cover of the 1983 edition

Citizen 13660, a graphic memoir by Miné Okubo published in 1946, begins with young Miné, a UC Berkeley graduate student in art, touring Europe on a travel scholarship. The first drawing shows her in a silly little Parisian hat with matching coat, carrying nothing but a handbag — when suddenly England and France declare war, leaving her stranded in Switzerland for three months (3). Eventually she makes it home to San Francisco, but soon her mother dies, and soon after that, Japan attacks the US at Pearl Harbor. Miné's life as an art student ends precipitously. In a matter of months, she and her brother, along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, are "evacuated." Within days of her induction into the Tanforan Assembly Center, she decides to make a project of recording internment camp life in sketches and drawings (48).

The book that grew out of Okubo's project bears the distinction of being the first personal account of the World War II internment camps. It was published by Columbia University Press a scant year after the end of the war. In a series of four-by-five-inch pen-and-ink drawings, one per page and accompanied by minimal narration, Okubo's memoir begins with the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939 and concludes with her release from the Central Utah Relocation Project in January, 1944. Cameras were not allowed inside the internment camps for obvious reasons. By bearing witness to the daily absurdities and humiliations of captivity, Okubo's visual record is not only moving and artful, but is also a conscious act of resistance.


When a work of art takes on the subject of injustice or an important historical event, it can be tempting for critics to conflate redeeming social value with artistic merit. You may be thinking, "O.K. this book is 'important,' but is it good?" The qualities that make this book good and not just worthy are Okubo's humor, her canny use of graphic narrative strategies, and her smooth integration of the large themes of history with the small details of daily life. In the manner of a picture book, the images and text are kept separate: drawings on top, text on the bottom. But unlike straight illustrated text, Okubo creates complex relationships between word and image. By casting the text as the straight man and letting the drawings show emotions and contradictions hidden behind the dry facts, Okubo employs that strange magic of comics — the interaction between words and images that don't neatly fit. New meaning arises from the discord.


Okubo places herself in every drawing and depicts most scenes as medium shots with a high point of view, but with the figures shown head on, in a way reminiscent of the work of Julie Doucet (67, 134). In fact, her style seems downright Drawn & Quarterly with a little Depression era social realism thrown in. She has an elegant thin line, and includes a wealth of specific details from the period, especially clothes, hats, hairstyles and the ad hoc domestic arrangements people contrived to make their lives more comfortable. But the details included here are not just to invoke period or a sense of place — they are meant to tell a specific story. For example, through the drawings she shows how a generation gap emerged between the Isei, the immigrant parents, and the Nisei, their American born children. The young folks are shown in bobby socks jitterbugging, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and staying up in each other's quarters for all night bull sessions (66, 139). Meanwhile, the old folks try to hold on to traditional patterns of life: walking to evening baths in cotton kimonos and wooden geta sandals, playing the bamboo flute and celebrating Buddhist holidays (161, 64). The details also serve to remind us, in practically every drawing, that these people are incarcerated. Armed guards, gates, watchtowers, rows of barracks and barbed wire form the background of even the most lighthearted moments (140, 94).


I found some aspects of her drawing style awkward and unattractive. For one, everybody in the book has gigantic, thick fingered, paw-like hands, and for no good stylistic reason that I could see (14). Occasionally when drawing figures engaged in physical activities like carpentry work or dancing, Okubo veers into distorted expressionistic figure drawing that now seems dated and overdone (137, 173). The book is filled with drawings of people Doing Things and most of them are charming — cartoony, informative and not overly dramatic or exaggerated. I blame her occasional foray into bad expressionism on the internship she had with Diego Rivera on a WPA mural project after she came home from Europe.


The strongest part of the book, the part that works the most like comics, is a twenty-six page sequence that covers just one day — the day Miné and her brother leave their home in Berkeley to be inducted into an "assembly center," formerly the Tanforan Racetrack. The first drawing in this sequence shows Miné and her brother surrounded by the few possessions they will take with them. Affixed to both the baggage and their persons are tags with the number "13660" (22). We see these numbered tags in almost every drawing of that day-- lines of people, piles of luggage, all with their designated family number (24). By repeating this numbered tag motif, Okubo shows how a grave injustice can be chopped up into banal little bureaucratic steps, thereby obscuring the larger crime. As the events of the day wear on, every freedom American citizens take for granted is stripped away from the evacuees (25).


There is a lovely drawing of a flatbed truck transporting evacuees to the horse stalls that will be their dormitory. Miné and the others cling to their bags and boxes as the truck jounces along. But one man leans out over the side of the truck in a relaxed manner, to knock ashes from his cigarette. The look on his face and his body language suggest that he is desperately trying to maintain his composure and dignity (43). The Army organized the evacuation of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents within months. But as Okubo's drawings carefully document, all the officious forms, lists, tags, protocols, and examinations gave the evacuation an air of inevitability, and few could defy its forward motion. Perhaps most painful was the total lack of privacy the evacuees were forced to endure: quasi-medical inspections, searches, surveillance, cramped barracks and public toilets with no doors or partitions (72). Page after page, Okubo draws queues of people waiting. They have lost the self-determination of private life; they wait for mail, vaccinations, laundry tubs, washrooms, toilets, and food. The repetition accrues quietly and effectively (86).


Okubo's decision to place herself in every drawing is the most obvious example of her use of repetition as a formal structure in Citizen 13660. Primarily, she uses the "Miné" character as a device to draw us into the story; we identify with the experiences through her. She also uses the drawings of herself to display a dry wit. She makes fun of herself, pointing out her clumsiness, messy hair and the strange clothing she has to make do with(150, 158, 152, 153). One of my favorite moments is Miné dubiously eyeing a pregnant lady who is surrounded by a gaggle of children (163). The caption reads, "The birth rate in the center was high." But she is also a diligent documentarian, drawing herself drawing the whole breadth of life in the camps: bachelor quarters, preschools, gardening projects, "Americanization" classes and any number of memorials, sporting events,pageants, holiday celebrations and secret gambling parties (171, 157). One can only conclude from the sheer amount and variety of activity in the camps that the evacuees were all, in their various ways, doing their best to not be prisoners.


Okubo's way not to be a prisoner was to separate herself from the experience by documenting it. And strangely, the artifice of her presence in every drawing communicates that separateness. We see her as an actor in the story, a victim like everybody else, but at the same time, the Miné character functions symbolically; she is a self-aware narrator, witnessing this miscarriage of justice for the reader. In this function, Okubo draws herself in scenes she may not have witnessed, and actions she may not have taken. For example, in a drawing accompanying text that describes the roll call held every morning and evening, a man, the house captain, takes attendance while Miné, seated at a table holding a paint brush, sticks out her tongue at him behind his back (59). On the next page, the text describes the twenty-four hour surveillance of the white camp policemen — how they spied on the evacuees, looking for contraband and suspicious activities. This drawing shows a policeman peering into a room of men playing cards. Miné lurks behind him, turning the tables by spying on him (60). Did she really stick her tongue out at the house captain, or follow a camp policeman on his rounds? In these drawings, she creates a visual narrative, silently expressing a humor and defiance that the text is oblivious to. She never actually turns to "address the camera" as the characters in Julie Doucet, Joe Matt and Joe Sacco's comics do, but she certainly editorializes. In a few instances, she rolls her eyes, holds her nose and sticks out her tongue at authority figures (175, 177). This decision to simultaneously act in and comment on her story presages the work of many autobiographical cartoonists.


It is interesting to note that out of the two hundred and six drawings that make up the book, there are three in which Miné Okubo absents herself. Because Okubo makes such deft use of detail and repetition for narrative effect, I thought perhaps there was an underlying reason why she broke her rule for these three drawings. But upon consideration, these drawings and her absence from them don't seem to make any larger point than what the drawings literally depict. One shows a small family having a private Christmas celebration together. It makes sense that Miné isn't in that drawing since she's not a member of that family. But in terms of the formal structure of the book, wherein she includes herself in scenes that she may or may not have actually witnessed, it seems an odd choice (156). I think it was a mistake for her to break the rule she established when breaking it didn't serve the narrative.


Citizen 13660 went out of print in the post-war years when most Americans, including the evacuees, wanted to forget the war altogether and move on with their lives. But in the Sixties and Seventies when the Sansei, the children who were born in the camps, came of age and went to college, their anger at the unjust incarceration of their parents and grandparents turned to activism. They insisted that people discuss the internment and that it be taught in schools. They helped form Asian Studies programs in colleges and universities and demanded that reparations be paid to the victims. Citizen 13660 was reprinted in 1973 amidst this debate. When Congress formed a commission and held hearings regarding reparations in 1981, Miné Okubo testified and presented members of the commission with copies of her book. In 1983, it was reprinted again by the University of Washington Press with a new preface by Okubo. It remains in print today and is one of the better known books about the internment of Japanese-Americans. The commission concluded that the Government should make a formal apology. Reparations of $20,000 to each surviving victim, were made in 1988. The Government acknowledged its mistake further in 1998 when President Clinton awarded the Medal of Freedom to Fred Korematsu, a man who had resisted the internment.

Mr. Korematsu, aged 84, was in the news recently. When the Supreme Court convened this spring to hear arguments regarding the detentions at Guantanamo, he filed an amicus brief on behalf of those 600 detainees who have been held incommunicado for over two years. In 1942, Korematsu had refused to go to the internment camps and was summarily imprisoned. The disgraceful 1944 Supreme Court decision United States v. Korematsu affirmed the government's right to indefinitely detain 110,000 people of Japanese descent, regardless of citizenship. It was deemed a matter of "military necessity." The Korematsu decision has since been widely regarded as a mistake and a low-water mark for the Court. This time, the Court saw through the "military necessity" argument. In the words of Justice O'Connor, "...a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Balancing national security with civil liberties has been the crux of this democracy from its very beginning. 58 years ago the lovely graphic memoir Citizen 13660 showed the human price that is paid when we tilt too far towards national security. That it remains fresh and relevant today is a testament to the current threats to our civil liberties and to the enduring power of graphic narratives.