Kenichi Maehara
 

Kenichi Maehara was the official photographer and photo concessionaire for Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (then called Hawaii National Park) from 1930 to 1941. His dramatic photos of the eruptions of Kīleaua and Mauna Loa, distributed around the world, have been seen by generations, and he did as much as anyone to popularize the Volcano area to visitors in the 20th Century.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, he immigrated to Hawaiʻi in 1896 and set up a photo studio in Hilo in the 1920s. In 1930, he added the Volcano Public Studio, which was built with the approval of the National Park Service near the site of the park’s current visitor center. It was a full-service business, offering, developing, printing, enlarging and framing options. It also sold Maehara’s own photos, lantern slides, colorized postcards and photos taken by others.

“I am a happy man today because photographing is both my hobby and my lifework,” he told a newspaper reporter in the 1930s. However, his life and business did not end happily because of some photos he took at the request of the U.S. government.

In 1935, when Mauna Loa was erupting with lava moving toward Hilo, Maehara was hired at the suggestion of geologist Thomas Jaggar to take photographs of the U.S military planes dropping bombs on the lava in an unsuccessful attempt to divert its flows.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Maehara was arrested and detained under suspicion of disloyalty to the United States and sent to internment camps in Honolulu and the U.S. Mainland. Part of the evidence used against him included those photos he took of the 1935 bombing.



While he was detained, park officials seized his equipment and boarded up the studio, then destroyed his concession business. He never worked in the park again.
.