02: The Japanese SOS Incident

This second issue of the Prevailing Theory has us in the Land of the Rising Sun, exploring a strange SOS sign, and the story that unraveled surrounding it.

Imagine this. It's the 24th of July, 1989. You're sweating in the shade of a birch tree near the Asahidake Mountain in Hokkaido, Japan. You've been lost for a few days now, and you're starting to feel delirious.  You look over at your friend,  and he smiles back at you reassuringly.

"They have to have a team out already. Someone will find us." He almost sounds like he believes it.

Suddenly, you become aware of the deafening sound of helicopter rotors overhead. You've never heard such a sweet sound in your life. You run out into the clearing, waving your hands. Your friend is shouting up at them as well, trying to get their attention.

They see you and begin to descend slowly onto a flat part of the mountainside. You realize you're crying tears of joy as you run to the clearing, pushing your exhausted muscles to their spent limit.

A rescuer embraces you tightly after they've landed. He begins talking to you, his voice a friendly and pleasing baritone.

"Don't worry. You're safe now. We'll take you back to your families and homes."

It's music to your ears. Then he says something else.

"It's a good thing you two made that SOS sign nearby or we might have never known where to look."

You look at your friend who breaks off a drink of water to return the eye contact. You both exchange a look of confusion before you turn to the rescuer and say, "What SOS sign?"

In the summer of 1989, a Japanese search crew found a giant SOS sign made from birch trees that had been cut down and laid to make the letters. Spotting the sign enabled the rescue team to find the man and his friend after they'd gone missing. But after establishing the man and his friend didn't make the sign, Japanese authorities were puzzled. Who made this sign, and why? And were they ever saved?

In the days following the rescue, the authorities made several puzzling discoveries.

Investigating the sign itself, they looked at aerial photographs the Japanese Forestry Service takes every five years of the area, and saw a reflection on a photo that the sign existed in 1987. The same reflection could not be seen on the photo taken in 1982. Close to the sign, police found a full human skeleton with gnaw marks on some of the bones, indicating some scavenging had occurred. The skeleton had fractures in its right shoulder, and left thigh. The coroner concluded that these were present when the person was alive, and upon further examination, the conclusion was made that the bones belonged to a woman, with a blood type of O.

In the vicinity of the body, police found a backpack containing three cassette tapes, a Sony tape recorder, some basic hygiene implements, and one ID card issued to a man named Kenji Iwamura.

These two findings seem to contradict one another. The bones belonging to a woman, and the backpack being found near the body implying it belonged to the deceased containing the ID card of a man. It gets more odd.

The first two cassette tapes were anime soundtracks, and the last was a recording of a man calling for help. The message, according to barelysociable's YouTube video, is translated as such:

"I can't move on the cliff, SOS help me.

I can't move on the cliff, SOS help me.

The place is where I first met the helicopter.

I can't go up deeply Sasa.

Lift me from here."

You would be forgiven if the translation confused you, because it isn't great. The obvious questions are going to surround the line "I can't go up deeply Sasa" so let's answer those from the jump. Sasa is a type of dense, running bamboo that grows around Mt. Asahidake, the setting for our mystery. The translation seems to imply that because of the Sasa growth in the area, the person on the tape is unable to move up the cliff to higher ground.

The next line I want to examine is "The place is where I first met the helicopter." In this line, the recorder is telling us that he saw a helicopter, perhaps tried to get it's attention, and then it flew off before he could be rescued.

While it seems odd to have taped this recording, it's been pointed out and noted that doing so would have allowed the recorder to be able to play it repeatedly for hours while conserving their own strength for other endeavors.

When Japanese authorities presented their findings (the backpack, the recorder, and the ID card) to Mr. Iwamura's parents, the parents were able to confirm that the backpack, as well as the contents, belonged to their son. They were not able to confirm, however, that it was their son on the tape recording.

Upon discovering the contents of the backpack, the police re-evaluated their conclusion of to whom the bones belonged. This closer look revealed that the bones actually belonged to a man, with a blood type of A. Which would seem to indicate the bones belonged to Kenji Iwamura.

Mr. Kenji Iwamura was an office worker who went missing on a hike near Mt. Asahidake in 1984. Along the trail he was hiking, there are two rocks that serve as landmarks. The first is called the Fake Safe Rock, because it looks like the actual landmark, but if you depart the trail here you end up along the ridgeline where we found our first two hikers, and subsequently, Mr. Iwamura's final resting place. The second landmark is the "Safe Rock" which is the actual landmark that marks the impending end of the trail.

Japanese authorities did search for Iwamura after he failed to show up for work a week later, and were unable to locate him or his remains in that search.

Finally, the coroner's report indicated that Mr. Iwamura would have had his fractured shoulder and thigh while he was alive. On top of that, the authorities stated that Mr. Iwamura's frame would have been "totally spent" after laying just eight logs for the sign. I haven't seen a number exactly, but the sign itself seems to be made of much more than just eight logs. On top of that, there was no axe or hatchet found with Mr. Iwamura's things. So how did the trees get cut down?

Now that we have our facts, let's look at our theories.

#1. Kenji Iwamura made the sign.

Each of the facts seem to indicate that Mr. Iwamura couldn't have made the sign, right? He had broken bones, was too small, and had no woodcutting implements. And yet, this is still the theory I'm arguing for, why?

Let's start with the woodcutting implements. Mr. Iwamura's body went undiscovered for five years before it was found, it's not impossible to think a small hatchet is still laying in wait, waiting to be found. Or that it was found already and picked up by some unsuspecting hiker. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The coroner report I mentioned earlier said that Mr. Iwamura would have been too weak to lay the number of logs necessary to make the SOS sign. Maybe in a day. But Mr. Iwamura was gone a week before he was reported missing and people started looking for him. If he lays 9 logs a day over 6 days, that's 54 logs. Not easily doable, but it doesn't seem so far fetched now.

Lastly, the bone fractures occurred while he was alive, but that doesn't mean necessarily they happened immediately. Mr. Iwamura could have been hurt by a falling tree (logging is an extremely dangerous industry) towards the end of his log-laying endeavor. His backpack was found in a hole under some tree roots, which could have operated as a resting area for Mr. Iwamura while he waited to be rescued.

But, what about the tape that his parents couldn't say was him or not?

Mr. Iwamura's parents might not have been able to identify their son's voice, but how often would they have heard him yell? The recording, which you can listen to here (warning: eerie), has a man repeatedly shouting very slow, very clear instructions. He breathes before almost every syllable. By all accounts, Mr. Iwamura was friendly but not gregarious or overly expressive, so the likelihood that someone ever heard him yell before that tape is minimal, and it had been five years since his parents had even heard his voice. Their memory of it might not have been extremely crisp. The recording was found in a bag with all of Iwamura's things, so it seems more likely its him on the recording, and he would play it on loop while he worked to cut down trees all day.

Finally, the timeline fits. The aerial photo taken in 1982 didn't have the SOS sign on it because Mr. Iwamura wouldn't go missing for another two years. It shows up in the 1987 photo because Mr. Iwamura made it in 1984 shortly after he went missing.

#2. It's a hoax.

There are a few holes in almost any theory that's presented. So it occurred to me while researching this case that things aren't adding up because they aren't supposed to. Mr. Iwamura wasn't physically capable of making the sign, so he didn't. There wasn't a chopping tool found because none was left behind. Kenji Iwamura's parents couldn't identify the man on the tape because it wasn't their son.

Short of just throwing circumstantial evidence at the wall, specifically regarding "this is what's possible", there is no real clean summation of this case if Mr. Iwamura wasn't the sign's creator.

So maybe it was a hoax. Some elaborate prank made by someone with a sick sense of humor.

But then how could Mr. Iwamura's body and belongings end up so close by pure coincidence?

Too many holes in this theory to be seriously viable.

#3. ALIENS

No, I'm just kidding, blaming the whole thing on aliens is too low effort.

In summation, Mr. Iwamura may have been unable to save himself, but his hard work endured long after his body didn't. And subsequently, that work saved two people's lives a half decade later.  So while the evidence doesn't fully support the sign's creator being Kenji Iwamura, it definitely doesn't support it being anyone else either.

It's at least viable that it was Mr. Iwamura, and that's the prevailing theory.

Thanks for reading! While I'm biased towards my own theory, email me back and let me know what you think! Stay tuned for the next issue of The Prevailing Theory.