About fifteen years ago, I read about a man I’ll call Jim who worked in a salvage shop. If your truck fell through the ice, you called Jim. He wondered what else might be at the bottom of the lake so between jobs he dove into it to see what he could find. Once he found what turned out to be a 1939 Japanese machine gun that didn’t appear to have been in the lake for very long. Because he knew how to salvage things lost in lakes, he kept it under water until he devised a way to refurbish it. When he was done, the gun looked nearly new. The question now was what to do with it. He called a gun dealer and told him that he had a working 1939 Japanese machine gun. The dealer said, “No you don’t.” Jim learned that it was illegal to buy, sell, or even own such a gun. He could hire a lawyer and through that lawyer negotiate with the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives. They might confiscate it and put it in deep storage until... what?. They might seek a licensed dealer who could do… what? Or Jim could put it in a closet until… what? In the meantime, he was committing a felony. He solved his problem in the simplest way: he threw it back into the lake.
Questions come into my mind. I wondered how many times it has been disposed of that way. How did it wend its way from Japan, over seventy-five years, to the bottom of Lake Minnetonka? Probably a soldier from Minnesota took it from a Japanese soldier and brought it home with him. If so, it’s reasonable to guess that the Japanese man died in the exchange since angry, scared young men armed with machine guns aren’t normally cooperative. Had he killed friends of the American soldier before being killed himself? Had the grim-faced American boy, wiped Japanese blood off the gun before lugging it and the dog tags of his friends back to camp? Had the lake finally removed the last particles of blood from the gun, or did Jim do that? My guess is that the man who threw it into the lake was also the one who took it from the dead Japanese soldier. He may have been twenty when he fought in the Pacific and would have been near the end of his life when he let it slip into the dark waters. What prompted him to do that? Had he hoped to finally bury the ghosts of his long-lost friends that lingered with the gun? Maybe he was cleaning out the house he had raised a family in and was confronted with the same problems Jim would be a few years later. There can’t be many ways of ridding oneself of an illegal and haunted machine gun. Maybe he didn’t want to burden any of his children with it. Had giving it to the lake brought him peace? Who knows? All people with stories to tell about it will probably be dead soon if they aren’t already. In the meantime, a 1939 Japanese machine gun waits at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka for… what?