paper quality and printing methods varied dramatically across issues, and Bantayan examples are among the harder provincial Cebu notes to locate today.