The clue here was Japan, which I am sure confused many of you, but it is the country with the highest numeracy rate. They did not invent mathematics though, because archaeologists have discovered figures and symbols in ancient Sumeria, which is the south of modern day Iraq. However the Japanese did have a way of doing mathematics which was all their own, it started in the early 1600s and lasted for over two hundred years, when Western ways came along. It used a kind of abacus, a very simple system of rods and beads which was widespread throughout the East and also parts of Russia. We know that it did not start there though, because we have notes by the Greek historian Herodotus about how he had seen Egyptians moving lines of pebbles in order to make calculations, just like they did in Greece.
This card shows a Buddhist Temple in Tokyo and it was issued with chocolates. They are really just thin papers, and they were designed to be stuck in a special album, though they still printed the descriptions on the back. I do not know much about Chocolat Pupier, but their advertising proudly proclaimed them "Le Meilleur Chocolat Francaise" which means "The best chocolate in France".
They were based in St. Etienne, France, and were started in the 1860s by one man, Jean-Louis Pupier. He passed it over to his son, Joseph, in 1895 and his grandsons, Marcel and Adrien, inherited in 1919.
There seems to be two versions of this set. The first, like ours, says "Bon Point" at the top. The second says "Edite par le Chocolat Pupier", and are almost certainly later, because the backs say, in red, "Nouveau prix de l`album" which means new album price; these albums were three francs but then they went up to five francs. However it looks like the red was added to a card that had the three franc price already, so there could have been three versions, our "Bon Point", the black backed version without that but with the album price, and the red overprinted version of the black, priced, cards.
Now for the African set you can see that they overprinted the section with the price with a black design - and perhaps they did this for the Asian one too, which would make a fourth variety
The set on "L`Europe" seems to have been issued first, in 1935, then "L`Asie" (Asia), and finally "L`Afrique".(Africa). All three of these sets had.a hardback album. However there was a fourth album, "L`Amerique du Nord" (North America, Greenland, Mexico, and Canada) which only had a rather basic and much more garishly cover-ed paperback album - and there was also planned to be a fifth album on "L`Amerique du Sud" (South America) but it was never produced.
There are many theories for this, but looking at the dates that we have for this series shows how close they were getting to the Second World War, and the company never really recovered from that, nor from the deprivations thereafter. In 1957 they sold up, and then things get sketchy, until in the early 1970s it just disappears. However it must have kept going, because it is now part of the company Cemoi, another long running chocolatier - which was founded in 1814.