Photo by Monty DiPietro

"It started two years ago when my son Kevin sent me a metal detector for Christmas," he explains through a thick accent in a deep drawl peppered with Texas slang. What began as an unusual hobby soon turned into an obsession for the semi-retired hazardous-materials expert, who has crisscrossed the Kanto Plain with his Garrett Treasure Ace 100 in search of buried goodies ever since. And he's got plenty of booty to show for his efforts: Old coins, a pistol, rings, tea boxes filled with love letters, and a bunch more. He's also dug up thousands of pull-tabs, drink cans, and bottle caps, all of which he deposits in the trash, "So I won't have to dig 'em up again next time!"

The law is clear enough about things found on the ground-they must be turned in to the police. But there is enough ambiguity about stuff dug out of the dirt to allow Sherman to work fairly unhindered. In fact, he says the police should be grateful for some of the things-such as live ammunition-that he has removed from Japanese parks, riverbanks, fields, and other public land he has come to know inside out.

Courtesy of Ron Sherman

"Those artificial hills you see in parks, they're just full of junk," he says, "because when the parks were landscaped they used landfill to make 'em." Sherman emphasizes that research makes all the difference when treasure hunting, and to that end he's become something of an expert on the habits of traders and travelling businessmen from the Edo era. Where travellers would spend the night, there would be drinking establishments and gambling and brothels-and that meant money changing hands. And many of the ancient mame, shu, or bu currency coins slipped out of the drunken hands. Some have sat in the earth for hundreds of years. Some are worth up to JY5 million today. The larger, ceremonial oban coins can fetch up to JY100,000 million.

"The lost stuff I find is usually modern and not too deep in the ground," says Sherman, "like new coins, rings, and watches. But things that were buried intentionally, they're some of the real goodies!" The practices of hiding emergency money behind walls or burying coins for good luck in the ground below a home's main support post were common during the Edo era.

But there is more to treasure hunting than finding coins, says Sherman. People who wanted to bury something they planned to dig up later often did so near a landmark such as a distinctive tree, he says, and it was dead center between a pair of trees on Russian Hill in the old Port of Yokohama that Sherman unearthed a 30 by 30 centimeter tin box filled with sketches and letters from an American serviceman to his Japanese girlfriend. In Inokashira Park, after his detector told Sherman that there was something deep but big, he found another similar box. "This one was just stuffed full of letters, we read them and they were really filthy, about making love and all. I put a little charm in the box along with a little note I wrote explaining that I'd loved the girl first, and reburied the whole thing."

Courtesy of Ron Sherman

After explaining to a group of half-believing kids that he's "looking for ghosts" with the detector, Sherman packs up and inventories his Yoyogi Park take: The broach, a beaten-up old silver cigarette lighter, three JY10 coins, a few dozen pull-tabs and bottle caps, and several lengths of wire. A typical day in the not-so-typical world of Ron Sherman, who buys a beer and sits down on the grass to regard the stream of young kids, which he terms the "freak show," as they make their way past him to Harajuku station.

For anyone interested in a guided introduction to Tokyo treasure hunting, Sherman plans to begin leading day-trips in the near future. He can be reached by email: rpp@gol.com