The Boys Who Claimed They Captured a Palm-Sized UFO in Japan (1972) — Kera Incident (Part 6/9)
Mystery Japan Presents: The Unexplained Japan Files Case File #001 — The Kera Incident (Part 6)
The Boys Who Claimed They Captured a Palm-Sized UFO in Japan (1972) — Kera Incident (Part 6/10)
Mystery Japan Presents: The Unexplained Japan Files Case File #001 — The Kera Incident (Part 6)
After national TV turned the Kera Incident into a famous “captured UFO” story, a new question took over: was it real? In 2009, writer Kenichi Nishimoto went back to the ground — interviews, maps, and the overlooked geography around the fields. Then he made one phone call to a key witness… and got an answer that refused to answer.
Previously (Part 5): The Kera story leaves the rice fields — reaching comet hunters, a radio show, and finally national TV. Read Part 5 here:
1. After the National Broadcast
About two months after the TV program aired, the Kera Incident caught the attention of someone else.
The writer was Shusaku Endo.
Shusaku Endo (1923–1996)
Endo reportedly learned of the case through Nippon TV’s UFO special, then traveled to the area and spoke with the boys himself. Drawing on that visit, he later contributed an essay to Shukan Shincho titled “The Flying Saucer of Kera Town.”
Endo is often described as a rare figure in Japanese literature: a Catholic novelist who returned again and again to the tensions between faith and doubt. His 1966 novel Silence would later gain international recognition and was adapted into a film in 2016. But what matters here isn’t his résumé.
What Endo emphasized in his piece was the way the boys spoke.
They didn’t come across as children trying to fool an adult with an outrageous story. If anything, he wrote, they seemed intent on conveying what had happened to them — seriously, carefully, and as accurately as they could.
2. From “Mischievous Kids” to “A Town’s Story”
With two comet hunters — Tsutomu Seki and Koichi Ike — taking an interest, with Junichi Yaoi bringing the case to national television, and with Shusaku Endo later writing about it, the nine boys’ experience was gradually reframed.
At first, it was simply: kids saying something strange again. Then it became: a bizarre incident that happened in the town. And for some, it edged into something even bigger: a case that might have involved Japan’s first captured UFO.
Locally, there was even talk of a small “UFO-hunting” boom among children. Some accounts recall kids wandering the Kera rice fields searching for something — right up until spring planting began.
In this way, the Kera Incident came to be retold as one of the more widely known episodes in Japan’s UFO lore.
But the story doesn’t end there. If anything, national attention only sharpened the next question:
Was it really true?
In Part 6, we lay out the skeptical arguments surrounding the Kera Incident as clearly as possible — not to force a verdict, but to identify the real points of dispute: what, exactly, is being questioned, and why.
3. Kenichi Nishimoto’s Reappraisal (2009)
In the 1970s — helped along by television and mentions from well-known figures — the Kera Incident came to be retold as a “famous UFO capture case.” A sustained critique from a clearly different angle didn’t emerge until much later.
That shift arrived in 2009, when freelance writer Kenichi Nishimoto took up the case and re-examined it.
Nishimoto contributed an article to Japan: The Complete “Weird” Encyclopedia (Nihon “Kaiki” Taizen), published by Million Publishing, under the headline “The Shock of the ‘UFO Capture Incident’ in Kera Town, Kochi Prefecture.” The subtitle was even more pointed: “The Truth of Japan’s Roswell, 37 Years Later.” The framing makes his intent clear — this was an attempt to dig it up now, decades after the narrative had already settled.
For the piece, Nishimoto traveled to Kera, interviewed people connected to the story, and retraced the circumstances as carefully as he could. And his conclusion did not simply echo the familiar, affirmative retellings.
Within Japan’s UFO scene, the Kera Incident had long been treated — more or less — without serious pushback. Nishimoto’s report challenged that mood by raising concrete questions grounded in on-site inquiry and step-by-step reasoning.
Unfortunately, this skeptical reappraisal has been less frequently cited among pro-UFO circles in Japan and remains relatively little known domestically. Even so, if we want to treat the Kera Incident as something to be investigated rather than merely repeated, Nishimoto’s article is hard to ignore.
Because it represents one of the first attempts — many years after the “captured UFO” narrative had taken hold — to lay out a structured set of doubts in a single, coherent record. In that sense, Nishimoto’s 2009 piece marks a real inflection point: the Kera Incident begins to shift from a story people believe into an event people test.
4. Interviewing a Witness — Kenichi Nishimoto Speaks with Keiko Fujimoto
When Kenichi Nishimoto canvassed Kochi City in 2009 — thirty-seven years after the incident — he reported a striking impression: among people over forty, many still seemed to know the Kera story. Whatever the truth of it, the case had lodged itself deeply in local memory.
One of the people Nishimoto interviewed in Kera was Keiko Fujimoto, one of the nine boys.
According to Junichi Yaoi’s account, Fujimoto was “the boy who first picked up” the palm-sized object. Years later, a photograph also survives of Fujimoto holding a replica — posed to recreate the moment of “capture” (a reenactment with a reproduction, not the original).
Fujimoto told Nishimoto he had taken the object home and shown it not only to his mother but also to his father. He also recalled being present at the end of the story: on the day of the “final disappearance,” he was riding a bicycle with Yasuo Moriyasu — the boy who had tied a plastic bag containing the object to his right hand — sitting on the rear rack. In other words, Fujimoto wasn’t a peripheral witness; he was close to the case from its earliest moments through its final scene.
At the time of the interview, Nishimoto wrote, Fujimoto was in his fifties and working as a social studies teacher at a high school in Nankoku City. Separately, posts on an alumni community site have claimed that he once taught ethics at a high school in Kochi City — and that he sometimes told students the “I caught a UFO as a child” story in class, even passing around his book. (These online recollections are unverified, but they add an interesting layer to how the story may have circulated.)
What is particularly notable is how precisely Fujimoto seemed to remember the geography. Nishimoto says Fujimoto sketched the locations of the sightings and the final disappearance in concrete terms. It’s possible his memory had been “organized” over time — he had spoken about the Kera Incident repeatedly over the past three decades.
The final disappearance, as Fujimoto remembered it
Nishimoto asked Fujimoto to describe the moment the object vanished for the last time. In Nishimoto’s article, Fujimoto is quoted as saying:
“When we were riding our bicycles with the M brothers toward K’s house, M suddenly screamed — ‘Uwaa!’ — and flipped over. I ran over, and the UFO was already gone from the backpack.”
In this telling, the “final disappearance” wasn’t quiet or ambiguous. It happened with a shout, a fall, and a burst of panic — details that carry the heat of the scene.
“Who was the leader?” — and one word that mattered
Later, in casual conversation, Nishimoto asked who had been the de facto leader of the group. Fujimoto answered, almost offhandedly, that it was “M-kun.” He added that the boy had been a star volleyball player at one point — and, crucially, that he was good at magic tricks, the kind of kid everyone liked.
Nishimoto’s attention snaps, not at the word “leader,” but at magic.
A central figure skilled at sleight of hand. A set of members who seem to cluster around the moments when the most dramatic “disappearances” occur. A nearby cast-iron factory, a garbage collection site across the river. A town undergoing merger and development. In Nishimoto’s reading, scattered fragments began to align into a single line of interpretation.
5. On-Site Recheck — What Nishimoto Noticed Around the Sighting Area
In Kera, Kenichi Nishimoto walked the area said to be the “first sighting and capture” site and checked the surroundings for himself. During that walk, one thing caught his eye almost by accident: a factory called Kuroishi Foundry. A metalworking site sitting close to the reported location — this detail would later become a quiet setup for his line of reasoning.
Kuroishi Foundry
Nishimoto also visited the riverside spot where the palm-sized object was said to have been “rediscovered” after it had supposedly disappeared. By the time he went there in 2009, however, the riverbank had been reshaped by embankment work, and the terrain no longer matched what it would have looked like in 1972.
According to local residents Nishimoto spoke with, the area across the river — later developed into what is now the Eastern Sports Complex — had once functioned like a dumping or refuse collection site, already piled with garbage brought in from Kochi City. In other words, Kera at the time was not only a quiet rural landscape; it may also have been a place where miscellaneous discarded items tended to accumulate.
An area believed to have served as a garbage collection site at the time of the incident (near today’s INOUE Eastern Sports Park Gymnasium).
That point stuck in Nishimoto’s mind.
Near the fields: a foundry. Across the river: a place where large amounts of waste collected. The stage of the incident, in his emerging map, wasn’t simply “idyllic countryside” — it also had geographical conditions under which man-made objects could plausibly enter the scene.
To clarify the layout, Nishimoto plotted the reported locations on a map. What emerges is a simple arrangement centered on the rice fields:
- To the northeast, the Kuroishi Foundry.
- To the south, across the Kera River, the area later developed into the Eastern Sports Complex — described by locals as a former garbage collection site.
This diagram plots the reported sighting/capture locations in Kera based on a 1975 aerial photograph taken by Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority. It shows the Kuroishi Foundry to the northeast of the rice field where the palm-sized object was reportedly seen and captured, and — across the Kera River to the south — a former garbage collection area (near today’s INOUE Eastern Sports Park Gymnasium).
Of course, this configuration alone doesn’t identify what the object “was.” But Nishimoto’s point was methodological. Before treating the Kera Incident as a paranormal story, he tried to reconstruct the physical conditions on the ground — and ask a basic question: was there room for ordinary “contamination,” stray objects, or visual confusion to enter the narrative?
That impulse — to re-check the terrain before choosing a conclusion — is one of the defining features of his reappraisal.
6. A Relative’s Account — “Why the Town Reacted the Way It Did”
After finishing his walk-through of the reported sighting and capture area, Kenichi Nishimoto writes that he next spoke with a relative of one of the nine boys. What emerged wasn’t a new detail about the object itself, but something broader: a portrait of what Kera was going through in 1972.
The relative recalled that year like this:
“Back then it wasn’t just the merger. New housing blocks were going up, and the national road the town had wanted for years was finally coming through. That’s why everyone was at their wits’ end about the commotion. If that kind of fuss gets out, nobody will buy land — prices will drop.”
In other words: alongside the municipal merger (Kera’s incorporation into Kochi City), the area was in the middle of visible, high-stakes change — new developments, new infrastructure, a shifting local economy. In that climate, a “UFO uproar” wasn’t merely entertaining. It was something people worried could damage land values and the town’s reputation. The quote carries that practical, anxious temperature.
The same testimony also suggests there may have been pressure to keep the story from growing. Nishimoto reports that this relative told him the middle-schoolers involved were ordered — collectively — not to talk any further.
What we can say is that 1972 was a period of rapid local transition. Nishimoto notes that Kera’s population was increasing with the development of housing areas such as Yokobori and Nakano, and that the environment of the district was changing quickly. The junior high school the boys attended had also reportedly just moved to a new location on March 1, 1972.
Kochi Municipal Kera Junior High School, which the boys attended at the time of the incident.
When Nishimoto asked whether the boys were long-time Kera residents, the answer he received was yes.
7. Nishimoto’s Reconstruction — “Another Way to Read the Kera Incident”
Based on his on-site checks and interviews, Kenichi Nishimoto attempts to reassemble the Kera Incident into a different shape — less as a chain of “mysterious phenomena,” and more as a story with a discernible structure.
His first point is this: although the case is usually told as the shared experience of nine boys, the moments when the truly puzzling effects occur — objects that “vanish” or “reappear” — seem to involve a noticeably narrower subset of them.
In Nishimoto’s framing, the initial discovery and capture of the palm-sized object is something the group broadly shares. But the later episodes — the dramatic “disappearances” and sudden returns — recur in situations where the same faces keep showing up.
The three names he places at the center are the Mori brothers (Hiroshi Mori and Yasuo Mori) and Toshiaki Kuzuoka. Nishimoto writes that these three formed the core of the commotion — and that they were also the ones invited to a Tokyo studio. When he traces the scenes where “unexplained disappearances” supposedly occurred, he argues that they appear to cluster around the Mori household, or during trips when these boys were moving together. The emphasis is on the pattern of concentration — the uneven distribution of “key moments.”
At the same time, the sources don’t align perfectly here. In Junichi Yaoi’s account, the three invited to the Tokyo studio are given as Hiroshi Mori, Sadao Fujiwara, and Toshiaki Kuzuoka.
8. A Background Hypothesis — Development, and a Community Under Strain
Next, Nishimoto layers in what he sees as the social conditions surrounding Kera at the time.
Kera had long been an agricultural area — Nishimoto even notes that the place name appears in the Nihon Shoki, an 8th-century Japanese chronicle — a region whose rhythms had been shaped over generations by farming life. But from the 1960s onward, as Kochi City’s population grew and housing shortages intensified, Kera began to change rapidly into a target for residential development. Housing estates were built. By 1972, a municipal merger — Kera’s incorporation into Kochi City — was realized. Nishimoto frames it as a kind of trade: in return for the merger, locals expected improvements such as national road development.
One example is the Yokobori housing complex, which is said to have begun development and sales around 1965. It lies on the north side of the Kera River (Kera-Otsu), and the junior high school the boys attended stood to the east of the estate.
The Yokobori housing complex
For Nishimoto, the point is not that development was inherently “bad.” It brought convenience. But it also disrupted the older rural atmosphere — and that disruption, he suggests, mattered.
He argues that around the merger period, Kera was often discussed internally in subdivisions — Ko, Otsu, and Hei — categories that could make differences in land value and living conditions more salient. Areas with especially productive fields, areas where salt damage could reduce yields, areas closer to the riverside “disposal site” across the water — these kinds of invisible rankings, in Nishimoto’s view, could generate tension around money and land.
And he suggests that children may have felt those shifts most sharply.
New housing estates meant more newcomers. A junior high school that had recently relocated would mix children from older local families with those from newly arrived households. Traditional homes stood alongside newly built, hybrid Japanese-Western houses — differences that can seep into everyday life even when no one says them aloud. Nishimoto’s hypothesis is that this was a setting where small frictions could easily take root — and where a strange “UFO commotion” might spread, harden, or be suppressed in ways shaped by those local fault lines.
9. Nishimoto’s Bottom Line — Connecting “Motive” to “Materials”
From there, Nishimoto tries to connect the social backdrop to a plausible mechanism.
He touches on where the Mori brothers lived (Kera-Otsu), and on the expectation — common in farming communities — that sons would eventually inherit the family’s agricultural livelihood. Against that backdrop, he speculates that Hiroshi Mori may not have felt comfortable about the changes unfolding around him. If there was an atmosphere in which the children of newcomers looked down on long-time local families, Nishimoto suggests, that kind of resentment could become fertile ground for staging “something” — a setup, a trick, a provocation.
On that basis, he proposes a working hypothesis:
- Nearby, there was the Kuroishi Foundry, where metal scraps or tools might have been obtainable.
- Across the river, there was a waste/disposal area, where miscellaneous parts could have accumulated.
- Using components picked up from such places — radio parts, for example — it might have been possible to assemble a small object that looked convincingly “UFO-like.”
- And the “capture” of the palm-sized UFO, along with its later “unexplained disappearances,” could have been deliberately staged.
At this point, the Kera Incident stops being a simple binary — UFO or not-UFO. Nishimoto’s hypothesis pushes the lens wider. His focus isn’t only the object, but the environment around the object: changing land use, local tensions, and shifting power dynamics among children — factors that could shape how an incident is created, circulated, and remembered.
For a case that had been repeated for decades with relatively little skepticism, Nishimoto did something significant: he connected physical conditions on the ground with human relationships, and offered a coherent alternative explanation.
That, at the very least, makes his 2009 report a fitting — and important — piece of evidence to end Episode 6 with.
10. On the Other End of the Call — An Answer That Refuses to Answer
To test how far his hypothesis could go, Nishimoto took one more step: he called Hiroshi Mori directly.
Nishimoto writes that by 2009 the Mori brothers no longer lived in Kera. They were running a yakitori shop in a neighboring town. Nishimoto phoned the shop and got straight to the point.
“Wasn’t this something you staged?”
The reply, he says, was brief.
“Come on — it’s all in the past. It doesn’t matter.”
And then Mori ended the call without saying anything more.
What matters here is that this exchange is neither a confession nor a denial. Mori didn’t admit anything — but he didn’t reject it, either.
Nishimoto reads the refusal itself as a reaction that brushes up against the nerve of the story, and he closes his article with a darker note — paraphrased here in essence:
Yes, it was something that “didn’t matter.” No “truth” needed to be spoken now. And yet, the lie — if it was a lie — has lived on in Kera for thirty-seven years, and will likely never disappear, the way a lost hometown never truly returns.
11. A Case That Seems Explained — And Yet Something Still Remains
In one sense, the Kera Incident has now been “explained.” A plausible possibility of staging. The likelihood of an untold layer. And the phrase returned over the phone — “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Put those pieces together, and the case can look almost solved. And yet, at the same time, it still feels as if something has been left behind.
Why is this story still told more than fifty years later? Why does it linger in memory even without a complete, final answer?
Next time, we move forward to 2016, following a record left by photographer Kenji Sato, who visited Kera.
Next time — **The Boys Who Claimed They Captured a Palm-Sized UFO in Japan (1972) — Kera Incident (Part 7/10)**
12. References
- Endo, Shusaku. (1976). “The Flying Saucer of Kera Town.” In I’m a Bundle of Curiosity (Boku wa Kōkishin no Katamari). Shinchosha. pp. 36–44.
- Nishimoto, Kenichi. (May 2009). “The Shock of the ‘UFO Capture Incident’ in Kera Town, Kochi Prefecture.” In Japan: The Complete “Weird” Encyclopedia (Nihon “Kaiki” Taizen). Million Publishing. pp. 239–253.
- Yaoi, Junichi. (June 2006). Junichi Yaoi’s UFO Encyclopedia (Junichi Yaoi no UFO Taizen). Lyonsha. pp. 254–256.
- Seki, Tsutomu. (May 1973). Seeking Unknown Stars (Michi no Hoshi o Motomete). Sankeishobo. pp. 187–194.
Author Profile
Haruto Rein, Ph.D. (羅院春人) Former quantum physicist turned independent writer and researcher. He writes Mystery Japan, a case-file series on Japan’s recorded anomalies — built from reports, documents, and testimony, with facts separated from inference and conclusions left to the reader. He also authored ToEST (Shinto philosophy in dialogue) and writes the Shinto Girl series on consciousness and “Spiritual Science.”
© 2025 Shinto Girl Project. Written by Haruto Rein, Ph.D. (羅院春人). All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
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