Grant expands online access to Japanese internment material

Tom T. Hide at Heart Mountain, Wyo.
(Photo from WSU MASC)
 
WSU donor Patti Hirahara visits with Charles Weller , left,
history instructor, and Raymond Sun, chair of WSU’s
history department, on the Pullman campus last week. 
(Photo by Steve Nakata, WSU)
 
A little boy rides in his toy car at Heart
Mountain in 1945. (Photo from WSU
MASC)
 
Internees at Heart Mountain board
a train for home on June 8, 1945. (Photo
from WSU
MASC)

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University last year became home to the largest private collection of photos taken during World War II at the Japanese-American internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo. Now the National Park Service (NPS) has announced it is awarding WSU an additional $77,769 to enhance access to its growing Heart Mountain collections.

 
The NPS awarded WSU $49,217 last year to digitize and preserve the George and Frank C. Hirahara photo collection of this father and son duo who took photos at the camp 1943-1945. Frank graduated from Washington State University in 1948.
 
The 46,000-acre camp at Heart Mountain housed nearly 11,000 Japanese and Japanese-American detainees from California, Oregon and Washington during the war, making the camp the third largest city in Wyoming at the time. August will mark the 70th anniversary of the opening of the camp in 1942.
 
Trevor J. Bond, head of Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections at WSU, said the initial donation of photos garnered considerable media attention from former internees and WSU alumni.
 
“Upon hearing about the Hirahara Collection, interest from around the Pacific Northwest led to donations of valuable new resources to our collection as well as offers to help us gain new insight into the Heart Mountain Internment Camp,” he said.
 
Tom T. Hide, of Anaheim, Calif., donated a 1945 Heart Mountain directory of all heads of households interned at the camp, as well as a Heart Mountain Carpenter’s Club directory. Hide attended WSU 1944-1945 and earned a freshman letter in track.
 
The WSU Hide Collection also includes family photographs and artifacts from Heart Mountain. This will be digitized, translated and classified through the new NPS grant, along with other new resources, to allow scholars and the public to view it online.
 
As outlined in the initial grant, WSU is continuing to develop curriculum materials based on the more than 2,000 black and white negatives of the Hirahara Collection. Donor Patti Hirahara, of Anaheim, Calif., spent two days on the Pullman campus last week speaking to more than 600 students in history classes about her family’s collection and experiences at Heart Mountain.
 
“She is the first person in recent memory to speak about her family’s personal ties to Japanese internment at WSU who is not a faculty member,” said Raymond Sun, chair of the WSU history department. ”Her ability to relate to the students was most effective.”
 
“This is an exciting time at WSU as we continue to expand our collections depicting this important time in U.S. history,” said Bond.
 
Much of the Hirahara Collection will be available online in October 2012. 
 
The NPS’ Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program will support projects in 11 states this year. Nearly $9.7 million has been awarded since Congress established the grant program in 2006.
 
More information about the grant can be found at http://www.nps.gov/hps/hpg/JACS/index.html.