The Japanese consulate in Chicago says it properly handled a box of human bones that was sent to the consulate this past summer but was not turned over to the medical examiner's office for examination until this week. 
 
 The box, containing two skulls and other bones, was sent to the consulate at 737 N. Michigan Ave. in the middle of June, along with a letter saying they were the remains of two Japanese soldiers who were killed on Tinian Island during World War II, police said. It asked the consulate to return them to Japan for a proper burial. 
 
 The staff at the consulate took photographs of the bones and sent the pictures to Japan. A pathologist responded two months later that they "may not be of Japanese descent," according to a police report. 
 
 On Tuesday, staff members were cleaning out a closet containing items from the consulate’s prior administration when they found the box, the report said. It was addressed to the consulate and dated June 14 from an unknown sender in Rochester, Minn., police said. 
 
 It was not clear why the bones were turned over to authorities three months after they arrived. 
 
 Police officers took the box to the Cook County medical examiner's office, which said it is conducting an "anthropological consultation" to determine the age of the bones, among other things. 
 
 Shinichiro Nakamura, the Japanese consul in Chicago, said the box was not kept in a closet but was stored beside his desk. 
 
 “The box was treated properly,” Nakamura said. “It was not just hidden in a closet to pretend it wasn’t there.” 
 
 Nakamura said the consulate worked with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo to determine a protocol for examining the bones. The consul would not say what the ministry instructed him to do with the bones, but he said no other organizations were notified about the box. 
 
 Nakamura later said he communicated with Chicago Police briefly about the situation on more than one occasion. He said the police did not express any immediate concern. A Chicago police spokesman could not be reached for comment. 
 
 Nakamura said the consulate did not try to track down the sender while it examined the bones. “We’re not an investigating organization,” he said. “We can’t do that.” ||||| Dick Portillo, as fast-food connoisseurs know, is the hot dog and Italian beef king of Chicago, the man who started his business in a food trailer in 1963 and built it into an empire of 38 successful diners before selling it reportedly for nearly $1 billion two years ago. 
 
 Isoroku Yamamoto is a venerated figure in Japan and a sinister figure in U.S. history. As commander of the Japanese navy beginning in 1939, he opposed war with the U.S. but dutifully orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. 
 
 Sixteen months later, Yamamoto was killed when U.S. pilots shot down his plane. His death dealt a catastrophic blow to the Japanese psyche and war effort, and it was a crucial turning point in the war. 
 
 In a safe in Portillo's sleekly appointed ninth-floor office is what would be a most unlikely link between the two men: a gold tooth that may have been in Yamamoto's mouth when his plane was attacked over Papua New Guinea. 
 
 "I'll do whatever it takes to find out," Portillo said one afternoon, holding the gold tooth in his Oakbrook Terrace conference room while recounting his acquisition of the incisor. 
 
 Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune Dick Portillo, shown with military memorabilia in his Oak Brook office Sept, 8, 2016, is on a quest to determine whether a gold tooth discovered on a Pacific island is that of Japanese Cmdr. Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack and who was shot down in 1943. Dick Portillo, shown with military memorabilia in his Oak Brook office Sept, 8, 2016, is on a quest to determine whether a gold tooth discovered on a Pacific island is that of Japanese Cmdr. Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack and who was shot down in 1943. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) 
 
 Portillo's friends are making contacts across the Pacific to determine the tooth's origin. 
 
 "And, if I can prove that to the world, maybe there'd be a lot of people interested in that. I think there would be." 
 
 Glint in the wreckage 
 
 How the founder of a Chicago hot dog empire obtained the tooth that may belong to one of the most revered figures in Japanese history starts with Portillo's love of World War II history. 
 
 A former Marine who served in peacetime, Portillo, 76, has a strong interest in the Pacific theater of that conflict and has organized at least five group expeditions to significant WWII sites in the region. 
 
 One of those trips was in July 2015. Portillo had taken seven other South Pacific history enthusiasts to the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, where a friend's father fought in the war. Portillo had read that Yamamoto's plane had crashed on Bougainville and pitched the idea of visiting the site. 
 
 The eight explorers enlisted a few local residents, hopped in two trucks, crossed rivers and plowed along a rutted, muddy road. Led by machete-wielding residents clearing the way, the group trekked through knee-deep mud, harassed by insects in the humid jungle, Portillo and others on the trip recalled. 
 
 Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune A gold tooth discovered on a Pacific island could be that of Japanese Cmdr. Isoroku Yamamoto. A gold tooth discovered on a Pacific island could be that of Japanese Cmdr. Isoroku Yamamoto. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) 
 
 About an hour and 45 minutes after they'd started the trip, the group arrived at the deteriorated wreck of Yamamoto's plane. One of them, retired college professor Anderson Giles, 67, crawled through the fuselage. 
 
 When he emerged via the torn front midsection of the plane, Giles stepped in mud to the left of the wreckage. Portillo was about 15 feet away. 
 
 "As soon as I did," Giles recalled in a phone conversation from his home in Maine, "there was this little glint that oozed up. I thought, 'what was that?' and I stepped back and picked it up." 
 
 Holding the tooth, Giles' mind raced through knowledge gleaned from his nearly three decades of research, documentary film work and visits to more than 50 plane wrecks in the region. He recalled that Yamamoto was shot with a large-caliber round in the jaw during the attack, that he was seated on the left of the aircraft and that his body was found at the left front of the plane. 
 
 "That's what caused the bells to ring in my mind," Giles said. 
 
 The local clan owns the wreckage site, and the clan chief confiscated the tooth. Portillo, who'd funded the trip, had to fund a second one and buy the tooth. 
 
 Patricia Trowbridge, who'd been on the 2015 expedition, returned in May, met the chief on Buka Island in Papua New Guinea and purchased the tooth for $14,000, Portillo said. 
 
 "If it comes to be true, it's peanuts compared to the value that I would look at," Portillo said in his office. He pulled the tooth from a tiny plastic bag in a prescription medicine bottle that had been in a soap tin. "If it doesn't, you win some and you lose some. I at least had to find out, and in order for me to find out if it was true, it's going to cost money." 
 
 'Colossus' in Japan 
 
 As vilified as he may be among some in the U.S., Yamamoto is a beguiling and sympathetic study of contrasts, historians say. He also had two connections to Chicago. 
 
 While a student at Harvard in 1919-21, Yamamoto learned poker and became an almost obsessive and masterful player. In fact, one historian reported that he used his winnings to fund a hitchhiking trip through the U.S. 
 
 And, in 1926-28, Yamamoto served as a Japanese navy attache in Washington, D.C., where he gambled with U.S. military members. 
 
 One of his Chicago connections centers on another recreation he enjoyed. In October 1934, during a three-day trip to Chicago, Yamamoto attended a football game in Evanston between Northwestern and the University of Iowa. 
 
 In Japan's buildup to World War II, he was a voice of moderation who opposed aligning with the Nazis, said Ian W. Toll, an American historian and author of two books on the Pacific in World War II. Yamamoto warned that the United States' industrial strength was formidable, even saying that Japan would lose the war with the U.S. if it lasted more than a year. 
 
 But, he was a dedicated military man, and when other leaders pushed for war, he followed their orders to carry out his plans for a crippling, pre-emptive strike against the U.S. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto said he feared the Japanese had awakened a sleeping giant. 
 
 Yamamoto's other Chicago connection is more ominous. Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a Chicago native and graduate of University of Chicago and Northwestern's School of Law, worked on the Navy intelligence unit that interpreted the coded Japanese message about the commander's trip to Bougainville on April 18, 1943. 
 
 The U.S. military used the message to intercept and shoot down Yamamoto's plane. 
 
 If it does prove to be Yamamoto's tooth, I think that's a fascinating and important story. — Ian W. Toll, American historian 
 
 "If it does prove to be Yamamoto's tooth, I think that's a fascinating and important story," Toll said. "Yamamoto is a towering figure in Japan, a colossus in Japanese history." 
 
 DNA may hold key 
 
 Giles and Trowbridge have taken the tooth or photos of the tooth to three dentists, who verified it is a human tooth and said it was removed by a violent act or trauma. One dentist, Dr. John O'Keefe, who had numerous wealthy, adult Japanese patients in the mid-1980s, said the contours and design of the crown were very similar to those of his Asian patients and common in Japan during Yamamoto's lifetime. 
 
 "I wish I could tell you conclusively it was his," O'Keefe said by phone from his office in Twisp, Wash., "but …"
– Everyone has skeletons in their closet of some sort, but the Japanese Consulate in Chicago actually, literally does—or did, anyway. A worker told police that a box filled with two skulls and a bunch of bones was discovered by staffers yesterday in a closet that the consulate's previous management had used, the Chicago Tribune reports. With the box was a letter postmarked in June from Rochester, Minn., informing the consulate that the bones belonged to two Japanese WWII vets and asking the consulate to return the bones to Japan for burial. The anonymous sender said in the letter that the remains were of two soldiers who had been killed on Tinian Island, which, according to the National Park Service, is the island in the Pacific's Marianas that served as the launching pad for planes that dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Interviews with members of the former consulate staff revealed that they had sent photos of the bones to a pathologist when the box originally showed up back on June 17—but the results came back a couple of months later saying the bones "may not be of Japanese descent," according to the police report cited in the Tribune. The remains are now reportedly with the Cook County Medical Examiner's office. (This woman found 80 skeletons stuffed into Ikea bags in a Swedish church.)