Located in a basin in south-central Iwate Prefecture in the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu, the town is surrounded by the Kitakami Mountains.

In about 1100, Fujiwara no Kiyohira moved his home from Fort Toyoda in present-day Esashi, in the city of Ōshū to Mount Kanzan in Hiraizumi.

By building his home south of the Koromo, Kiyohira (half Emishi himself) demonstrated his intention to rule Ōshū without official sanction from the court in Kyoto.

Kanzan was also seen as the exact center of Ōshū which stretched from the Shirakawa Barrier in the south to Sotogahama in present-day Aomori Prefecture.

In conjunction with this, he placed small umbrella reliquaries (kasa sotoba) every hundred meters along the Ōshū kaidō decorated with placards depicting Amida Buddha painted in gold.

Other pagodas, temples and gardens followed including the Konjiki-dō, a jewel box of a building intended to represent the Buddhist Pure Land and the final resting place of the Fujiwara lords.

When the poet Matsuo Bashō saw the state of the town in 1689 he penned a famous haiku about the impermanence of human glory: Modern Hiraizumi village was created on April 1, 1889 with the establishment of the post-Meiji restoration municipality system.

In terms of national politics, the city is part of Iwate 3rd district of the lower house of the Diet of Japan.