Hitachi Province

Hitachi was one of the old provinces of Japan, on the Pacific coast northeast of Edo (Tokyo). It was created in the 7th century and abolished in 1871, when its lands became most of Ibaraki Prefecture. In the Edo period it was dominated by the Mito domain, a branch of the ruling Tokugawa family that sponsored the great history Dai Nihonshi.

The province is the setting of the utsuro-bune, or 'hollow ship', legend. Several texts written between 1815 and 1844 describe a round vessel, part glass, that washed up on its shore, most say in 1803, carrying a young woman in strange clothes who held a box no one was allowed to touch. Fishermen are said to have pushed the boat back out to sea.

Modern UFO writers sometimes call it Japan's Roswell. Historians of folklore treat it as an Edo-period story that drew on older legends of women set adrift in boats; the accounts differ on place names, and no local record confirms the event.