Kazuo Tanaka
Japanese engineer and professor emeritus at Gifu University who researches the utsuro-bune legend
- Position
- Professor emeritus, Gifu University
- Known for
- Research on utsuro-bune (hollow ship) documents
- Finding
- A document naming Hitachihara Sharihama, a real beach
- Location today
- Hasaki Sharihama, Kamisu, Ibaraki Prefecture
The Gifu University scholar who found an Edo-period document placing the 1803 utsuro-bune landing at a real beach, now in Kamisu, Ibaraki.
What is Kazuo Tanaka known for?
Kazuo Tanaka is a professor emeritus at Gifu University in Japan who has studied the utsuro-bune, the 'hollow ship' said to have drifted ashore in Hitachi Province (now Ibaraki Prefecture) in 1803 with a young woman inside.
Earlier accounts of the story give place names, such as Haratonohama, that cannot be matched to any known location. Tanaka identified, in a document from a samurai household (the Banke bunsho), the place name Hitachihara Sharihama, which corresponds to a real stretch of coast now called Hasaki Sharihama in the city of Kamisu. The find, reported in 2014, suggested the legend had been attached to a specific place.
Tanaka treats the utsuro-bune as a folk legend shaped by Edo-period fears of foreign ships and older stories of beings arriving from the sea, not as evidence of an unidentified craft.
His document find tied the utsuro-bune legend to a real beach in Kamisu.
Mentioned on these pages
- Rabbit holeUtsuro-bune (the hollow ship)
Sources
- Nippon.com, '“Utsurobune”: A UFO Legend from Nineteenth-Century Japan' (2020)Reference
- Wikipedia, 'Utsuro-bune'Reference
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