Help Please -Japanese Translation!

This cover was sent to OASAKA, JAPAN and returned was undeliverable. It has a purple Roman-style 11-comb International receiving cancel backstop on 19.3.47 (March 19, 1947). The cover has been censored my USMG Postal Censors and re-sealsed (on left) and the cover has been stamped the red vertical boxed Japanese handstamps (if I am translating correctly: RETURN TO MAILER) with two different personal "chops" below the boxes.

I would greatly appreciate if someone would please translate the handwritten information highlighted in "blue" below and also verify that my translation of the red vertical boxed Japanese hand stamps is correct.



Thank you in advance.

Hal

Hi Hal,

This is a tough one



Seems that the recipient was not residing at the original address, which seems to be somewhere in Kobe under the company name of Nippon (Japan) Raw Material Co., (translation written in pencil), and the recipient's new address was not known.

The address (in pencil) seems to be some abbreviation which I cannot identify; I couldn't decipher the big red script as well.

I have searched for any additional information on "Nippon Raw Material" in Kobe without success so far...

Hope this helps.

- Hironobu

I'm glad to see that someone who actually knows the language had trouble with this one, because the handwriting had me totally defeated, even the katakana, which is usually easy for me.

So that really says "Nippon"? I'm now fully convinced that I'll never be able to read handwritten Japanese, even if by some miracle I can manage to learn the kanji well enough to read a book written at higher than a third-grade level. (I'm slowly working my way through a 138-page chapter book for little kids, in which the only kanji are first-grade level, and even those are supplied with furigana.)

I thought the hon kanji was the shi of Shina, making it Nisshi "Sino-Japanese," though I suppose the idea of any company being "Sino-Japanese" in 1947 would be rather odd. And I was never able to get "Raw Material" out of this, because the person wrote meteruaru rather than materiaru, and the te looks like a ra!

I gave up on handwritten Japanese a long time ago. I didn't even recognize Kobe on this, and I used to live there!!!!

Erliaz, I totally agree that the "hon" kanji might be "Shi", and that may be more straightforward than "nippon". The fact that a chinatown is in Kobe may support your analysis... thanks for the suggestion. There's so much varieties of hand written characters, which is also a big challenge for modern Japanese like myself...

The "Raw Material" interpretation is actually my best guess from what was written, i.e. "ro you me te ru a ru". It's really a pity that the two kanji hidden behind the big chop is unreadable !

People used to write english words in quite odd manner in the past; for example, "station" was written in katakana as "sten-sho", "American" as "Meri-ken", "Handkerchief" as "Han-ka-chi" (we do still use this!) and so on

- Hironobu

Hi Hal and erliaz, here's the updated encryption based on comment from erliaz and also through more investigation.

The only plausible address in Kobe which may match the abbreviated hand script seems to be "Iso-Gami-dori" (Iso-Gami street), which is still a commercial area.





Thanks for the interesting puzzle.

-Hironobu