1st National Boy Scout Jamboree, Tokyo

On 22 September 1949 Japan issued an 8 yen yellow-brown commemorative for the first postwar national Boy Scout gathering in Tokyo — catalogued by Domfil as 949.30 under «National Jamboree in Tokyo», motif «Scout», and by Colnect as the 1st National Boy Scout Jamboree, Tokyo.

The stamp anticipates the 1st Boy Scout National Rally (第1回ボーイスカウト全国大会), held on 24–25 September 1949 at the Imperial Palace plaza and Hibiya Park in Tokyo. The Scout Association of Japan records about 3,500 participants; this two-day camp rally is treated in Japanese Scout historiography as the precursor of the later numbered Japan Jamborees (the first full Japan Jamboree under that name came in 1956 at Karuizawa). In the occupation years after 1945, Scouting was being rebuilt under the postwar federation — the 1949 Tokyo meeting was the first large national public expression of that revival.

Production: designed by Masaru Kimura, photogravure at the Government Printing Bureau (Ministry of Finance), panes of 50, comb perforation about 13 × 13½, size about 26 × 36 mm. SOSOW records a print run of 3,000,000 and notes that 1,500 specimens received a «Mihon» (specimen) overprint. Catalogue numbers: Scott JP 467, Michel JP 460, Yvert JP 434, Stanley Gibbons JP 544.

SOSOW also records that the Scout figure is based on a photograph of George Russell published in the 1948 Boy Scouts of America Field Book — an American model adapted for Japan’s first national Scout commemorative stamp of the postwar era. That international borrowing underlines how the Japanese movement was reconnecting with world Scouting while staging its own national rally in Tokyo.

ATA 1964 is especially precise on the design source: the Scout figure was taken from an illustration on page 54 of the 1948 Boy Scouts of America Field Book; the photographer was William Hillcourt and the Scout was George Russell of Mendham, New Jersey. Retouching added tents and removed another Scout who had been kneeling in the original photograph. A Scout-badge cancel also shows a tree stump with new twig growth, read as a symbol of Japan’s renewed Scouting programme after the war.