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Bones Found in California Mountains May Be Internee From Manzanar

File - In this May 23, 1943, file photo, an American soldier guards a Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, Calif. A human skeleton retrieved from California’s second-highest mountain, Mount Williamson, in October 2019, may be the remains of a Japanese-American man who died in 1945 as part of a fishing party from the Manzanar internment camp. The Inyo County Sheriff’s Department says that is among the possibilities being investigated after the bones were discovered Oct. 7 by two hikers. (AP Photo/File)

Lost once and found twice!

source: St Louis Post Dispatch

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — In the closing days of World War II, a Japanese American set out with other men from the infamous internment camp at Manzanar on a trip to the mountains, where he went off on his own to paint a watercolor and got caught in a freak summer snowstorm.

A hiker found Giichi Matsumura’s body weeks later amid a jumble of boulders, and he was laid to rest in a spot marked only by a small stack of granite slabs.

Over the years, as the little-known story faded along with memories, the location of Matsumura’s burial in the remote and forbidding alpine landscape was lost to time, and he became a sort of ghost of Manzanar, the subject of searches, rumors and legends.

Now, 74 years later, his remains may have finally been found.

The Inyo County sheriff’s office told The Associated Press it is investigating the possibility that a skeleton discovered earlier this month in the high Sierra Nevada is Matsumura’s.

If those suspicions prove correct, Matsumura will have the rare distinction of having been lost and found twice.

His fate is a footnote to one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history, when more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were deemed a security risk and herded into prison camps in remote locations.

Mountain skeleton may be man from Japanese internment camp

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