Biography:
Tomio Miyahara was born May 28, 1920, in Sheridan, Wyoming, where his father, Tamekichi, worked and lived with his wife, Tsutae. He was an only child. The family eventually moved to Mountain View, California, where they worked as gardeners and farmers. By the time of the forced removal in 1942, Miyahara ran his own 10-acre truck farm and also worked as a gardener in the Mountain View area. The Miyahara family was sent first to the Santa Anita Assembly Center, where they arrived on May 27, 1942, and then to Heart Mountain, where they arrived on September 13, 1942. They lived in apartment 23-2-F. Miyahara received a leave clearance in March 1943 to investigate sugar beet farming in Hardin, Montana, before he returned to camp. He answered Yes and Yes to Questions 27 and 28 on the 1943 loyalty questionnaire, adding that he did not want to serve “until my citizenship status is cleared and my immediate family is relocated.” Miyahara was arrested on April 7, 1944, tried and convicted in the June 1944 trial of 63 resisters and sentenced to three years in the McNeil Island federal prison in Washington. He was released in 1946 and pardoned by President Harry Truman in 1947. After the war, he returned to Mountain View, where he married Michiko. The 1950 Census shows that the couple lived with Miyahara’s aging parents. Tomio Miyahara died in Mountain View on July 13, 2000, and his wife died there one month later.