Maxicards on the theme of Ghibli’s animated feature film Whisper of the Heart, realised using 2 sets of matching ‘frame’ stamps that were exclusively sold at the newly inaugurated Ghibli Park, and the pictorial cancel (this one is a kogata-in) showing the antique store that appears in the film. This kotaga-in is only available to mails posted into the postbox located on the Hill of Youth within the Park, therefore is the rarest kind of cancels offered by Japan Post that one can collect.
Originally, this pictorial cancel was scheduled to be retired after one year. But they decided to prolong its usage for a second year, making it available until 30 September 2024.
Many thanks to Fiona (@marupiter) for flying to Japan and putting my cards into the postbox!
I was on a business trip and came across this postcard completely by chance.
I’d been thinking for a few weeks about a maxicard for this stamp, which wasn’t due to come out until some time after I’d found this card!
I thought it was a perfect card and that I was really lucky !
The Pantone cards? I bought them from The Nile. They list things that aren’t sold in Australia and ship them from other countries, so it was not super-fast. But I couldn’t find them from any other local supplier.
Maxicards realised on the theme of the Japanese manga/anime Cardcaptor Sakura, using the set of matching ‘frame’ stamps that celebrate the 25th anniversary of the anime adaptation.
The choice of cancellation may be unintuitive at first: As this work was created by the manga artist group CLAMP whose members were all born on different days and at different locations (3 in Kyoto and 1 in Osaka), it’s impossible to get the cancel on the creator’s birthday. So I opted for this work’s first run date instead. However, there wasn’t much information that could be found about which date it is – I only knew that it was first serialised in the June 1996 issue of the magazine Nakayoshi. So I set the cancellation date on the first of June this year.
As to the location of the cancel – since it’s a tough choice to pick only one location in Kyoto / Osaka for the creation of these maxicards, I opted instead for the location where the story was set. It’s supposed to be somewhere in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and if memory serves, I dimly remember that Tokyo Tower – the old symbol of Tokyo – appeared in the story. Hence, I chose this classic fukei-in that has started being in use since 1959, the next year Tokyo Tower had been inaugurated.
Oh, so beautiful! And I think the cancellation is very fitting.
I loved Card Captor Sakura 20+ years ago and it’s one of the very few manga I’ve kept and still have on my bookshelve. Now I want to re-read it very badly…
These are great! Where are the first and last fukei-in from? I don’t seem to have the sunflower one in my Hokkaido map (and Google translate isn’t helping) and I can’t make out the second kanji in the last one clearly enough to translate it.
Thanks! I should have guessed the Marugame one, after all I do know that first kanji and have been there myself, but I haven’t had a chance to work on the Shikoku portion of my fukei-in map. Is the Toyosato post office the one Ozara? It seems to be a common name.
I found the postmark, then discovered how many stamps Australia has made with Teddy Bears. Why are there so many?! This is definitely the biggest set of maxicards I have made.
!
