I checked the service registry regulations (兵籍規則) they refer to and saw that Combat Experience History (出戦務) was indeed supposed to be entered in the registry in vermillion, so no wonder all the confusion about black and vermillion.
I rechecked all the filling in instructions I posted here and none talk of vermillion entries, so the passbook was only supposed to be in black except when corrections in vermillion became necessary.
How did the soldiers actually carry their passbooks? I have come across no regulations or guidelines on this point for WW2, but I came across army correspondence that suggests most soldiers carried they passbooks in their backpacks during the Russo-Japanese War.
This became an issue, as many of the wounded soldiers, returned to the Rusu-Reserve Division in Japan for treatment, were found to be missing their passbooks. This happened, because as soon as they were wounded, they were stripped of their gear on the spot, and transported to the rear, while their gear got left in the field until collected later for delivery to depots, during which things often got lost.
So they were not casually carrying passes in their pockets back then, and the home units had to reissue large numbers of passes to the wounded, which should be a hint when determining whether a pass was a "Zweitschrift" reissue as suggested by Tom.
This particular correspondence was related to the 10th Division and dated 26th February 1905.
The Manchurian Version
Along with all its uniforms, the Army Passbook issued to Manchukuo soldiers were also designed by the Japanese. A surprising revelation in a draft document of the passbook handling regulations from August 1933 mentions that the Manchurian passbooks were to be issued with a photo inside, unlike the Japanese versions.
For requesting issuing of the pass, 2 photos were to be submitted, of which one went into the passbook and the other went into the passbook issue register/roster.
Also, the name of the pass was to be 軍人手簿 (Gunjin Shubo) in Chinese, instead of the Japanese 軍隊手牒 (Guntai Techo).
The photo below of the actual passbook may be of a replica, but considering that an original would be super rare, I still thought it was worth showing.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 10-04-2018 at 05:55 PM.
I wanted to share this unusual late war techou in my collection. It was purchased out of Japan a few years back. Unlike the cloth covered examples earlier in the war, this example's cover is of thin cardstock-like paper that is stapled rather than sewn. There is also a slit for the closing tab on the back. The name of the soldier is Id'd on the inside cover of this example as well. In 12 years of collecting these booklets, this is the only such example I have seen.
This soldier was a member of "Gonan" 22403 Unit: 421st Infantry Regiment within the 146th Division. This was one of the coastal divisions that was supposed to defend Japan from invasion, activated in February, 1945. This soldier was activated out of Kumamoto Prefecture on April 5, 1945 and was a machine gunner.
Tom
Here's the 1943 March update to the Specialty Entry Abbreviations List for Passbooks
More often, I see people picking up booklets that are not what I discussed here, but look similar. So perhaps I should briefly touch upon the other look-alikes that are easily mistaken for army passbooks.
The photo below shows a set of similar booklets, but only one is the Army passbook (No 5). However, they all belonged to the same person, so it serves as a handy example to explain which is what.
No. 1 is his Youth School Booklet .This booklet says he was born in 1919 as a second son to parents in Mie prefecture and had graduated from elementary school in March 1931. At the time of entering class 2 of Youth School in Oct 1936, he was a live-in employee of a Kimono fabric wholesaler in Nihonbashi Tokyo. He finished with Youth school in March 1937 at which time he was 157cm tall and weighing 45.8 kg. Packed under the cover is his school attendance cards. One was required to take this booklet to the draft physical check up.
No.2 is the card he received after the draft check-up dated September 1939, assigning him to 1st Replacement Reserve Status, which means he was fit for active service, but was not immediately drafted.
No. 3 is his Replacement Reserve Book . The cover says Compiled by the Ministry of the Army “Booklet for Pre-induction Replacement Soldiers of the army (陸軍未入営補充兵手牒)“, but the back cover reveals it was issued by the Reservist's Association and not by the Army. There is a pocket on the back cover, where the above card (No.2) was to be kept. This booklet was to be kept inside the Service Bag shown in the left and in this way carried to drafts, annual reserve roll calls and to meetings of the Reservist Association. At the periodic roll calls for the reserves, participation needed to be recorded in this book. His occupation is still shown as working for the fabric wholesaler in Tokyo. The book also records his enrollment in the Reservist Association in October of 1939. Although we translate it as a Reservists' Association, the Japanese name actually means “Association of Soldiers Residing in their Hometowns”. Thus members included reserves who had never been to war, as in this case.
Normally reservist groups are for those who already had war experience, so when those inexperienced youngsters joined, who had not yet been initiated into the Army, they needed to be treated differently from the other vets. Therefore it was decided in 1934 that the reservist associations would issue them with a suitable primer in a format similar to the Army Passbook. The Army passbook was the official instrument for recruiting, so this reservist's booklet was issued "in addition to" the Army booklet, not as a substitute.
No.5 is the usual Army Pass Book. He received this at the time he showed up for his physical exam. But as he was not immediately inducted into the army, his official army passbook remained unused, with the exceptions of his roll call attendances. Thus his attendance to the inspections in 1941 and 42 are recorded here.
No 4 Would explain why he never went to war. It is a booklet titled “Detailed Guidelines for Plant Personnel” issued by the Tachikawa Army Air Depot, where he was repair personnel , probably for planes.
Mimeograph-printed and pasted-in entries
Often you will see service entries that are pasted into the passbook. These are not corrections, but block entries that were shared by many troop members.
Instead of hand entering the same text over and over in multiple passbooks, these block entries were mimeograph printed and pasted in.
The example below describes how one got dispatched to Rabaul to be inducted into unit Numa 8925 (229 Infantry Regiment) to garrison Kolombangara Island. This unit was actually a newly formed 229 Battalion composed of members drawn from various other regiments. Thus this whole entry applied to the entire 229th Battalion, so it got printed instead of hand-entered. The applicable official activity report for the 229th Regiment is also attached below, highlighting the formation of this garrison battalion.
Making multiple copies of the same text in pre-Xerox Japan was done by mimeographing, as carbon copies done on typewriters were not a practical field option for the Japanese language.
When I was in elementary school, we printed our monthly school newspaper in this way. This was done by handwriting the text with a needle-tip pen on a wax-laminated sheet, and this sheet got fixed to a frame to become a printing screen. And when you put a fresh sheet of paper under this screen and ran over it with a ink roller, what you scratched out on the waxed sheet came out as print. Shown below is a photo of what this printing setup looked like. They were easy to use and could save the company scribe a lot of work, so large troop movements and so on were often printed in this manner.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 07-11-2022 at 12:25 PM.
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