ID on a few Japanese items please

[48stars]

Just picked up a handful of items brought back by a U.S. Army MP. Wondering if this is a POW item considering the Japanese and English writing.

[48stars]

Dog Tags?

[48stars]

[rbminis]

Dog Tags?

Not dog tags, they are small oval brass discs with a sort of rectangular hole at each end and Kanji on it.
Mine can be seen here to the left of the saki cup. I do not have a close up of it.
Ralph.

[ghp95134]

I cannot find the kanji on my computer, or in Nelson's .... and I can only get a translation when I input as Chinese .... however --
The Bataan piece.

Written by brush:
保甲巡祭員
Bǎojiǎ xún jì yuán
[Japanese: Hokō Junsai-In???] It's really bad to try to guess a kanji phrase when you don't really know....

Neighborhood Group Patrol Member??? Sort of like a "Neighborhood Watch"? I'm just guessing!!

保甲 [bǎojiǎ]

1. noun Formerly: a household registration system in which a certain number of households comprise a jia (甲), which in turn is joined with a certain number of other jias to become a bao (保), each level administered by an appointed leader with those on the lower l.

This part, stamped on the left margin, is easier to decypher:

垣第六五五八部隊中井隊
Kaki dai 六五五八 Butai Nakai-tai
Wall-Unit #6558, Nakai Group/Section

I'm not sure of the proper pronunciation of 垣 [kaki - fence] in this case.

----

Wooden tags:
1. 成田山 Narita-san [an amulet from a famous Shingon temple]
2. A 型 A-kata -- Type A [Possibly blood group]
3. 林維政 Name. I cannot tell if it is Chinese or Japanese.
3a. If Japanese, 林 is Hayashi (and I can't find any Japanese on Google named 維政
3b. If Chinese (and LOTS of Chinese results on Google): Lum/Lin Wéi-zhèng
4. 鹿児島神宮御守 Kagoshimajingū omamori -- Kagoshima Jingu amulet
5. Omamori/amulet -- can't read it; too fuzzy. Perhaps a native-speaker can assist.

Cheers,
--Guy

Edit: The stamp on the "A-kata" tag is a US Army Intelligence stamp similar to this:

[tomp]

垣第六五五八部隊 is the coded unit for the 22nd Field Artillery Regiment, 16th Division, IJA. It looks like this cloth identifier was created pre August,1944 when the 16th was still garrisoned around Manila before being moved to Leyte.


Tom

[Stu W]

FYI ... as you asked about the possibility of them being dog tags I'll provide close views of two dog tags. One, an EM, and the other an Officer. As Ralph mentioned they are metal discs.

Regards,
Stu

[48stars]

Thanks for the info fellas, much appreciated. With a guess that one of the wooden tags has a blood type, any chance it's like an unofficial dog tag? Being marked with a U.S. Army official stamp, maybe a Japanese POW ID Tag?

[tomp]

I think nearly anything could be possible when it comes to unofficial IDing of one's person/possessions. There are several examples out there of scratched in names/addresses on brass dog tag blanks, names on wood tags, etc. Soldiers probably used whatever was available around them. As to a Japanese POW ID tag, again, anything is possible, but there is nothing on the tag that definitively points to that. The US stamp that you see on the tag was used by intelligence (most likely Marine by the design of the stamp) to clear items that had no intelligence value so the soldier could keep it as a souvenir. This is mostly seen on captured documents, but I have seen them on flags, the backs of photographs, and even on a wooden fork (that was a strange one). I am going purely on conjecture here, but I would think POW related ID tags, etc., would have a lot of English on them-- blood type would be all in English, and a romanized version of the name would be included for easy reading by allied personnel, that kind of thing.

Tom

[48stars]

Thanks kindly for all the information.