As you can gather from my signature, I live in a small Japanese town about a hour west of Tokyo. It's got a long history, with known human settlements going back to the Jomon period (ca. BC10,000-200). People even now pick up pieces of Jomon pottery in their fields on a regular basis. And we have trails and homesteads going back hundreds of years all around us. One gravestone in the family plot just above our house is dated Genroku 14 (1701).
It is also located at an important crossing point between several powerful clans in the warring states period (16th c). Anyway, that kind of stuff I discuss on my website's
history page.
It has a bit more recent history of note as well. The
Katsusebashi, is located about a mile downstream from where I live, and it was built toward the end of WWII, at which time it and the train lines were straffed by U.S. planes in the last year of the war.
All this background to say this: I bought a metal detector last year in the U.S., but haven't used it much; since the weather was nice today tho, I took it up to the mountain and found a couple of interesting things. One was a U.S. .50 cal machine gun shell, just 30 meters from my house up the trail head.
I did a bit of searching on the net and found that these markings mean it was made at the Lake City Ordinance plant in 1943.
So probably the last person to handle that shell was an American soldier or sailor who loaded it into the plane that was attacking the bridge a mile downstream. And now it gets picked up by another American now living in Japan. Strange world.
The second thing I found was farther up on the old trail leading between my town and the hamlet on the other side of the mountain. Anyone guess what it is?
It's the mouthpiece from a brass pipe, called a
kiseru in Japanese. They were used throughout the Edo period (1600-1867), and for some years into the modern period, so I can't be sure of how old it is, but it is certainly pretty old, between 80 and 280 years I would guess. It was probably dropped by a woodsman or trader, or just a traveler making his or her way across the mountainst.
A
kiseru (not my photo)
Here's an old picture of a woman with a
kiseru (also not my photo). In her left hand she holds the pipe case and a pouch for tobacco.
I found an old coin up above my house once before, but was even more excited to find these two pieces of history today. I want to make my way gradually over the entire trail through the mountain to see what else turns up.
Cheers!
A bit of local Japanese history
Linear Mode
