Can anyone tell me what these are? I found them with my grandfather's WWII navy medals. They are metal, 1 inch long, and appear to have japanese writing stamped into them. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.
If you don't get an answer soon you might try asking over on the jaircraft everything else board. They do a lot of photo and item id'ing over there although mostly aircraft and ship oriented.
They are Inkan or Hanko (usually called a "chop" by westerners), a seal pressed into wax for important documents. Normally these have the indent at the end of the stick rather than in the side like these, so they are rather odd. I wonder if these didn't fit into some sort of device like a notary public's stamp, to be used by a clerk who had to seal great numbers of documents?
Or they could have been used by proxies to sign for the official. The odd design could have been to distinguish them from the "real" chop.
Perhaps so. I'm pretty sure they are chops of some kind and if the seal could be identified they might have great value, depending on whether it's the Minister of Public Toilets or Admiral so-and-so.
Thanks everyone. Great information! Were these "chops" used in a machine or device or did people just walk around with the bars in their pocket? Do you think the writing is a Japanese word that can be translated, or is it a person's name? I'll do more research with this new info. Thanks!
They are generally "Kanji" which are symbols denoting a syllable, generally two or three stylized Kanji combined to spell out a name. Or (to make it complicated) they could be in sveral older "alphabet" (prior to Kanji) marks passed down in an old family, instead of relatively modern Kanji. To make it even more complicated, the word spelled out might not be the name of the owner, but a place name, an event, something indicating a particular family history. And to get even more complicated, they might not indicate a family at all, but an office - Minister of Whatever, General in Charge of this or that army, Chief of Police. At any rate, only a Japanese, and perhaps only a Japanese with some historical education could tell you who or what office they represent. I'd buy some seal wax and photograph the impressions they make because pix of the symbols on the stick will be backwards and harder to interpret.
Please come back and let us know what you find out. It would be great if they are traced to some WWII historical figure.
Will do. I've got some medals I can post too. My grandfather was a maintenance worker on a hospital ship, so who knows how he got this stuff.
Oh, I missed a question you asked above. A personal chop would be part of your writing desk articles, along with pens, brushes, ink holder, etc. A personal chop belonging to an important person is quite fancy, perhaps made of ivory with gold accents and so on. These are very pedestrian, so I *think* they are possibly from an office where lesser mortals might put together correspondence sealed with the bosses chop. They could still be extremely valuable if the seal proved to be that of a political or military figure. Or, they could be the seal of some factory executive and just a curiosity. I'm out of my depth here, but a Japanese scholar could likely decipher them. It's too bad your dad came by them second-hand. If some marine or soldier grabbed them in General Ushijima's headquarters at Okinawa (for example), you could have something very important.
I got the sealing wax. Worked well, but is quite hard to get a clear picture with camera or scanner. Here is one of them:
I ran these by some folks who are experts in Japanese writing. One of them says "phlegm" and "to rise up, or increase". "Coughing up phlegm?" So it appears that these could be medical related, since my grandfather served on a hospital ship. However, the wax impressions are backwards, meaning the stampings are positives. That leads me to believe that these are possibly dies for creating rubber/wax stamps used in medical coding of records. Due to their shape, I think they might fit into a larger machine, like a typewriter or printing press, possibly to create phrases or sentences to be stamped. Knowing that these might be medical related, does anyone have knowledge of relevant WWII hospital equipment?
