Unknown unusual device

The Freeman Army Airfield Museum has a storage room we call the Dig Room. It contains items that were here during the Evaluation Period, right after WWII, were land-filled after the base closed, dug up later (late 90's), that have not been cleaned up and identified. Mostly, they are things we believe are duplicates of items we already have on display. But occasionally come upon an item that piques our curiosity, and we select it to clean up, hopefully identify, and put on display. Such is the case with the item shown in the attached photos. In this instance, we cleaned the item up a couple of years ago, but never got it identified. It cleaned up very nicely, and has been sitting sitting on a table with a sign that says "Unknown Items", but no visitor has ever been able to help us.

The item is very irregular in shape. I have no Idea which way is UP. I took the pictures from angles the way the item would not fall over. There is an arm that appears to attach to a bracket of some sort of tapered mount. There are various knobs and scales. Some guests have suggested that it is some sort of aiming device. The large black knurled knob has a scale under it, from zero to 1000. Range in yards? There is another scale on a brass plate, deep inside the item, that also has Japanese characters. (Difficult to photograph.) There are numbers on the primary frame components that are easy to read in the pictures.

Can anyone help us with this? It cleaned up so nicely that we would really like to put it on official display, but I need to know what it is, and where it was used, so I can create a sensible exhibit sign.

Thank you for your help. Larry

Nice one Larry but unfortunately I have no idea what it is.

May I suggest you look for any books on Japanese aircraft interiors. There are at least two that I know of (and have) but I am far from home at present so cannot look myself.

It looks like a piece of an bomb/gunsight or just a gun mount and its settings . The inscription with the arrow sign " 飛行方向 " means the flight direction in English.

The thing that occurs to me with all of the items that Larry has shown is, were they evaluated? And if so, was a written report made? And where can these reports be found?
I can't believe these things were taken apart simply to say, "Gee, look at that!"
Information must be somewhere in the old Freeman Field records.

I don't know the answer to your question, Special Ed. I don't know where those records might be. The individual parts were part of larger assemblies. But nobody apparently cared about them. They were just landfilled near the base dump. You find a part; you have no idea what it went with or on.

The records MAY have been microfilmed or dumped. There was a policy on what was kept but from the microfilms I have it was pretty haphazard and from the order of files in the films when compared to the index on the film, some camera operators did not give a hoot. Some files suggest the pages were accidentally dropped on the floor before photographing and were then just picked up and stuffed in the camera feed slot. One whole section of General Kenneys records is missing and "replaced" with stuff that is totally unrelated.

Speaking of cameras, could that bracket have been used as a photo recon mount (like in the KI-46) or a specialized gun camera mount similar to the one that was mounted in the nose of.the Me262?

I don't know if Freeman field ever had a Nakajima "Kikka" there for evaluation, though.

It is a fairly large item being some 15" on one side so I think the camera mount, or a bomb-sight mount may be plausible.

Shinpachi would know but he has not been seen for far too long.