Unraveling the mystery of the Heart Mountain stones

Posted 3/23/17

The year was 1956. When the Heart Mountain camp closed in 1945 at the end of World War II, the land it was built on and the surrounding acreage was parceled off to homesteaders. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was charged with clearing off what …

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Unraveling the mystery of the Heart Mountain stones

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Museum presentation examines WWII-era enigma

Tasked with leveling out what was once the cemetery at the Heart Mountain internment camp, a local worker made an amazing discovery.

The year was 1956. When the Heart Mountain camp closed in 1945 at the end of World War II, the land it was built on and the surrounding acreage was parceled off to homesteaders. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was charged with clearing off what remained of the camp. It was during that work that Bill Higgins and his road grader ran over something definitely not native to the soil. Assuming he’d run over a casket that had been left behind when the cemetery was relocated, Higgins was surprised to instead find a 55-gallon drum buried just below the surface. The force of the impact sheared the top off the barrel, exposing its contents: Thousands of tiny stones, each marked with a single Japanese character.

So began the mystery of the Heart Mountain stones.

The tale of the stones’ origins was the subject of a Saturday presentation at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, part of the center’s Winter Program Series.

“This story is one that has captivated me since I first started working here,” said Museum Manager Dakota Russell. “I wanted to learn more about it, and that’s how this presentation began to take shape.”

The past meets the present

In the years that followed the discovery, homesteaders Les and Nora Bovee made attempts to identify the stones and figure out how they came to be buried in the cemetery. Lacking the resources for an intensive investigation, the barrel sat for many years in the Bovees’ farm. As Japanese-American families with members once held at Heart Mountain began to make pilgrimages back to the camp in the 1970s and 80s, Les Bovee would show the stones to the intrigued visitors.

“A lot of times, he would send visitors home with a handful of the stones, which diminished the collection somewhat,” Russell said.

After the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) opened in Los Angeles in 1992, the Bovees donated the roughly 650 remaining stones to the facility.

Once on display at the JANM, the stones were viewed by Sodo Mori, a Japanese scholar and an expert in Buddhist history. Mori theorized that the stones were part of a sutra, or Buddhist scripture, as he’d seen similar collections in Japan dating back to the 16th century.

“Basically what happens is that they will take a sutra, copy one character at a time onto stones and then bury them,” Russell explained. “It’s a symbolic gesture: The stones are buried for when the future Buddha comes to teach mankind the way of enlightenment; the scriptures are preserved.”

But questions still remained. In an investigation rivaling any good detective story, Mori copied down all 650-plus characters in the JANM collection. He and his colleagues then wrote a computer program to test the characters against the existing sutras, narrowing the search to the closest matching texts. It was finally concluded the text in question was selections from the first five chapters of the Lotus Sutra, a widely read and revered Buddhist scripture. First translated in the third century in East Asia, the Lotus Sutra is used by the Nichiren sect of Buddhism, Russell said.

“So now [Mori] knew he was looking for a Nichiren priest, and a calligrapher,” Russell said. “Fortunately for the search, there was only one in the camp that fit that criteria.”

Mystery solved?

That one was Rev. Nichikan Murakita, a Nichiren monk. He was sent to the U.S. on a mission to San Francisco in 1933 and eventually settled in Los Angeles. However, Murakita was detained after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, arriving at Heart Mountain in September of 1942.

“He was only in camp about a year — taught calligraphy, preached in camp,” Russell said. “He and his wife eventually applied for and were granted repatriation back to Japan in 1943 as part of a diplomatic exchange. He never spoke about the stones, so they remained for years this total mystery.”

Theories abound as to whether Murakita created the stones as part of his calligraphy class or if it was something he did on his own. As he was only in camp for a year, and the stones initially found numbered over 2,000, it represented a rather extensive undertaking.

“That’s a lot of stones, so if you think about it, he would have had to go down to the Shoshone River, which means getting a pass,” Russell said. “You have to collect the rocks, bring them up to camp, clean them off and then paint each one. It’s a big project to undertake alone, but if he did it as part of his calligraphy class, how come no one remembers it?”

Russell is inclined to believe Murakita painted the stones on his own, a belief shared by Mori. Because no one can say with any certainty that Murakita indeed had help, it may be the one element of the story that will remain a mystery.

“You would think that if there were a bunch of people doing this, someone would have some memory of this stone scripture being made,” Russell said. “So that, and the fact that the brushwork on the stones are so consistent, leads me to believe he was doing it alone, in secret.”

A lasting legacy

Since the unveiling of the stones at the Japanese American National Museum, the stones that were given out over time have slowly begun to trickle back to Heart Mountain. The center now has a small collection of the stones that used to hang in Nora Bovee’s ceramic shop on display, as well as a few from different owners that have been donated over the years. Russell said he hopes those who attended Saturday’s presentation, as well as the rest of the center’s Winter Program Series, will continue to focus on the individual stories of those interned here, and the legacy they left behind.

“There were 14,000 people who passed through here in the three-plus years it was open,” he said. “That means there are 14,000 stories. The purpose of the series was to highlight some of these different lives that passed through here, some of the interesting stories that aren’t part of the big-picture story we tell every day in the exhibit...Individual stories foster a greater connection with visitors to this place, because they’re not just seeing the Japanese-Americans held here as a large group, they’re seeing individual faces.”

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