George and Frank C. Hirahara Photograph Collection of Heart Mountain, Wyoming, 1932-2016

In 1907, the Hirahara family immigrated to the Yakima Valley where they owned a farm and ran the Pacific Hotel. In 1942, they were removed from the Yakima Valley by the War Relocation Authority as part of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans authorized by Executive Order 9066. The Hiraharas were sent to the Portland Assembly Center before their incarceration at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. The Hirahara family, including grandfather Motokichi, grandmother Sato, father George, mother Koto, and son Frank, were among nearly eleven thousand people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center from 1942 to 1945.

In 1943, the Hirahara family purchased photography equipment from a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. catalog and built a darkroom beneath his family barrack. George and his son, Frank, took thousands of pictures that portrayed life at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, including daily practices, festivals, funerals, sports, and the Heart Mountain School. George Hirahara (1905-2000) took numerous family and individual portraits, and Frank C. Hirahara (1926-2006) served as a photographer for the 1945 Heart Mountain High School Tempo Yearbook his senior year. Both George and Frank also took many landscape portraits, as well as photographs of their family trips to nearby destinations like Yellowstone National Park.

Frank C. Hirahara left the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in January 1945 to attend Washington State College (later Washington State University). While at WSC, Frank participated on the school track team. Later in 1945, he returned to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center to attend a funeral for his grandfather Motokichi Hirahara. Frank graduated WSC in 1948 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and later served as an engineer for the Bonneville Power Administration.

At the closure of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in 1945, George and Koto Hirahara returned to Yakima, Washington, where they resumed their lives, until moving to California in 1992.

Executive Order 9066:

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the incarceration from 1942 to 1946 of approximately 120,000 adults and children of Japanese ancestry, many of whom were United States citizens. They were expelled from their homes and placed in incarceration camps without due process and in violation of their civil rights. These camps were euphemistically referred to as “relocation centers” or “internment camps”. After decades of advocacy by the Japanese American community, in 1988 the United States issued a formal apology and began redress to survivors of Japanese incarceration during World War II.