New Year’s celebrations and traditions are important in Japan, and were likewise important to many of the Americans of Japanese ancestry forced to live in Wyoming’s Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site between 1942 and 1945.

Ruby Hifumi, 16, was photographed with a special arrangement she made to celebrate the new year of 1943 while detained at Heart Mountain. These types of holiday arrangements are called kadomatsu, and tend to be created with pine boughs, bamboo and flowering plum branches. 

Hifumi here used paper bamboo, paper flowers on a sage branch and real pine.

“The flower arrangement of the three materials symbolizes in order, hardness, courage and strength,” the photograph’s original caption reads. 

As of Jan. 1, 1943, the camp confined 10,767 prisoners, according to the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Using 1940 census data, it would’ve been Wyoming’s third-largest community at the time.

A young man with glasses moves around printing press materials
“In the press room of the Cody Enterprise, Bill Hosokawa, Editor of the Sentinel, Heart Mountain Relocation Center newspaper, prepares the final makeup for the weekly edition. Leave regulations will allow only one member of the staff to leave the center, so Bill performs all the necessary jobs, type setting, makeup, form locking, and all necessary press work in order to get out the edition.” – Jan. 8, 1943. (Tom Parker/War Relocation Authority/National Archives Catalog)

Behind the lens

Colorado native Thomas Parker — who took this picture — visited a handful of Japanese internment camps around the country. His images, including this one of Hifumi, are in the National Archives. 

Among those images are also people at Heart Mountain learning to ice skate, working on a newspaper printed out of the Cody Enterprise office, playing games, taking classes and sitting in stylish living rooms created from almost nothing but scrap wood and ingenuity.

A man and a woman hold onto eachother's hands while trying to ice skate
“Centerites at Heart Mountain were quick to grab the recreational opportunities of cold Wyoming winters. Shallow ponds were prepared and flooded for ice skating. Here a former California boy and girl try out what to them is a brand new sport.” – Jan. 10, 1943. (Tom Parker/War Relocation Authority/National Archives Catalog)

While thousands of Japanese Americans living near the West Coast were forced to relocate to under-prepared camps like Heart Mountain, those already living in Wyoming remained free. The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center is a Wyoming museum dedicated to teaching future generations about this dark moment in U.S. history.  

All three branches of government have recognized Japanese internment camps as racist overreaches of governmental power. Still, hundreds of those within the camps joined the military and fought for a country that stripped them of civil liberties.

As we head into yet another new year, this is a reminder of the Equality State’s past — both the painful and joyous parts of it — and a reminder of the diverse cultures and celebrations Wyoming remains home to.

Madelyn Beck reports from Laramie on health and public safety. Before working with WyoFile, she was a public radio journalist reporting for NPR stations across the Mountain West, covering regional issues...

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