An experiment conduced on a replica of an ancient bronze mirror held at Kyoto’s National Museum revealed that the original may have been used as a ‘magic mirror’ to conjure up images of mountain wizards and divine beasts for sun-worshipping rituals. In a magic mirror, unevenness on the polished surface—too subtle to be detected by the naked eye—reproduces patterns on the back when light reflects off the front.
The mirror, known as Himiko’s mirror, was unearthed from the Higashinomiya Tomb in Aichi, Japan, and belongs to the “sankakubuchi shinjukyo” (triangular-rimmed deity and beast mirror) category of mirrors. It is associated with Himiko, a shaman Queen who ruled the kingdom of Yamatai in the 3rd century AD, because some of the mirrors found in the tomb and in other locations were inscribed with the year 239, which is when a Chinese emperor presented 100 bronze mirrors to the Queen’s emissary, according to a Chinese chronicle. At the time, mirrors were a valued gift between members of the court and were often used as diplomatic gifts to bind political alliances.
Oddly enough, Queen Himiko is not mention in Japanese sources, rather it is a classic Chinese historical text written in the late third century, ‘Records of the Three Kingdoms’, which gives the earliest and most complete picture of this ancient queen.<snip>
Magic mirror of shaman Queen used in ancient Japanese rituals | Ancient Origins
I should point out you cannot see the illuminated back image of the mirror just by shining light through it. You have to bounce it against a flat surface such as a wall and see it that way. The Japanese Christians under the Tokugawa shogunate used to create false backs on their mirrors so that when you looked at the back, you saw Buddha, but when you shined a light through it against a wall, you saw Jesus crucified. These mirrors require an incredible amount of polishing in order to work and is the forerunner of microchip-building technology.