Japan.Utsuro-bune · Hitachi

The utsuro-bune ('hollow ship') tale is one of the most singular in Japanese folklore and a fascinating antecedent of the 'unidentified object' narrative predating the modern era. According to several Edo-era texts, on 22 February 1803, fishermen on the Harayadori coast, in Hitachi Province (present-day Ibaraki Prefecture, on Japan's eastern coast), sighted a strange drifting vessel and towed it ashore.

The descriptions, remarkably concrete, agree on the essentials. The object was about 3.3 metres high and 5.45 wide, and its shape recalled a kōro, a Japanese incense burner or censer. The upper part seemed to be of red-lacquered rosewood, while the lower was clad in metal plates —a detail modern enthusiasts stress for its resistance to rocks. In the upper half were several windows of glass or crystal, protected with bars and sealed with a kind of resin. And, above all, the interior was decorated with texts written in an unknown language. Inside traveled a young woman, between 18 and 20, with very pale skin and red hair, dressed in an unfamiliar manner, who could not communicate in Japanese and who held a box she would let no one touch.

The story survives in at least four texts: Oushuku Zakki (1815), Toen Shōsetsu (1825) —edited by the famous writer Kyokutei Bakin, with one of the most detailed versions—, Hyōryū Kishū (1835) and Ume-no-chiri (1844). Historians and ethnologists such as Kazuo Tanaka and Yanagita Kunio have studied the utsuro-bune as part of a long Japanese folkloric tradition of 'women arrived from the sea'. The soberest interpretation, which Bakin himself already hinted at, is that the woman may have been a real foreigner —a Russian princess was speculated, or a British, American or Bengali woman— whose arrival in an unusual boat was mythologized as it passed from mouth to mouth and copy to copy. Only much later did some ufologists reinterpret the episode as an encounter with extraterrestrial life.

The utsuro-bune matters to the corpus as the Japanese equivalent of the European prodigy broadsheets —Nuremberg 1561, Basel 1566—: a pre-photographic document demonstrating that fascination with a strange, unidentified object with an incomprehensible occupant is deeply rooted in very different cultures and long predates 20th-century ufology. Its value is historiographic and comparative: it extends the longue-durée anchor beyond Europe and shows that the narrative mold of the 'incomprehensible visitor arrived in a strange craft' is a cultural universal, not an invention of the space age.

That is why, as with the European historical cases, the posterior loads onto the mundane/misid narrative. The most economical explanation, and the one Japanese scholars themselves defend, is twofold: on one hand, a folkloric substrate of 'women come from the sea' legends; on the other, the possibility of a real event mythologized —the arrival of a shipwrecked foreigner in an unusually designed boat, whose features (pale skin, red hair, unintelligible language and script, exotic dress) are perfectly compatible with a European or an Asian from another region in the closed Japan of the Edo period. The small mass of indeterminacy acknowledges that we cannot verify witnesses from over two centuries ago nor cleanly separate the fact from the literary adornment added by copyists like Bakin. The trace assigned to the non-human open is a concession to historical uncertainty, not to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which is a late reinterpretation. In the corpus, the utsuro-bune is the Asian witness that the 'encounter with the unknown' has cultural roots as deep as they are universal.