1. Mickey mouse notes were the yen notes.

2. You don't/cant educate people timely on a new money. Peso is peso in Philippines, the time period, shy of 40 years Philippines went from Spain, American to Japanese Custodianship. Too many changes == not accepted.

3. Local printing, typetext and fonts. It isn't like today where you can use comic sans immediately and change it in post. It used to all be done by hand in a printing press.

What's also interesting is you can still find silver pesos around Luzon diving, there's also this good story: http://corregidor.org/chs_trident/silver/hubbell_01.htm

If you ever have a chance to visit the Philippines, I highly suggest looking for pesos. :) I found so many, and all the locals I talk to don't know the story or history, most don't really know their history at all...

But +1 on infrastructure projects and such. Philippines also reissued the pesos coins, and they, suck, the 1 and 5 peso coin are similar in diameter and size, there is no color difference as previous currency it was gold color and silver color (not metals), and for a while, people were confused which were which -- getting change means you'd get 15 pesos back instead of 3!

Also, they are now following the ASEAN style of design with flowers and local "treasures" on the coins. The locals I talk with didn't really know there was a national plant -- always fun!

Korea and Taiwan were both integral parts of the Japanese Empire before WWWII. Their conquest pre-dated the outlawing of conquest and annexation in international law, when France and the USA decided they’d conquered enough of the world and no one else should be allowed to do so [1]. Taiwan had been Japanese since 1895 or so and Korea 1910. I’m sure if the Japanese had been in charge of the Philippines for more than a decade they’d have introduced Filipino yen too. But there was never a period when the Philippines was part of the Empire of Japan under civilian administration.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg–Briand_Pact