Think: Indiana Jones meets 400-year-old Japanese art meets modern Seattle.

It's the second annual Seattle-wide treasure hunt — Emerald City Search — and it begins today, starting with the first clue on this page. One clue will follow each day for the next nine days. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to follow those clues to the location of a medallion hidden somewhere on public property in Seattle.

You have 10 days to find the palm-size treasure. The first one there gets $2,500 in cash and prizes. All of the clues, which are written in a traditional Japanese meter, will deal with facts about Japanese art history, inspired by the Seattle Art Museum's latest exhibit, "Japan Envisions the West." A quick hint? It's not at the Seattle Art Museum, it's not buried or underwater, and you don't have to destroy, dig up or climb anything to find it. It's hidden, as they say, in plain sight.

You may remember last year's first-ever Emerald City Search, which was Dead Sea Scrolls-themed in honor of last fall's exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. You also might remember that the search ended anticlimactically: Someone found the medallion after the third clue.

"That's not happening this year," says Marilyn Kliman of the University of Washington, who helped plan the Emerald City Search both this year and last. "This time, we got puzzle masters in here to test all the clues ahead of time. They're really tricky."

The clues were written primarily by two graduate students, Catherine Roche and Melanie King, both of whom are studying Japanese art history at the University of Washington.

When the two discuss the clues, they lapse into Japanese, then laugh. A discussion of bilingual double entendres and Seattle topography ensues.

Without giving away any pertinent information, let me put it this way: You're in for a challenge. All the clues draw inspiration from the "Edo" period in Japanese history, from 1615 to 1868. It's the same period covered by the "Japan Envisions the West" exhibit at SAM. Most clues allude to Seattle history, too. And somehow, all these historical references — separated by 500 years and an ocean — suggest the physical location of the medallion in our modern city.

Here's a crash course on the Edo period, just to get you started:

Beginning in the mid-16th century, Western merchants began moseying over to Japan to trade. First it was the Portuguese, then the Spanish, and then the Dutch. In the early 1600s, the Japanese kicked out the Portuguese and Spanish for proselytizing Catholicism. The Dutch were allowed to stay.

That's the rough beginning of the 350-year Edo period, during which time Japan was run by a shogun — a central military leader — and was almost entirely closed off to direct trade with the world. Dutch and Chinese merchants were allowed in, but on a limited basis.

It stayed that way until 1854, when U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry ("and his Friends," quips Roche, alluding to another Matthew Perry) opened Japan for trade with the West.

So, for those three closed centuries, the average Japanese citizen would have had very little contact with Western culture. Folks living near the port of Nagasaki might have stolen an occasional glimpse at a Dutchman or two, but on the whole, the Japanese people's understanding of the West was filtered through artifacts left over from the brief Spanish and Portuguese stays. Or through hearsay and legend.

That comes through in the art exhibit. In one woodblock print, a Japanese artist depicts Commodore Perry with large, bulbous blue eyes — only they're not Perry's irises that are blue; they're the white parts around the irises. That's because the artist had never seen a Western man, explains King. He had only heard that they have blue eyes.

Other pieces of art show disparate cultures overlapping: Japanese-style pottery emblazoned with a Spanish-style cross; folks in Western dress painted in the Japanese aesthetic.

So, what does all this art history have to do with that little medallion, hidden somewhere in Seattle's city limits?

" 'Japan Envisions the West' is about how two cultures began to explore each other. Emerald City Search is about people from different parts of the Seattle community beginning to explore each other, too," says Kerston Swartz of the UW Alumni Association.

"The university is sometimes seen as this elitist community, and we want to break out of that." She hopes the search will create something that all Seattleites can share — aside from the traffic on the floating bridge.

Rabbi Will Berkovitz of Hillel UW, who was instrumental in starting the search last year, also hopes that the now-annual search will remind people that education shouldn't be limited to books.

"The more you learn about something," he says, "the more the world begins to shimmer."

You know what else shimmers? $2,500 in cash and prizes.

So go on, decipher those clues, consult the SAM exhibit, and prowl Seattle for that medallion.

If all fails in the end, just remember the conversation between Indiana Jones and his father in "The Last Crusade." Walking away from a site empty-handed, Indiana asks his dad, "And what did you find, Dad?" Professor Jones looks at his son, thinks a moment, then answers.

"Me? Illumination."

Haley Edwards: 206-464-2745 or hedwards@seattletimes.com