Mystery skeleton found in California mountains revealed as WW2 Japanese-American prisoner
Giichi Matsumura during his incarceration at an internment camp. Image: AP Giichi Matsumura during his incarceration at an internment camp. Image: AP A SKELETON FOUND by hikers last autumn near California’s second-highest peak was identified yesterday as a Japanese-American artist who had left the Manzanar internment camp to paint in the mountains in the waning days of World War II.
Matsumura was one of more than 1,800 detainees who died in the 10 prison camps in the West, though it’s one of the more unusual deaths. As a girl, she was haunted by a photo her grandmother showed her of the pile of stones where her grandfather was buried beneath a small marker in the remote mountains.
Earlier in the day, the men had discovered a pile of bones beneath Shepherd Pass, where a herd of migrating deer had plummeted to their death two years earlier on a steep, icy slope. What officials didn’t say, though, was that by the time they had retrieved the bones by helicopter, they already had a hunch it might be Matsumura.
In the final year of the war, the guard towers were no longer manned with armed soldiers, and people were free to leave the camp. The Matsumuras, like many others, had no home or business to return to, so they remained behind. During that period, his wife, Ito, worried so much that her hair turned the color of snow, according to Kazue, who was 10 at the time.
The burial party brought back clippings of his hair and fingernails, a Buddhist tradition when a body can’t be returned, for a ceremony at the camp.
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