Japanese internee’s bones return home
When Giichi Matsumura arrived at his final resting place, the people who knew him best already were there.
SANTA MONICA >> When Giichi Matsumura arrived at his final resting place in late December, the people who knew him best when he disappeared from a Japanese internment camp in 1945 already were there.
His wife, Ito, who had mourned his passing for 60 years before her death in 2005, was buried in the same plot, as was his daughter, Kazue, who died in 2018. His father, Katsuzo, who died in 1963, was nearby. His brother and two of his three sons were a short walk away, all buried in the shady, grassy haven of Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica.
They last saw Giichi alive in the waning days of World War II at the Manzanar internment camp, one of 10 where the U.S. government held more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent for more than three years, claiming without evidence they might betray America in the war.
In the summer of 1945, Matsumura hiked from camp into the nearby Sierra Nevada, the rugged spine of California, and never returned. His remains were committed to a lonely mountainside grave left to the elements.
His journey home, 75 years in the making, only happened after a hiker bound for the summit of Mount Williamson, a massive peak overshadowing Manzanar, veered off route near a lake and spotted a skull in the rocks. He and his partner uncovered a full a skeleton under granite blocks.
It was 2019, and the duty to bring him back fell to a granddaughter born decades after he died.
Lori Matsumura never expected to play that role. She knew of her grandfather’s unfortunate death, but it wasn’t something she often thought about.
Then an Inyo County sheriff’s sergeant phoned and asked for a DNA sample to see if the unearthed bones belonged to her grandfather, the only Manzanar prisoner who died in the mountains.
“It was a complete surprise when I received a call from the sheriff,” Lori said. “There were stories my grandmother told me about her husband passing on the mountain. They were stories to me, and it wasn’t reality. But then when the sheriff called it, you know, brought it into reality.”
That conversation set her on the first step of a mission to reunite her ancestors, a journey that awakened her to a history she had largely seen through a child’s eyes, the edges softened by a generation more inclined to look forward than dwell in the past. Stories that once seemed rosy lost their bloom when faced with the harsh landscape where her relatives spent more than three years in captivity.
Until the U.S. entered WWII after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Giichi Matsumura and his family lived what seemed like a quiet life in the leafy oasis of Santa Monica Canyon, a retreat for artists and stars of old Hollywood.
Born in the Fukui prefecture on the coast of the Sea of Japan, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1916, arriving in San Francisco on a steam ship with a single bag. His father already was there and they worked as gardeners and lived on property owned by the Marquez family, Mexican land grant owners of an area that became parts of Los Angeles and Santa Monica.
Giichi’s wife, Ito, arrived from Kyoto in 1924, according to U.S. Census records. The couple had four children born in the U.S.: sons Masaru, Tsutomo and Uwao, and a daughter, Kazue, the youngest. Kazue, Lori’s aunt, recalled a fun childhood in an interview by Rose Masters, a ranger with the Manzanar National Historic Site, a few months before her death in 2018.
Her mother would pull her in a wagon to play at the beach. She remembers seeing the actor Leo Carrillo, later known as sidekick Pancho to TV’s “The Cisco Kid,” doing lasso tricks.
Giichi Matsumura, who signed up for the World War I draft, registered again on Feb. 14, 1942. Five days later, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that would force people of Japanese descent on the West Coast into prison camps in waves.
Under an April 20, 1942 order, the Matsumura family had about a week to leave their life in the canyon behind.
Kazue, who wasn’t even aware there was a war, recalled her experience as a 7-year-old.
Her father had to give away his car and they were only allowed to bring a single suitcase to camp.
She had been excited about taking a bus trip, but the novelty after a long ride from LA through the desert along the dramatic eastern flank of the Sierra quickly faded when they arrived at Manzanar.
“I noticed it was all dirt,” she said. “Nothing there. Like a desert.”
Manzanar, which means apple orchard in Spanish, quickly became home to 10,000 people of Japanese descent — two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens — living in hundreds of cramped, tar-paper covered barracks.
The family would have shared a barrack with four to six other families, each unit separated only by a thin wall that did not extend to the pitched roof. There was little privacy.
The shacks were so poorly built that frequent winds blew sand through the cracks in walls and floors. There was no insulation, making scorching summers intolerable and frigid winters unbearable.
Giichi Matsumura worked as a cook. In his spare time, he painted watercolors, capturing the guard tower, barracks and Mount Williamson, the second-highest peak in California.
His eldest son, Masaru, Lori’s father, had been about to graduate from high school when they were imprisoned. Instead, he had to wait until the next spring when he was in the internment camp’s first graduating class.
Lori remembers her father talking about the camp’s most infamous incident when guards shot into a crowd of people, killing two and injuring nine.
But she doesn’t know much about his time there.
He didn’t like to discuss it.
What she knew came mostly from her grandmother and Aunt Kazue, who lived together across the street, stories about squashing scorpions on the way to the bathroom using geta — elevated wooden sandals.
Lori Matsumura always meant to visit Manzanar. But she’s not sure she would have made the more than three-hour drive north from Los Angeles.
Now she had to go.
A few weeks after the sheriff’s call, she and her boyfriend, Thomas Store sund, drove to the station in Lone Pine where she gave an oral swab for DNA. They then drove a few miles north where the National Park Service operates the camp as a sort of living museum.