A (real) drawback of these stickers is that they may leave permanent marks or discoloration on the surface to which they are attached.
As explained above, there is no intrinsic value in these stickers, either real or fake. There are even reports of JCII stickers seen attached to second-hand cameras and lenses made in the Soviet Union, China or East Germany, which cannot possibly have been exported from Japan. Today, some second-hand sellers seem to attribute an extra value of sorts to items carrying these stickers, and recently-produced fake stickers of this type are apparently available.
Fake stickers that only say PASSED were used by manufacturers not connected with JCII or JMDC, as a way to bypass the verification of usability and patent non-infringement. JMDC was probably not used on early stickers. In addition to stickers, larger PASSED round tags were sometimes attached to camera products with a thread or ribbon.
Several changes were made to these stickers during the years. At that time, goods manufactured in Japan were regarded abroad, often with good reason, as cheap trash or (externally at least) exact copies of patented items made in other countries, and this sticker was an effort by Japanese companies and government to improve their image. The sticker does not mean that the individual item was tested, only that its model had been deemed to be usable and not a knockoff. These stickers were attached to camera products that satisfied minimal quality requirements and were not blatant copies of German camera products of the time. JCII stands for Japan Camera Industry Institute, and JMDC for Japan Machinery Design Center. An oval PASSED sticker similar to this was attached to virtually all camera equipment exported from Japan between the 1950s to the mid-1980s. The gold-colored sticker shown in Figure 1 is a small historical curiosity. Reflections on the JCII PASSED oval stickers Figure 1.
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