A State Security guy wanted her to inform on Czechoslovaks in Japan
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Irena Hirai, née Jirásková, was born on 9 August 1960 in Náchod. She lived with her parents and younger brother in Rtyně v Podkrkonoší. Her father Jiří Jirásek worked in a mine. Her mother, née Reina Raab, came from a German family from Chlívce in the Broumov region and worked in the textile industry. Their family was not displaced because their grandfather worked in the mine. Irena Hirai joined the renewed Junák in 1968. She did not get a recommendation for secondary school study. After training as an artistic ceramist, she was admitted to the Secondary Industrial School of Ceramics in Bechyně in 1978, where she graduated in 1981. She was not allowed to go to university, she worked for two years as a designer and painter in a ceramic workshop in Hořice. Then she taught art at the art school in Žacléř. She became a member of the Esperanto club and travelled to congresses abroad. In Poland she met her future husband, a mechanical engineer from Japan. In 1989, after attending a congress in the Netherlands, she was interrogated by State Security (StB). She married in 1990 and then lived in Japan with her husband Hirofumi Hirai for ten years. She studied traditional Japanese art, created art and organized exhibitions. They had two daughters. They returned to Žacléř, where she started to work in an art school. In 2025 she was living in the settlement of Bobr in Žacléř.
