Researchers have discovered what they believe to be Japan's oldest depiction of whaling, on an urn dating from around 100 B.C., according to officials with the Nagasaki Board of Education.
The urn, made during the Yayoi Period (about 400 B.C. to 300), was unearthed in 1974 from the Harunotsuji ruins in Nagasaki Prefecture.
Only in January did researchers notice that it bears a whaling scene.
The drawing is estimated to be far older than the sixth- or seventh-century whaling wall-paintings in a stone room in the Nagato-Onizuka burial mound in Konagai in the prefecture, currently considered the oldest paintings of whaling in Japan.