Return of Japan’s ‘culturally significant’ treasures to Okinawa from US sparks joy

“It is a great joy for the people of the prefecture to have this Okinawan treasure back, allowing us to directly connect with the days of the Ryukyuan kingdom,” said Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki after the artefacts were handed over last week.

The 22 artefacts – including six painted scrolls from the 18th and 19th centuries depicting kings of the Ryukyu Kingdom, ceramics, a teapot and a hand-drawn and annotated map of the Okinawan islands – were discovered by family members of a former WWII soldier as they cleared his home after his death last year.

Mystery still surrounds how the veteran acquired the items as he never served in the Pacific theatre during the conflict.

The family – who has asked not to be identified — researched online and discovered that the items were in a Federal Bureau of Investigation file for stolen art, at which point they contacted the FBI’s Boston office.

“They came across what appeared to be very valuable Asian art,” FBI Special Agent Geoffrey Kelly, coordinator for art theft cases in the Boston office, said in an interview posted on the agency’s website.

“Once they realised they were stolen, they reached out to the FBI,” he said.

A typewritten letter that was with the items made it clear that they had been collected in Okinawa in the last days of the war “and therefore most likely had been looted,” Kelly said.

The investigative team compared the black and white images of the missing artwork with the recovered items and they “were a pretty good match,” Kelly said.

“There is something very climactic about unfurling a scroll,” he added. “I didn’t do it when I recovered it initially because I certainly didn’t want to damage it … so really the first time they were unfurled, that we could see them, was at