HOLDEN – When Ralph McLeod, a local gun and memorabilia dealer and Vietnam-era veteran, first heard that a trophy skull from World War II had been discovered at an estate sale in southern Maine, he knew he had a new mission.

“I said, ‘I’ll get it and return it to Japan – that’s where it should go,'” McLeod said on Saturday. “If it were an American skull discovered in another country, we’d want it back. It’s the moral thing, the right thing, to do.”

McLeod purchased the skull for $50 from a fellow gun dealer who obtained the skull by purchasing a box of materials at an estate sale several months ago. Once he had the skull, McLeod contacted the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C., about returning it to its home country for a proper burial and was referred to the consulate general of Japan, regionally headquartered in Boston.

The skull, which has the words “1945 Jap skull, Okinawa” printed by hand in ink on its top has not been officially determined to be a trophy skull, or souvenir human skull. Such skulls have been collected by soldiers in wars that date back to before records were first kept.

“It was very common to have trophy skulls,” especially during WWII, McLeod said. “There were a lot sent back.”

McLeod spoke while sitting in his shop, Buyers Guns, surrounded by more than 200 guns, old coins and swords, knives and a case of Nazi memorabilia. The skull sits in a cardboard box behind the counter.

The practice of sending home trophy skulls was spotlighted by Life magazine in a full-page photograph published on May 22, 1944, in which a sailor’s girlfriend is seen looking at a Japanese skull her fiance sent her from the Pacific war zone. The Life photo caption reads: “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”

Edward L. Jones, a U.S. war correspondent during World War II, wrote a piece about trophy skulls for The Atlantic Magazine, published in February 1946, which graphically states: “We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers.”

One such letter opener was sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he refused to accept it, according to published reports.

Even though the skull has not been officially determined to be a Japanese trophy skull, McLeod said, “I have no reason to believe otherwise.”

After McLeod contacted the Japanese consulate, he was told to gather information, which would be forwarded to the appropriate Japanese ministry.

“As you can imagine, the meaningful return of such an object is extremely difficult, given the need to determine whether or not it is, in fact, a Japanese skull,” Richard Winslow, consulate general of Japan, stated in an e-mail to McLeod.

Dr. Edward David, deputy chief of the state’s medical examiner’s office, said it would take a forensic anthropologist to determine if the skull is in fact from Japan, but he added that human skulls differ depending on where they originate in the world.

“There are characteristics more common in blacks, [compared to] northern Europeans and in Asians,” he said.

David said the consulate may ask the state to investigate the skull to determine its origin. He said he hasn’t done such investigations before, but Dr. Marcella Sorg, state forensic anthropologist, has done such investigations.

Sorg, a world-renowned forensic expert now based at the University of Maine, probably would handle the investigation, David said.

Contacted this weekend, Sorg indicated that the inscription on the skull made it likely it was a trophy.

Trophy skulls have been discovered in the attics of veterans after they die, or in storage, but many times, family members do not publicize their findings, David said. There have been published reports of discarded skulls that, when found, were investigated by police to determine if a crime was committed.

Hideo Matsubara, consult for the New York office of the Japanese Consulate, said the process to determine if the skull is in fact from Japan could take six months to two years.

“If we receive these kinds of items, we return [them] to the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare in Japan,” he said. “If we find the owners of the items, we return them. The ministry passes them to the owners or descendents.”

If no owners or relatives are found, “the materials will be sent to the Ministry of Fallen Officers,” he said.

Because of its small size, McLeod thinks the skull is that of a woman, and he doesn’t believe it belongs to a combatant in the war. When the Marines first landed on Okinawa, they found burial crypts that looked like ammunition bunkers, so the soldiers searched them and oftentimes used the crypts as shelter, the gun dealer said.

“It could be as much as 150 years old, but I’m not an expert,” he said, surmising the skull came from one of the crypts. “I think they found the skull and they said, ‘Let’s take this home,'” and sent it to Maine, he said.

The skull appears to have a small amount of human cellular matter remaining on it, which should help with identification, McLeod said.

“There is still a little bit of tissue, so they may be able to do a DNA match,” he said. “I figure DNA testing would be able to tell if it’s Asian, male or female, and if it’s Japanese.”

In his 30 years of dealing guns and military artifacts and memorabilia, this is the first trophy skull that McLeod has come across, but it is not the first one he’s seen.

“I’ve know five different guys that have five different Japanese skulls,” one of which went through the piles of paperwork required to return the skull in his possession to Japan, he said.

“It’s pretty easy ethically” to return the skull, McLeod said. “We would want the same thing.”