First published in 1946, Citizen 13660 remains one of the earliest and arguably best-known autobiographical accounts of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Through spare prose and more than 200 drawings, Nisei artist Miné Okubo documented daily life inside the camps.
An accomplished artist before the war, Okubo continued her practice throughout incarceration. She taught art to children and adults in the camps; helped produce Trek, a literary magazine at the Topaz incarceration camp in Utah; and contributed illustrations to the camp newspaper, Topaz Times. “Cameras and photographs were not permitted in the camps, so I recorded everything in sketches, drawings, and paintings,” she later wrote in the preface to the 1983 University of Washington Press reissue of Citizen 13660 through the Classics of Asian American Literature series.
A perennial bestseller, Citizen 13660 is now available in both a paperback and a wide-format artist edition with an introduction by Christine Hong.
Okubo and her brother Benji were separated from the rest of their family when they were forced to vacate their home. In the excerpts from Citizen 13660 below, Okubo depicts their arrival at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a former racetrack in San Bruno, California, repurposed by the US government to detain nearly 8,000 Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, the Tanforan Memorial stands on the site.
From Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo
Click on the images to enlarge.
Baggage of all sizes and shapes was piled high along the driveway in back of the grandstand, and earlier arrivals were searching among the stacks for their possessions. We waited in the parked bus for fifteen minutes; then the bus was driven around to the front of the grandstand.
The soldier got out and opened the door and we filed out past him.
My brother and I were separated at this point. I was asked to sit on the bench with the women and wait while my brother lined up with the men and was searched from head to toe for contraband. Straight-edged razors, knives more than four inches long, and liquor were considered contraband.
Medical examination followed. I was asked to enter one of the slightly partitioned and curtained compartments and was ordered to undress. A nurse looked into my mouth with a flashlight and checked my arms to see if I had been vaccinated for smallpox. When I rejoined my brother I asked him what they made him do. “They made us strip,” he said.
As head of the family I took the okayed slips from the nurse and presented them at the desk where rooms were being assigned. The girl who took the slips said, “Sorry, but we will have to send you and your brother to separate bachelor quarters. We are short of rooms for small family units.” I told her that my brother and I had come as a family unit of two and that we intended to remain that way. I had to argue the point with each of the girls at the desk in turn, but finally they decided to let us remain as a family unit.
A guide was called to take us to our home, Barrack 16, Room 50. We went practically halfway around the race track and then diagonally across the center field through sticky mud and tall weeds. The ground was wet from the downpour of the day before. Those who had come on that day were drenched and their baggage was soaked. Friends who had entered the camp the previous week had warned us what camp was like so we came prepared with boots. When we arrived it was not raining, but now it started to sprinkle.
We followed the guide past the race track to the other side where the horse stables were. We passed many stables before Stable 16 was pointed out to us. It was an isolated building surrounded by tall weeds and standing high above the ground. It was the only barrack with a raised walk and railing.
The guide left us at the door of Stall 50. We walked in and dropped our things inside the entrance. The place was in semidarkness; light barely came through the dirty window on either side of the entrance. A swinging halfdoor divided the 20 by 9 ft. stall into two rooms. The roof sloped down from a height of twelve feet in the rear room to seven feet in the front room; below the rafters an open space extended the full length of the stable. The rear room had housed the horse and the front room the fodder. Both rooms showed signs of a hurried whitewashing. Spider webs, horse hair, and hay had been whitewashed with the walls. Huge spikes and nails stuck out all over the walls. A two-inch layer of dust covered the floor, but on removing it we discovered that linoleum the color of redwood had been placed over the rough manure covered boards.
We opened the folded spring cots lying on the floor of the rear room and sat on them in the semidarkness. We heard someone crying in the next stall.
It was no use just sitting there, so we went to work cleaning the stall. We took turns sweeping the floor with a whisk broom. It was the only practical thing we had brought with us.
Miné Okubo (1912–2001) was born in California. From 1939 to 1942 she was employed as a Works Progress Administration artist. In 1944 she was hired by Fortune magazine and moved to New York, where she continued to work as an artist, with solo and group exhibitions at museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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