To be or not to be : CTO - The disputable ones 06 a

I have wrote a lot on CTO stamps in the past articles.
From easy to recognise CTO cancels, over the harder ones.
This - for now - last part is about disputable cancels.

The cancels in this article are not really CTO cancels, but they are no postal cancellations either.
They are not fake, but the cancels on the stamps were not for postal use.
This means, those stamps weren't used as post stamps, or at least the cancel tells us that.
In that way, they fit the same definition as some CTO cancelled stamps...
The stamps are made unusable (cancelled) but not for postal trafic.

Let me give some examples:

Two beautiful Japanese stamps from the so-called UPU-Koban series (1883).

Scott catalogue mention shortly that those stamps can be found with "telegraph or telephone office cancels" and "sell at considerable lower prices then the postally used copies"...
The beauties above are such cancels.
Scott doesn't helps us further then the quotes lines above.
The French "Yvert" catalogue doesn't help us either, and even the (Japanese) Sakura catalogue fails to help me.

I had to search in the German "Michel" to find a picture of what was meant.

non postal cancels - old Japan

This might look like Japanese to most of you, and ... indeed it is.
The first cancel is a telegraph cancel.

telegraph stamps with telegraph cancels

The first type of these cancels is eay to recognise : an outer circle with japanese inscriptions, and an inner circle that remains empty.

post stamp with telegraph cancel

In the picture above, we see a regular stamp (1883) with a telegrap cancel.

to be continued ...