Early days
Miné Okubo was born in Riverside, California, in 1912 to Japanese parents who immigrated to the United States in 1904 when they represented their home country in the St. Louis Exposition of Arts and Crafts. Okubo’s mother was a calligrapher who graduated with honors from the Tokyo Art School, and her father was a scholar. In America, her mother raised their seven children, and her father worked as a gardener.
Life across the Pacific Ocean was poignant. For Okubo, it was also a lesson learned as she saw how her mother struggled as both a homemaker and an artist:
The young artist attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. In 1938, as the Bertha Taussig Traveling Art Fellowship recipient, she won the chance to study art in Europe. It could have been a two-year opportunity if war did not break out a year later.
Okubo was stuck in Switzerland with no way to get home. It took a while, but she eventually made it to New York only to learn that her mother had passed away. She returned to the California Bay Area afterward, where she worked as part of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, creating mosaics and frescos alongside artist Diego Rivera. Her works during that time would be exhibited as part of the San Francisco Art Association.
Executive Order 9066
Pearl Harbor was under attack on December 7, 1941, thrusting the United States into the war. In response to the incident, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, a document that would send thousands of Japanese Americans to internment camps located in the western United States.
In a matter of days, families were forced to pack, make government arrangements for their homes, and figure out what to do with the possessions they could not take with them. One of Okubo’s brothers joined the U.S. Army whilst the rest of the family went to different processing centers. Thankfully, she at least was able to stay with one of her brothers (who she only referred to as “my brother” throughout her book). They were first sent to the registration center at Tanforan in San Bruno, California, where they stayed for six months and then transferred to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. She and her brother were assigned the family unit number 13660.
Citizen 13660
Okubo spent her time recording life at the camp: the indignities of sharing restrooms and living in squalid conditions, being at the mercy of the weather, as well as the absolute boredom and monotony they faced day after day. There were also brief moments of amusement, like talent shows and movie nights, or people experiencing snow for the first time. In the 1983 edition of the book, Okubo wrote:
Added next to the lines of text were one-panel drawings. Okubo included herself in most scenes, serving as a kind of tour guide for us, the viewer. We see situations through her eyes and often her reactions. And we can feel how she was ostracized through one panel created shortly after Pearl Harbor before the Executive Order went into effect. This scene takes place on a public bus, with Okubo pondering as her fellow riders stare at her with furrowed brows. “The people looked at all of us, both citizens and aliens, with suspicion and mistrust,” she reminisced.
A plot twist confirmed the suspicion we shared with Okubo a few pages later: In another drawing, she and her brother look back at their “happy home” as they prepare to leave for the bus station that will take them to Tanforan. Okubo has tears running down her face.
These artistic productions connect the author with the reader beyond the actual historical event. In an introduction to the 2014 edition, Dr. Christine Hong identified an underlying message, asserting that Okubo is both a figure within the panels and a constant reminder that “this could be you.”
Citizen 13660: Tanforan
The Tanforan Assembly Center was the first stop in this journey away from home. Only weeks prior, Tanforan stood for Tanforan Park Racetrack. Upon Okubo’s arrival, horse stables had become housing for entire families. Meanwhile, mess halls and other facilities were repurposed from buildings or erected from the ground up.
Many of Okubo’s scenes about Tanforan show seemingly unending lines and crowds. She filled these pages with lines to get vaccinated and lines to get into the post office, crowds in the mess hall, and crowds looking for their baggage. It must have been overwhelming and exhausting.
After arriving at Tanforan, the siblings were separated and told to undress for smallpox under the supervision of a nurse. Next, they were ushered to the registration where she had to fight for her and her brother to remain together. And then, amongst looming bad weather, they trekked through the mud across the camp to the horse stables that were their designated living space.
Okubo depicted her and her brother sweeping out the stall by hand with a whisk broom. She wrote:
She also drew them setting up their cots:
She showed women using communal bathroom stalls and showers. Without any privacy afforded to them, they utilized what they could: old blankets nailed up and boards that leaned against their knees. The showers also offered little modesty.
In a particularly poignant scene, Okubo wrote:
She shows herself sitting on the roof overlooking the camp with a streetcar just on the other side of the fence with the guard tower and barbed wire between them.
Citizen 13660: Topaz
September brought the relocation to Topaz in Utah on a two-day train trip. This was the more permanent location—though it was unknown how permanent it might be, and the camp was still in the midst of construction. They saw some familiar faces from Tanforan, who helped Okubo and her brother find their living space. Getting there was unpleasant as the wind, sand, and dust blew into their faces.
Okubo and her brother had to live with a stranger, a young man who hoped to relocate shortly with his father. They hung up a rare spare blanket to create a private space for Okubo, the lone woman.
She resumed her sketching: the community restrooms and bathing facilities (“four tiny bathtubs”), the crowded mess halls, and the schools where she taught art. She even documented the annoying fact that they tended to wear the same clothes as they all had to order from the same mail-order catalog. The expressions of the women, in their matching shirts, are at once humorous and heartbreaking.
Okubo and other forcibly displaced Japanese-Americans continually battled the weather–extreme heat and cold, blustery sand and dust storms, and constant rain ensued by brutal mosquitos in the summertime. Cattle, chickens, and hogs were brought in, and people planted gardens that everyone helped out with, though the climate and soil made it hard for the produce to thrive.
In early 1943, the military created a combat unit of Japanese Americans. Roosevelt sent officials to the internment camps and asked for male volunteers. They had to complete a complex questionnaire intended to prove not only their loyalty to the United States but also their opposition to Japan. Many, unsurprisingly, found this insulting, which added to the existing tension. Those who answered that they wanted to return to Japan were segregated and later sent to a separate camp.
Rules began to relax slightly and passes were distributed for inmates for work or shop for basic necessities. Eventually, this gave rise to a complicated relocation reversal process. People returned to their previous lives or got new jobs or, like Okubo’s brother, joined the military.
Okubo left in January 1944:
The last page shows Okubo as she looked back at those who remained:
Afterwards
Published in 1946, Citizen 13660 was the first of its kind as a primary source of the Japanese American experience in an internment camp.
In 1976, Executive Order 9066 was officially repealed by President Gerald Ford. Five years later, Okubo testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. She shared her story, providing copies of Citizen 13660, the degradation she felt as a loyal American forced into a camp, and the hope that such a thing never happened again.
In 1988, more than 40 years after the end of World War II, the US Congress issued a formal apology and provided reparations to those who had been interned.
Though she is best known for Citizen 13660, Okubo was a prolific artist who painted until her death in 2001. In a book on her work, author Elena Tajima Creef described walking into Okubo’s New York apartment and seeing works in a range of sizes in various mediums and styles on every available surface.
The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles is home to the Miné Okubo Collection. In 2021 (and ending February 20, 2022), the museum commemorated the 75th anniversary of her book, Miné Okubo’s Masterpiece: The Art of Citizen 13660, featuring her original drawings and drafts. Living on the East Coast, I was not able to see the exhibition in person. However, the museum’s website has some wonderful videos that discuss Okubo, as well as an online catalog of her work.