ABSTRACT A narrative of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon #5), a Japanese fishing vessel constructed in 1947, is presented to reveal how popular experience and storying connected with the vessel have oscillated amid and are interwoven across the everyday, the unusual, and the extraordinary. The multiple historical and contemporary meanings (inclusive of relations with the global anti-nuclear peace movement), personal/global associations, and institutional care connected with the vessel are used to illustrate the degrees of heritagisation to which the object has been subject and the complexities of fixing heritage significance within dynamic socio-political contexts. By attending to changing relations over 67 years across local and global events and activities, the story of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru works to critique a binary of top-down (authorised, legitimate, official) versus bottom-up (popular, from below, unofficial) processes, practices, and heritage approaches. The making, unmaking, and remaking of the vessel as heritage is a story of entangled official and unofficial heritage work characterised by a futures orientation – specifically the continuous demand for global peace free from nuclear weapons – and a value regime that has been and continues to be open and multiple.