What you have there is a stack of Japanese invasion scrip.

One of the things the Japanese military did when they took over an area or nation was confiscate all the hard currency (pounds, pesos, Gulden, whatever) in exchange for their own fiat money, called scrip.

Scrip is essentially worthless except in the area it is issued in, and even then it could suffer from terrible inflation... whenever Japan needed more money in, say, Burma, they'd just go ahead and print more.

In this particular case, what you have here is scrip for the Philippines (top) and the Dutch East Indies. Assuming the stacks are all the same amount, even back during the war they were practically worthless: centavos and cents can be thought of like the US penny... a very small denomination, mere fractions of the Peso and Guilder. What you've got there might have been able to buy a pack of gum, maybe. Not each note... each stack.

I exaggerate perhaps, but not by much.

Normally these denominations would be coins, but metals were too valuable, too useful for use in war materiel, to be used as money.

Nowadays, these have some collectible value... you can find plenty of ebay auctions for them, for example. I've always found such invasion money to be fascinating... in many ways it's Monopoly money, just printed on "real" currency paper.

During the war, the US/Australia printed quite a bit of counterfeit Japanese scrip as well. I'd assume they wouldn't bother with such small denominations though, considering the limited quantities of appropriate blank paper available.