Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune

Illustration of the “The Strange Boat Drifted Ashore on the Fief of Lord Ogasawara” from Hyoryu Kishu (Archive of Castaways), ca. 1868 or before — Source. You can also view a wider crop here, which features alien symbols on its lefthand side.

Sometime in the early months of 1803, an alien ship came ashore on the coast of Japan. Fishermen thought it was one of their own and rowed out to tow this object bobbing in the waves. It was not. The vessel looked like a cauldron, rice pot, or pod — its bottom was forged from some kind of heavy metal; the top seemed to be rosewood, lacquered and inset with latticed glass. On the beach, villagers marveled at the advanced engineering, and peering through the opaque windows, they noticed something writhing. Just then, a panel flung open on the hull and out stepped a being that looked almost human. . . Or so the various sources tell us, with varying levels of contradiction.

This utsuro-bune (hollow or vacant ship) appears in at least twelve literary sources from the late Edo period. The most notable, perhaps, is Toen shōsetsu (1825) by Bakin Takizawa (Kyokutei) — a fourteen-volume collection of gossip and gathered tales. We find a series of perplexing details in the eleventh volume of this work, during an account titled Utsuro-bune no Banjyo (A Foreign Woman in a Hollow Vessel). The alien ship, measuring about five meters in diameter, was discovered on a beach in the Hitachi Province. Its adolescent inhabitant was incomparably beautiful. Her red hair had white highlights; some speculated it was made of fur. She wore a dress crafted from a strange material, which the local women rather liked, for it could be kept tight on the top and loose near her ankles. She grasped a wooden box firmly and refused to let it go. From evidence gathered in the vessel, her species seemed to drink water and subsist on mince and cake. She spoke no Japanese.

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