Description
Lori Matsumura is a Sansei for whom the legacy and events of her family's unjust incarceration at Manzanar and Tule Lake during World War II continues to impact her life in the twenty-first century. Matsumura, the youngest of four siblings, was born in July 1970 in Santa Monica, California, where her father worked as a gardener after his own father's unexpected death at Manzanar in 1945. In 1982, soon after Matsumura turned twelve, her mother, then forty-eight, died suddenly. Matsumura attended grade school and high school in Santa Monica and has lived her entire life in the Los Angeles area. Prior to World War II, Matsumura's maternal family lived in Stockton, California, where they ran a hotel. Matsumura's paternal family emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in the Santa Monica Canyons near Los Angeles. During World War II, when both her parents were young, they and their families were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated without due process by the US government in mass detention camps in remote areas of California. Her mother's family eventually went to Tule Lake, and her father's family went to Manzanar. In July 1945, Matsumura's grandfather Giichi Matsumura died while hiking high in the mountains above Manzanar, just weeks prior before he, his wife, and their four young children were to be released from Manzanar. Giichi's body remained some ten-thousand feet atop Mount Williamson until late 2019 when two hikers rediscovered his remains. The Inyo County Sheriff's Office retrieved the remains, and in collaboration with National Park Service Rangers at the Manzanar National Historic Site, they contacted Matsumura, whose DNA test confirmed a match with her grandfather. During the COVID pandemic of 2020, Matsumura and her siblings eventually laid their grandfather to rest alongside his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. Matsumura has several family mementos and heirlooms, including photographs, a ring, and her father's artwork as a young man, some of which she shared during this interview. In this oral history, Matsumura discusses all of the above, including her family's experiences before, during, and after their wartime incarcerations; her own life in Los Angeles, including during the 1992 LA Riots; her experiences visiting Japan as a young girl; and her experiences both of the rediscovery of her grandfather's remains in the mountains above Manzanar and her efforts in 2021 to stop the sale on eBay of artwork her family created while incarcerated in Manzanar.