Story at a glance
- Authorities were able to identify the remains using DNA from Matsumura’s granddaughter.
- The man was killed while painting in the mountains during a surprise summer blizzard.
- Manzanar War Relocation Center held more than 11,000 Japanese Americans at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.
Hikers in California discovered the skeleton of a Japanese American artist who left an internment camp in the last months of World War II, and later died in a freak summer blizzard.
The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and the National Park Service announced Friday they used DNA to positively identify the remains as Giichi Matsumura, a Japanese American man from Santa Monica who had been incarcerated with his family for three years at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. During the war, more than 11,000 Japanese Americans were held in Manzanar, which was one of 10 internment camps set up by the U.S. government in order to detain Japanese-origin people in the U.S.
The two hikers who found the remains were making their way to the top of Mount Williamson on Oct. 7, when one looked down and found a human skull. They then moved rocks around and found an intact skeleton with a belt around its waist and leather shoes on its feet.
Authorities were able to verify the identity through DNA provided from Matsumura’s granddaughter, and the Manzanar National Historic Site pieced together Matsumura’s story through detailed historical archived data.
They say the 46-year-old ventured on a hiking trip with other members of the camp into the Sierra Nevada mountains on July 29, 1945. At some point, Matsumura stopped by himself to paint a watercolor. A snowstorm moved in and, as the other men sought refuge in a cave, Matsumura was left exposed and succumbed to the elements.
When the weather cleared, search parties scanned the area but were unable to find his body until a month later, when he was buried beneath a pile of rocks and memorialized in a Buddhist ceremony.
Lori Matsumara, the granddaughter who provided the DNA sample, told the Associated Press she was surprised when the Inyo County sheriff’s office reached out to her to say they believed her grandfather’s remains had been found after nearly 75 years.
“It was a bit of a rediscovery,” she told AP. “We knew where he was approximately because we knew the story of what happened. So we knew he was there.”
Her aunt, Kazue, said her grandfather was known as “the ghost of Manzanar.”
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