World War II loot found in a Massachusetts home is being returned to Okinawa

During the brutal Battle of Okinawa in Japan, in the final months of World War II, a group of American soldiers took up residence in the palace of a royal family who had fled the fighting. When a palace administrator returned after the war was over, he later said, the treasure was gone.

Some of these valuables turned up decades later in the attic of the Massachusetts home of a World War II veteran whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to identify when announcing the find last week.

The veteran’s family discovered the cache of vibrant paintings and pottery; large fragile roles; and an intricate hand-drawn map after his death last year, and they reported the discovery to the agency’s Art Crime Team.

Geoffrey Kelly, a special agent and art theft coordinator for the bureau’s Boston field office, was assigned to the case and took the artifacts to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington. The recovered items were returned to Okinawa in January and a formal repatriation ceremony will take place in Japan next month.

“It’s an exciting moment when you see the scrolls unfolding before you, and you’re witnessing history, and you’re witnessing something that hasn’t been seen by many people in a very long time,” he said.

Verified by Smithsonian experts as authentic artifacts of the former Ryukyu Kingdom, a 450-year-old dynasty that ruled Okinawa as a tributary state of China’s Ming Dynasty, the FBI turned the items over to the agency’s Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations US Army. Command. The cultural heritage specialists brought the precious pieces back to Okinawa.

“Very few objects from that kingdom survive,” said Travis Seifman, an associate professor at the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. “Reclaiming heritage, reclaiming cultural treasures and knowledge of their own history is very important to many people in Okinawa.”

The Ryukyu Kingdom ruled in Okinawa from the early 15th century until 1879, when Japan annexed the kingdom as a prefecture.

The cache of 22 artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries includes two portraits of Ryukyu kings – the only two of as many as 100 painted portraits known to have survived the war – “an incredible find,” he said.

A typewritten letter written by a U.S. soldier stationed in the Pacific theater during World War II was found with the artifacts and indicated the items had been taken from Okinawa, authorities said.

The letter described the pieces being smuggled out of Japan and trying — and failing — to sell them to a museum in the United States, said Col. Andrew Scott DeJesse, the cultural heritage preservation officer who collected the artifacts. accompanied to Okinawa.

The veteran, who was stationed in Europe, found the artifacts near a dumpster, Colonel DeJesse said, and recognizing their value, he took them to Massachusetts.

“Samurai swords, katanas, things about military personnel, that was always accepted,” Colonel DeJesse said, describing how American commanders approved soldiers’ war trophies from the battlefield.

During World War II, cultural heritage researchers known as Monuments Officers in Europe were tracking down millions of works of art, books and other valuables stolen by the Nazis. There were also officers stationed in Japan, “but the looting of heritage sites,” Colonel DeJesse said, was “not really known,” adding that Americans were not the only ones taking items from war zones.

‘The Japanese empire did it everywhere. So were the Nazis, and so was the Soviet Union. That happened systematically,” he says.

The Battle of Okinawa, which has been described as “82 days of the costliest fighting in the Pacific,” was one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Second World War. About 100,000 Japanese civilians and 60,000 troops were killed. More than 12,000 soldiers, sailors and marines died in the three-month battle. Works of art and other valuables were not the only items stolen. Some researchers have said that American soldiers took skulls and other body parts as trophies.

After the war ended in 1945, Bokei Maehira, a palace steward, returned to the palace to check on the heirlooms – including crowns, silk robes, royal portraits and other artifacts – that he and others had hidden in a trench on the palace grounds. . He found the palace reduced to ashes and the trench looted, he wrote in an academic article published in 2018.

Among the loot was ‘Omorosaushi’, a collection of Ryukyuan folk songs dating back centuries.

The US government repatriated the Omorosaushi to Okinawa in 1953, after an American commander, Carl W. Sternfelt, took the spoils of war to Harvard University for assessment.

In 1954, the United States signed along with dozens of other countries The Hague Conventiona treaty established by the United Nations to protect cultural property in armed conflict.

Still, Col. DeJesse, who has deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq, said part of his and other heritage officials’ job is training military commanders and soldiers who are unaware of that obligation.

“It’s a big problem. We advise them, ‘Hey, don’t touch it, don’t pick it up. It belongs to someone else. Just like you wouldn’t want your own church and your own museum to be looted,” he said.

The government of Japan registered other missing items from the Ryukyu Kingdom with the FBI’s National Stolen Art File in 2001. These include black-and-white photographs depicting a collection of important Okinawa cultural heritage that, according to Professor Seifman, are “in many cases all that survive from sites and objects lost or destroyed” in World War II.

Among the items recorded were the scrolls found in the Massachusetts veteran’s attic.

The veteran’s family, to whom the FBI has granted anonymity, will not face charges.

“It’s not always about prosecuting and putting someone in jail,” Mr Kelly said. “A big part of what we do is ensure that stolen property is returned to its rightful owners, even if it is many generations later.”