Officials trying to return Japanese skull found in Lake Villa: ‘It’s the ethical and moral thing to do’

In a case with more questions than answers, a decades-old skull of a Japanese woman with the word “Okinawa” written on the forehead was found in the footlocker of a deceased Vietnam War veteran in a small Lake County community, authorities say.

While the exact origins of the skull remain unknown, its discovery evokes a morbid side of U.S. history during World War II, when the remains of Japanese people became war trophies for American soldiers.

The discovery was made on Sept. 21, when Lake County officials say deputies were dispatched to an automotive shop in Lake Villa for an unusual call.

The caller had been cleaning out his deceased father’s business when he found a military footlocker in an old abandoned box truck on a storage lot. The footlocker was not owned by the man’s father, officials said. It was likely owned by another now-deceased man who had been stationed in Okinawa and Korea during the Vietnam War.

Chief Deputy Coroner Steve Newton said officials sent the skull to their forensic anthropologist at Northwestern University, who determined it was consistent with a biological adult female of Japanese ancestry.

Beyond the word “Okinawa” on the skull’s forehead, Newton said there was an attempt at drawing glasses on the skull, as well as some kind of design on the top he wasn’t able to describe.

Newton said local officials are working to get the skull to the Japanese Consulate to have the remains returned to Japan. The Consulate-General of Japan did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Sheriff’s Office Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli, the case remains open, and investigators are waiting to coordinate further with the Coroner’s Office to determine if there’s a way to trace the skull to a specific region.

“Most importantly, we’re glad to see progress being made toward returning the remains home,” Covelli said.

Dark history

It won’t be the first time the Japanese Consulate in Chicago has been given human remains, including skulls. In 2014, the consulate was sent a box containing two skulls and other bones with a letter claiming they belonged to two Japanese soldiers killed on Tinian Island during World War II, although there was some doubt at the time.

In the more than 80 years since the war ended, such remains have periodically been rediscovered and returned to Japan.

Author Colin Dickey, an associate professor at National University, has developed a specialty in such grisly discoveries. His work has a focus on death and the historical and cultural side of ghost stories, and he previously served as the managing director for the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York.

He wrote on the subject of Japanese human skulls as a form of war souvenir more than a decade ago, after seeing an infamous 1944 Life magazine photo of a young woman staring at a skull on her desk. The original caption read, “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”

“It was staged very much like a classical Renaissance painting of Mary Magdalene,” Dickey said.

But despite the photo and number of reported incidents, there’s a lack of data or writings on the subject, he said. That’s at least in part because the military officially condemned the behavior, meaning such souvenirs were taken in secret, Dickey said.

War souvenirs are a largely universal occurrence, Dickey said, and World War II saw Americans returning home with plenty of mementos from Europe, including Nazi paraphernalia like pins and insignia. But only in Japan was there a “sort of trade in human body parts,” he said.

“The short answer is racism,” Dickey said. “It had a lot to do with this kind of dehumanizing attitude towards the Japanese, and this particular kind of animosity, and this sense that they were ‘savages’ beneath us.”

But it wasn’t just soldiers taking Japanese remains back to the U.S., he said. After the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American doctors arrived and began creating an archive of irradiated body parts.

Those remains were taken to the U.S. and were only fully returned to Japan by 1973, according to reporting from the Hiroshima Peace Media Center.

The lack of writing on the topic makes it something of a “hidden history,” Dickey said, likely because people aren’t typically going on record describing how it came about. But every now and then, the evidence will appear again and “you suddenly have this kind of reminder of this weird thing that happened.”

While the remains are now many decades old, it is still important to return them to their home countries, Dickey said.

“Fundamentally, this is how you reaffirm your own humanity,” he said. “By recognizing the burial rites and mourning customs of other people. That’s fundamentally what we’re doing there.”

The dehumanization of a wartime enemy had been a way to “take away the pain of war,” Dickey said. Stepping back from such thinking requires recognizing what has been done and “trying to make it right.”

Newton had a similar sentiment; the skull needed to be returned

“It’s the ethical and moral thing to do,” he said.

jstates@chicagotribune.com