Who here reads Japanese?, WWII medal

[manker]

So the anchor and waves made you think it's a medal for naval service.

How did you come to that conclusion

The anchor alone doesn't necessarily mean a naval medal, it could be that the assault was a coastal landing. The waves add "extra" IMO. If you look at the veterans badge it has the anchor as well as the star but it is not just for the navy..it could just be military as opposed to a specific service.

It's the safest guess in the history of safe guesses.

Right up there with; 'That Pope - I reckon he believes in Jebus'.

[Gripper]

It say's "If found please return to-Emperor Hirohito,Tokyo ,Japan"
Seriously I would love to know what it say's as well,spent an hour searching through websites,when you first posted

[Guillaume]

Skelley, I'll ask at Hongfire.com, I'm sure one of the resident animé freaks enthusiasts will know how to decipher it.

[Cheese]

The "No 173" leads me to believe this means Number 173. :vidcc:

[Barbarossa]

EDIT: nvm (hope no-one saw that )

[DarthInsinuate]

i did

[Dark Steno]

Skelley, I'll ask at Hongfire.com, I'm sure one of the resident animé freaks enthusiasts will know how to decipher it.

When you make the thread at HF, I thought you're the one open the thread here.

[Guillaume]

Skelley, I'll ask at Hongfire.com, I'm sure one of the resident animé freaks enthusiasts will know how to decipher it.

When you make the thread at HF, I thought you're the one open the thread here.

Saying "someone I know" was so much faster than saying "someone on another forum I frequent".
I'm lazy.

[hirukenzan]

i thought i could give it an hour or two, but here is all i come up with that wouldn't dig me into a hole and make me look bad if someone corrected me.

starting from left to right: meeting/society (based off looking through korean and japanese character dictionaries　会　in modern japanese), ambiguous character possibly　之 "of" in standard chinese character (meaning old japan and korea would use it as "of"), 軍　military, 郷　hometown, 在　existence.

interestingly enough if you read the last two characters left to right in modern japanese you get 在郷　"living in the countryside" but only if read that direction which leads me to believe it's either they said that in japanese a good while ago or it's not japanese (because it's not in modern kanji dictionaries anyway). um, so the thing to wonder about (and it's probably not this way) is if we are supposed to read from right to left. but i've never seen horizontal writings from that area that need to be read like that.

i tried damn hard to get the first line but first, it's written in the style similar to the earliest chinese characters where all the radicals look only slightly similar to what they are now, which makes it difficult to confirm the characters in the middle and top. the second difficult ... well no, that's the main difficulty.

anyway, as for a guess to the first and second lines. look at the second line only carrying 3 characters. that's the right number of characters for a korean or chinese name. not so common are 3 character japanese names but anyway, i'm guessing it's a name. could even be the name of a japanese-born korean or japanese soldier who was korean or chinese. or even taken from the body of a non-japanese soldier. that's just conjecture at this point.

also of note: i didn't see any characters resembling navy　海軍 or sea　海, or even boat　船. oh what the hell let me go back and use kanji　漢字.

another thing to read is the pushed in mark just left of the No. 173. that is the engraver. i cannot read it, since it's so small but does it say a government/country or something?

[skelley521]

Thanks hirukenzan, I will pass this info on. He has had several dealers look at it also and they dont know either. Still has me wondering though.
Thanks Again