Sam MiharaSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

The camps housed a total of 120,000 West Coast people of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were born in the United States. The whole time Sam and his family were imprisoned, they lived in a single chamber spanning 20 feet by 20 feet. Sam returned to San Francisco when the war finished and he was freed from camp.

He attended Lick Wilmerding High School and earned engineering degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA. He went on to work for The Boeing Company as a rocket scientist, where he assisted in the launch of several satellites into space.

Sam started his own high-tech consulting company after retiring from Boeing, and he likes meeting new people from all around the world. He created the Heart Mountain Memories presentation to educate people and guarantee that similar human rights crimes do not occur again.

He relates the tale of his family and what happened to them, as well as the reasons for the camps' establishment and the essential lessons learned from the event. For his presentation, Sam looked into a variety of government and private photo collections, including a few that had been removed from public access.

Many notable photos were collected with permission from the UC Bancroft Library and are the work of experts such as Dorothea Lange. Sam has developed an educational and amusing show that recounts the conditions he, his family, and close friends faced during the Japanese-American internment by mixing these professional photos with his personal photo collection.

Sam is a member of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which was founded in 2011 at a Wyoming campsite. Sam has also spoken at a number of schools, universities, and Department of Justice offices about his experiences.