Nagoya: Solution

Solution needed. The answer is EUROPEAN UNION.

Archivist's Note: Here is some speculation about how the puzzle might be solved:

The bit about file drawer labels may mean that we will need to alphabetize these answers, maybe get one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. Chari river or Yobe river
2. volcano
3. Rosetta stone
4. OS/2 or AIX
5. RNA?
6. is that part of a snake?
7. missing
8. American Greetings logo (rose)
9. Mount Vernon
10. Google thinks this is Stop Sellafield, a 1992 concert by U2 and other bands to support Greenpeace and fight the construction of a nuclear power plant.
11. ??? It is possible this is something Biblical.
12. King Henry IV of France, Henry de Bourbon, not sure what they want here.
13. missing
14. (Joe) Zawinul
15. Yobe river or Chari river
16. Subliminal (They Might Be Giants song, first track on John Henry)
17. photo is missing
18. Xenon
19. Quesnel, British Columbia, Canada
20. Fat Man, the second atomic bomb used in World War II
21. Absolute Zero
22. Blue Nun wine
23. domino
24. missing
25. missing
26. missing

There are some unused images in the folder for this puzzle: item20.jpg, some sort of tunnel (which doesn't seem to go along with the actual item 20); icone.jpg, a cone for ice cream; and duplicate copies of some of the other images which spoil their intended answers (apparently the American Greetings card is a forget-me-not, the invented parody of Fahrenheit 451 is supposed to be Kelvin Zero, and item 6 is something abbreviated "aba").

This seems to make most things start with distinct letters. Try alphabetizing.

• "aba"
• Blue Nun wine
• Chari river
• domino
• Fat Man, the second atomic bomb used in World War II
• Forget-Me-Not (American Greetings)
• Greenpeace (Stop Sellafield)
• ??? (found eating pomegranate seeds)
• photo is missing
• King Henry IV of France, Henry de Bourbon
• Kelvin Zero
• missing
• Mount Vernon
• missing
• OS/2
• RNA? (found in conjunction with a DNA strand)
• Quesnel, British Columbia, Canada
• Rosetta stone
• Subliminal
• tunnel
• missing
• volcano
• missing
• Xenon
• Yobe river
• Zawinul, Joe

If we want the last letters of these things, then we might be trying to complete _ N I O _ _ E _ _ _ O _ N _ 2 _ L E L L _ O _ N E L.

Additional insight from Michael Sylvia: nearly all of the answers end with either a number (usually one or two, though Henry IV gives four) or a syllable indicative of nothingness (null, none, no, naught, etc.) The person found eating pomegranate seeds is likely Perseph(one).

Possibly, since you'd wind up associating each of the twenty-six letters with a number in this way, and the majority of them seem to be zeroes, the solution might involve anagramming together that quantity of each letter? The four Hs make this seem a little less than promising, though, and if it is the right method, the missing data would make this likely impossible to solve now.

Bryce Herdt and Joe DeVincentis give us the following answers assuming this. That is, assuming each "item" clues a word or phrase which starts with a different letter of the alphabet, and ends with either a number or a word suggesting nothing (often phonetically).

If the 5 unsolved ones were E 2, J 0, L 0, N 3, W 0, then these would give the quantity of each letter in the answer EUROPEAN UNION.