Good for you Jon!!!

You will love working with it. I want to replace the set I lost. They are some of my favorite planes and "go to" tool for all manner of clean up.

For the Kanji found on the tang, it is most likely the makers mark and/or location orgin.

Google Translate has a "hand write" interpreter built into it. It's not perfect, but it is usually close enough to figure things out. I also have a few other sources (as do others here) that probably can assist you...

Thanks for sharing...

j