A small sensation: the secret of the golden JCII labels has been revealed

Anyone who collects Japanese cameras from the post-war period will recognise them: the small golden JCII stickers with their mysterious two-digit number. Generations of collectors have wondered what this code means. Our member Dr Stephan Baedeker has now helped to answer the riddle.

With the support of his friend Elmar - a German who has been on the board of a Japanese company for thirty years and knows the customs there inside out - Dr Baedeker contacted the JCII Camera Museum in Tokyo. Several perfectly polite enquiries in Japanese and finally a personally delivered letter led to success. Yoshio Inokuchi, curator of the museum, went in search of clues and spoke to a person who was working at JCII at the time of the foundation's inspection activities.

The solution is simple:

"The numbers on the labels are a combination of the last digit of the year and the month. For example, January 1986 would be the number '61', and January 1976 would also be '61'." - Yoshio Inokuchi, Curator JCII Camera Museum

This means that a large part of the golden Japanese camera era can now be dated much more precisely - a tool that collectors and researchers have long lacked. In practice, the ten-year ambiguity can usually be resolved using the known production periods of the respective models.

One question remains unanswered: For the months of October, November and December, the key is not clear, as no one has seen three-digit codes on a JCII label - as far as has been documented so far. How these three months were coded is the subject of further research, to which Dr Baedeker is already devoting himself.

We would like to thank Dr Baedeker and his friend Elmar for their detective work and look forward to the next step.