Where the Utsuro-bune landed depends on the text

The Toen-kai account of the hollow ship names the beach where it came ashore: Harayadori, in Hitachi province. No Edo-period record has turned up with a place of that name, and it was taken for an invention.⁹ In 2014 Tanaka Kazuo, a Gifu University professor emeritus,¹⁰ found the beach written another way in a document from a ninja family’s papers: Hitachihara Sharihama, a name that appears on Inō Tadataka’s map of the coast.¹¹¹² If he is right, the beach is real. It is also a stretch of dunes where, the Kamisu city newsletter says, nobody lived until 1872.¹³

One story, fourteen texts

The Archives file the copy under the Hirokata zuihitsu, “Hirokata’s essays”, call number 特095-0004.¹⁴ Minakami Ryūtarō traces the text to 1825 and the Toen-kai, a monthly gathering in Edo where twelve collectors of curiosities brought each other strange stories, and names Bakin and his son Sōhaku as its authors.²² It was later bound as the Toen shōsetsu and travelled in hand copies.²² A coloured copy at Tenri University’s Central Library has the vessel, the woman and four strange signs.²³

The Ōshuku zakki draws a different vessel. It is a round one with a flat rim and a single window, labelled ウツロ舟図 (“hollow ship drawing”), and a woman with long loose hair stands beneath it.²⁴

Tanaka counts fourteen texts of thirteen kinds, and every one has a picture.¹ He sorts them into three groups. The Toen shōsetsu and nine other kinds are the first. The Ōshuku zakki and a paper from Mito form the second, which tells the same event from another source. The third is a single paper that puts the landing at a harbour in Bōshū.²⁵

Three of them he calls the oldest and closest to the original: the Banke document, the Shinko zakki and the Ibun zassho. They share a plot, were written soon after 1803, name no lord, and draw the vessel as a bowl with a straight base.² The Ibun zassho, in the Sakakibara family papers, is a private notebook compiled by Suzuki Kanrai, who died in 1812; its entries run to 1806.²⁶ The table follows Tanaka’s date for each text.

Three months

The oldest three agree on the day and differ on the month. Tanaka takes the Banke document’s second month for a copyist’s slip, which would put all three on the 26th of the third month.⁴ The Toen-kai text has the 22nd of the second month, and spring.¹⁴ The Mito document and the Ōshuku zakki entry say the eighth month.⁵

The calendar database of Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory shows that 1803 had a leap first month.²⁷ By it, the Toen-kai date falls on 13 April and Tanaka’s date for the oldest three on 17 May.²⁷ The eighth month began in mid-September.²⁷ So the texts put the landing in spring or in autumn.

A beach with many spellings

Several of the texts write the beach with the characters 原舎 and small changes of ending, which Tanaka reads as Harayadori.⁶ A printed broadside has 京舎ヶ濱 in Kashima district, the Ōshuku zakki 阿久津浦, the Mito document 外濱.⁶²⁸

Most also say the beach lay in the fief of Ogasawara Etchū no kami, and that is the first thing that fails. Tanaka and Minakami both find no such fief on that stretch of coast.²⁹ Tanaka puts the fishing rights at Sharihama in the hands of a different bannerman, Matsushita Kawachi no kami.³⁰ He reads the Ogasawara line, which says the account was copied from a report by that lord’s fief, as the story’s source rather than its landing place.³¹

Sharihama is the best candidate so far. The Banke document, which Tanaka found in 2014, writes the name as 常陸原舎り濱, and he says the same name is on Inō’s map and is the Sharihama of today’s Hasaki, in Kamisu city.¹¹ The National Archives are more careful, saying only that Harayadori is “said to be” perhaps Sharihama.³² Minakami, whose paper of 2014 called Harayadori invented, was writing before the Banke document came to light.⁹

The Mito document has its own beach. Tanaka found the name 外濱 in the Yanagawa district of Kamisu, about 10 km from Sharihama, and reads the paper as an advertisement for Seifuku-ji temple’s silkworm faith, not a travel report.³³

The woman in the vessel

All ten kinds in Tanaka’s first group have a woman with a box.¹⁸ Little else about her stays put. The three oldest give a pale blue-white face, dark red eyebrows and hair, and white teeth.³⁴ The Toen-kai text has reddish brows and hair and a pink face.¹⁹³⁴ The Ume no chiri of 1844 has skin white as snow and glossy black hair, and Tanaka reads the later wording as simplified over time.³⁴

A hollow ship with a woman aboard was not new in 1803. The National Archives list one that came ashore at Yoshida-ura in Mikawa in 1698, with a man’s head at the bow and a woman nobody could understand.³⁵ A diary of 1699 reports another at Atsuta, with a palace woman and a monk’s head on a spike, and the diarist writes it off as a false tale.³⁶

A guess that ends in a shrug

The Hirokata copy ends by guessing at her country. It says the signs inside the vessel resemble those on an English ship that came to Uraga, and that she might be English or a king’s daughter from the Netherlands or America.³⁷

Minakami, quoting Yanagita Kunio’s essay of 1926, gives the same words as Bakin’s note.³⁷ Yanagita himself called the whole story a tall tale, because the four signs in the vessel were nonsense.³⁸ The one early text that doubts it, the Ibun zassho, ends 「此事偽と聞たり」, “this matter was heard to be false”.³ Tanaka cannot tell whether “false” means the report to the authorities or the story, and he finds no official record of a landing.³

Minakami thinks the event probably never happened.⁷ Tanaka says in an interview that he feels it was probably based on something real.⁸

How it became a flying saucer

In 1926 Yanagita could treat letters nobody could read as proof of a tall tale. Minakami argues that after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 24 June 1947 “letters not of this world” no longer meant that, and could mean the writing of visitors.³⁹ Tanaka began studying the story around 1998.¹⁰ Skeptical Inquirer printed his paper in July/August 2000 under the title “Did a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Occur on a Japanese Beach in 1803?”⁴⁰ We found no earlier publication that sets the vessel beside a saucer, but we could not read Tanaka’s paper or his book, so that is a gap in our search and not a finding.

Two of the explanations for the signs and the shape are on the record. Minakami reads the triangle-and-circle signs as an upside-down VOC monogram of the Dutch East India Company, the mark of a Nagasaki ship-owner’s flag; Tanaka reports the idea and doubts that Dutch letter frames were in use in Hitachi in 1803.⁴¹ Tanaka’s own reading is that the early texts describe a silkworm in its stages, pale larva to white cocoon, and that the Mito document’s woman was drawn from the Kinjiki-hime statue at Seifuku-ji. He still calls the origin of the saucer shape unexplained.⁴²

A copy from Akita

On 23 July 2026 the Sakigake newspaper reported that Akita Prefectural Library holds a copy, made in 1867 by Ogasawara Tameji of Asō in present-day Noshiro, of a record titled 「聞書覚及俳諧」. It puts the arrival on the Hitachi coast in February 1803, as the paper gives it. We could read only the free opening of the article, and it does not say whether that is the lunar second month. Experts told the paper it is plain and lacks the sensational parts of the other texts, and one called it possibly a real drift report.⁴³ We have not seen it.