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Hello,

I recently purchased this 'thing'. I'm trying to figure out what I bought.

The object is made from wood, with a copper or bronze bowl in it.

The wood looks pretty old, it's gone black on the outside, and it's pretty dry.

The bowl on the inside is all scratched out, and it even has a small hole in it. Even the inside rim from the decorations rim has a lot of scratches on it as if someone was trying to remove something from it. When viewed in the dark with a lighter some of the inner jar appears shiny as if once marked. But it is unreadable to me.

It has metal (possibly copper?) decorations nailed to it with tiny small (blackened) nails.
There are lots of 'faces' engraved in the decorations. It's mostly faces with a nose with two eyes and a bunch of feathers on their heads. A few faces have perfectly round holes where their eyes used to be, as if someone took the gems from their eyes.
Their are also bigger images of faces and they have a x3 row of feather decoration.
None of it (except for some of the nails) is magnetic (checked with small magnet).

There is one symbol on it (appears four times), but I do not know what it means.
There are also tiny tadpole like creatures next to the symbol.
I tried to look this up, but my best guess is 'unusual' in Japanese (Kanji).

It as came with some sort of small demon head. I think this was been attached to the top (or bottom depending on how you look at it..)
The hole on the top appears has openings at the bottom.

There are 8 large heads resembling some sort of creature, and they have their tongues sticking out. I´m not sure if it´s a fish or an insect.

So what is it? Dinner bowl? Vase standard? Incense burner?
And where is it from?

Images:






Kind regards,
Vincent

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