Bones.

This is coolbert:

1. From the Telegraph, as of August, 2008:

"Body of WWII airman found dangling from a tree"

Human remains, believed to be from a combatant of the Second World War [WW2], found hanging from a tree in New Guinea. Evidently a "bailed-out" aviator, caught by his rigging, not able to make it to the ground, the body "caught", disintegrating with time, covered with moss, but the outline of a human body still plainly discernible!

"The suspected remains of a Second World War airman have been found dangling from a tree in the dense jungles of Papua New Guinea."

A story that caused a mild stir at the time!!

"The skeleton of what is thought to be a World War II pilot hangs in the jungle canopy along the Kokoda Track"

"in a harness. There are goggles and it appears to be caught up in cables, so presumably it is an airman,"

"a jumble of cords and bits of parachute harness leaves."

"If confirmed as a human body it is likely to be the remains of an Australian, American or Japanese airman, left undisturbed in the forest for more than 60 years"

2. NOW, thanks to the BBC, only two weeks after the discovery of the "body" hanging from a tree"

"Papua 'remains' are not WWII body"

"Hikers thought moss-covered branches were the remains of a WWII airman"

Well, what was thought to be so was not so. It was not a body - - rather, a growth, branches and vegetation, having shape and form of a human body, but merely that, jungle vegetation covered with moss and nothing more. Where all the notions of cable, harness and goggles came from I do not know!!

"The Australian military sent a team to investigate the 'body' only to discover it was a branch tangled in vines."

3. And here from 2007 - - the Philippines, the remains of Japanese soldiers, fragments of bone I would think mostly, being burned. Japanese "bone pickers, what they are called, devoted to proper ceremony and ritual for Japanese war dead - - many decades after the end of the war in the Pacific.

"Japanese soldiers' bones burned; At rites in Ifugao to release spirits of the dead."

"KIANGAN, Ifugao - Japanese bone pickers were here last week to retrieve and ceremonially burn the skeletal remains of Japanese soldiers killed 62 years ago during World War II."

"Japanese officials and a high priest burned the collected human skeletons believed to be those of Japanese soldiers 'to release the spirits of the dead.' This is consistent with mandatory cremation of the dead, a Japanese tradition"

Within the Buddhist tradition [perhaps even more so within the tradition of Shinto?], those deceased, the body of which is not disposed of according to proper ritual, roam the earth as ghosts? Proper ceremony obligatory to the greatest extent possible!

"those who in Buddhism are reborn in the 'realm' where they wander the earth eating waste. The fear of many Japanese, indeed, is that Japanese soldiers who died missing in action in many places in World War II, and whose bones may lie without proper burial or rites, did end up as hungry ghosts in such places."

Japanese civilians - - "bone pickers" have been a presence all throughout the WW2 Pacific theatre for decades now! A noble but thankless task properly disposing of the remains of Japanese soldiers, what still exists. A devotion to Buddhist ritual and belief that is to be admired.

coolbert.