This is an interesting story, most well known as Utsuro-bune (hollow ship), this unknown craft washed ashore in 1803 in Hitachi province on the eastern coast of Japan, with a beautiful woman inside. The ship was unlike anything the locals had seen before and the woman was a complete enigma.
Historians argue this story is folklore, but ufologists believe this is a credible, detailed account of a close encounter with extraterrestrial life.
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The utsuro-bune “Hollow ship” incident
There are three main historical texts the utsuro-bune story is told.
- Toen Shosetsu “Tales from the rabbit garden” written in 1825 by Kyokutei Bakin.
- Hyoryu Kishu “Dairies and Stories of Castaways” was written in 1835 by an unknown author.
- Ume-no-chiri “Dust of the Apricot” was written in 1844 by Nagahashi.
Toen Shosetsu was the earliest manuscript and the later texts seem similar, so I have used mainly the Toen Shosetsu version of the story for this article.
Background
On February 22, 1803, local fishermen from Harayadori, in Hitachi province (modern-day Ibaraki prefecture, northeast of Tokyo) saw a strange ship drifting off the coast. They were curious, so they went out to investigate the ship, they found it to be so unusual, it required further investigation, so they towed the ship back to the shore.
Description of the Utsuro-bune “Hollow Ship”
The fishermen seem to have made a detailed record of what they saw. The strange craft was 3.30 meters (10.83 feet) high and 5.45 meters (17.88 feet) wide.
The shape of the craft reminded the fishermen and villagers of a Kohako (Japanese incense burner) or a traditional rice pot.
Its upper part appeared to be made of red rosewood, the lower half was covered with plates of metal, the metal plates looked of excellent quality, seemingly to protect it from rocks.
The upper part had windows made of glass or crystal, covered with bars, and smothered with some kind of tree resin.
Around the middle it had a thickened band.
The fishermen looked into the craft through the windows, they were surprised to see the inside decorated with text written in an unknown language. They found some items inside, two-bed sheets, a bottle of water containing 2.6 liters of water, some cake, and kneaded food and meat.
Description of the woman (Utsuro-bune occupant)
The fishermen and villagers were shocked to find someone inside the Hollow ship, she is described as extremely beautiful and around 18 to 20 years old, she was said to be 1.5 meters (4.92 feet) tall, she had red hair, her hair had artificial extensions, they were thought to be white fur or thick, white textile strips.
Her skin was described as snow white or very pale pink, she wore expensive-looking long flowing clothes, the villagers had never seen material like this before.
The woman had a mysterious box, which she never let anyone touch and always was holding it, or it was close by. The box is described as rectangular, made of a pale material around 60 cms (24 inches) in size. There was no elaborate design it was fairly plain looking.
What secrets were in the box?
The woman tried to communicate with the local people, but they didn’t understand her or recognize her language, and she seemed not to understand Japanese, so finding out who she was, where she was from, and information about the ship was lost in translation, so the mystery deepened.
Theory of the villagers
A village elder came up with a theory trying to put together all the facts, and the information they saw in front of them.
He said the woman was a princess from a foreign land, she had an affair, and her angry husband had the princess’s lover put to death. She escaped the death penalty, but she was banished from her country, she was placed in the Utsuro-Bune “Hollow ship” with a few supplies and set adrift and her destiny/fate to be decided by the sea and the tides.
The box was said to contain the head of her lover (this had been heard of before), this would explain her attachment to it and not allowing anyone to touch it.
In one version of the story/tale, the woman remains in the village and grows old and dies there.
The more popular version is that the villagers placed the woman back into the hollow ship and set her adrift, and her fate was decided by the sea and tides again. You might think this was a callous act by the villagers, but you must remember at this period of time Japan was closed to all foreigners, foreigners could only access Japan by a few designated ports. So the villagers could have been afraid of the authorities finding out they had a foreigner (an illegal alien) in their village they could be punished, so setting her adrift in the Utsuro-Bune “Hollow Ship” was the best for everyone concerned.
Historical investigation
The Utsuro-Bune incident fascinated people, they wanted to solve the mystery, one of the first investigations on the Utsuro-Bune incident was conducted in 1844 (41 years after the incident) by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). Kyokutei highlights a book called “Roshia bunkenroku” (Records of Seen and heard things from Russia) written by Kanamori Kinken.
Kyokutei finds in the book about traditional Russian clothes and hairstyles, here it mentions a popular method to dust ladies’ hair with white powder. It also mentions that many Russian women have natural red hair and they wear clothes similar to the women in the 1803 incident.
Based on this book and his research Kyokutei comes to the conclusion that the woman of the Utsuro-Bune was Russian.
He doesn’t tell us about why she is in a Hollow ship, is she a Princess? Or a spy, since Japan is closed off, maybe Russia wants to insert a spy to find out what is going on in Japan.
Modern investigation
Further investigation of the Utsuro-Bune incident was carried out by ethnologist and historian Yanagida Kunio in 1925 and 1962.
Yanagida points out that circular boats were known of and fairly common throughout Japanese history, the windows made of glass or crystal and the metal-clad lower half of the ship made it unusual and noteworthy.
He also found out that most stories similar to that of the Utsuro-Bune follow the same formula: a girl or young woman is found in a circular boat and is rescued or set back adrift in the ocean.
Yanagida says the earliest versions of the Utsuro-Bune describe very basic circular or open log boats without the dome section. He feels the addition of the dome with the windows and metal-plated lower hull, gives the story credence and this Hollow ship could travel the seas in a fairly safe manner, but the original logboat would be too flimsy to survive in the open sea.
Yanagida concludes that the 1803 Utsuro-bune is just basically an old story/tale with additions to make it more believable and shouldn’t be taken as a real/true incident.
In more recent times Dr. Kazuo Tanaka, a Japanese professor of computer and electronics engineering from Gifu University in Tokyo, investigated the original texts (1803) in 1997.
He considers the popular comparisons of the Utsuro-Bune with modern UFO sightings to be unrealistic. He points out that the Utsuro-Bune of 1803, never flies or moves on its own, it doesn’t have any advanced technologies. It drifts, unpowered with no steering at the mercy of the sea.
Tanaka concludes that the tale of the Utsuro-Bune was a mixture of folklore and imagination.
The case of Utsuro-bune as a UFO incident
In ufology circles, the 1803 Utsuro-Bune incident has been described as an early case of a documented close encounter of the third kind based on the similarities between the drawings of the craft from the Edo period and 20th-century descriptions of flying saucers.
“Close encounters of the third kind” was derived from Ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the third kind denotes human observations of aliens or animate beings.
UFOs first appeared in the media on June 24, 1947, when American businessman Kenneth Arnold allegedly saw “flying saucers”, from then on UFO sightings have occurred worldwide. Some ufologists suggest the Utsuro-Bune could have been an unidentified submarine object (USO).
The believers who think it is a UFO say the symbols inside the Utsuro-Bune are similar to the symbols reported at the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident in England, near a United States Air Force base in 1980
The appearance of the woman, her clothes, hair, strange language, and the mysterious box, point to further evidence of an extraterrestrial encounter.
My own strange theory of the Utsuro-bune “Hollow ship”
Looking into the Utsuro-Bune incident a few things caught my eye, and I thought could there be a link/connection with the folktale/fairy tale of Urashima Taro which originates from the legend of Urashima dating back to the 8th century.
Let me briefly give you a brief summary of the story:
A fisherman called Urashima Taro notices a group of children torturing a small turtle. Taro saves the turtle and returns it to the sea. The next day a huge turtle tells Taro that the turtle he saved was the daughter of the Emperor of the sea, Ryujin, who wants to thank him.
Taro travels to the bottom of the sea to the palace of the dragon god (Ryugu-jo). He meets the Emperor and his beautiful daughter Otohime.
He stays for three days at the palace with Otohime, Taro requests to return home, the princess doesn’t want him to leave, but finally agrees and gives him a mysterious box called tamatebako, which would protect him, but he is warned never to open the box.
When he gets home, he doesn’t recognize anything or anyone, everything has changed. He finally finds out he hasn’t been away for three days but for 300 years.
All his family, friends, and everyone he has ever known has gone, in a state of grief and shock he opens the box, a cloud of white smoke escapes the box and instantly Taro has aged, his beard is long and white, and his back bent.
From the sea comes the sad, sweet voice of the princess “I told you not to open that box. In it was your age …”
The similarities I see in the two stories/tales are:
- The Sea
- A Fisherman
- A beautiful woman
- A mysterious box
Maybe the woman in the Utsuro-Bune had visited the underwater kingdom and spent time with the Emperor and his daughter, she has left the underwater kingdom in the Utsuro-Bune and surfaced off the coast of Japan.
She has been warned not to open the box, so she is not allowing anyone to touch it, and is very protective of it.
Your thoughts?
What do you think she was?
- A Russian princess
- A Russian spy
- An alien
- Returning from the underwater kingdom
- Folklore
- Just a story
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