EBay cancels auction of art from Manzanar internment camp after protest

The auction of a series of sketches purportedly drawn by an artist at the Japanese American internment camp at Manzanar was canceled Tuesday after groups protested that it was offensive and immoral to profit off the misery of incarcerated people.

The auction was halted by eBay hours before it was to conclude after company executives met with Japanese American groups who called the sale “hurtful, and a degrading reminder of the mass roundup and incarceration.”

“It’s seems unethical and immoral to put this artwork up on eBay to the highest bidder,” said Shirley Higuchi, author of “Setsuko’s Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration.” “When you sell artwork created during an oppressive time for money ... that’s against what our society feels is moral.”

In a letter to eBay, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Japanese American Citizens League and other groups cited the current wave of attacks on Asian Americans in the U.S. that has escalated recently.

“Sales of our history are never a good thing but are especially hurtful now, when we hear cries to ‘go back to your country,’ exactly what we were told during World War II,” they wrote.

Japanese American groups also got a New Jersey auction house to halt the sale of a much larger collection of internment art in 2015. In that case, hundreds of pieces were turned over to museums that commemorate the forced internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent for more than three years on the groundless claim that they might betray America in the war.

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The artworks for sale on eBay comprised 20 pencil sketches from 1942-43 with the name “Matsumura” written at the bottom, along with the word “Manzanar.” The drawings depict mostly what appear to be Japanese landscapes, including one of Mt. Fuji.

The Japanese American groups suggested that the artist could be Giichi Matsumura, a Manzanar prisoner who died in a storm while sketching and painting in the high Sierra in the final days of the war. Several Matsumura families were held at the camp 180 miles north of Los Angeles.

Lori Matsumura, who recently reburied her grandfather Giichi’s remains after a hiker unearthed his skeleton in 2019, thought the sketches could be by her late father, Masaru, or another family member. The name printed in block letters was similar to the way her father signed high school reports.

Arts and crafts created in the 10 Japanese American internment camps have often resurfaced at yard sales or auctions. Some of the creators abandoned their works when they left camp because they could carry little and had nowhere to go, while others stored them in attics or garages to be discovered later, said Bernadette Johnson, superintendent at the Manzanar National Historic Site.

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If the artwork was by one of her relatives, it could have been in a trunk of her grandmother’s mementos that her aunt kept, Lori Matsumura said. The collection, however, was lost to the family after the aunt died in 2019, and the house was the subject of a legal dispute with her aunt’s partner that was settled for an undisclosed sum.

Lori Matsumura discovered the auction Monday, on the sixth day of the weeklong bidding period, and submitted an $82 bid to try to win the works. The price had climbed to more than $470 when the sale was yanked by eBay.

After the groups contacted eBay, the company removed the auction because it violated an artifacts policy prohibiting the sale of items from government or protected land, spokeswoman Parmita Choudhury said in an email.

Matsumura had a mixed reaction to the sale being halted.

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“I feel I may never see those sketches again,” she said. “It depends how the seller reacts.”

Higuchi said eBay would contact the seller and put one of the groups in touch to try to obtain the collection.

The seller, listed as sunsetderby in Sharon Springs, N.Y., said the works came from the Japanese family of a former girlfriend in the 1980s. The seller would not name the girlfriend in a follow-up message and said the full name of the artist was unknown.

The seller said they weren’t violating eBay’s policies and said other major auction houses had sold similar art. “It’s absolutely preposterous to think that I am doing anything wrong,” the person wrote in response to a question sent through eBay.

Erin Thompson, an expert on art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said anyone who legally owns a work of art is entitled to sell it. But she said consideration should be given to the circumstances of a work’s creation and the artist’s intent. When the creator can’t be consulted, a community consensus could be sought.

She said the first question should be about the authenticity of the work, which can be “questionable at best” on eBay. Any investor not put off by provenance concerns might consider the moral issues brewing, Thompson said.

“People don’t want to buy a controversy along with a landscape drawing,” Thompson said. “It seems they’re worth the paper they’re created on and not much more.”

Bif Brigman, a former art dealer, said he had purchased similar Manzanar works from the same seller more than a year ago by an artist named Matsui. He hopes to reunite them with the artist’s family or provide them to a museum, but he said he wouldn’t participate in future auctions of the kind.

“I didn’t want them scattered to the wind,” he said. “The whole notion that somehow eBay thinks that objects made by prisoners in a concentration camp is a commodity to be sold ... is super-offensive.”