Citizen 13660

Rating:
Summary: A story of the whole, not the individual
Review: I find I'm not all that attracted to graphic novels of this type. I tend to focus more on the text of books, and leave the pictures up to my own mind. With this, you lose your own visual interpretation of the text, and since I'm focused on the text, I didn't spend enough time really looking at the art. I glanced at the art on each page, but I feel if I spent more time on each illustration, I might have a better appreciation for the book.

I also didn't really appreciate the text much. Each paragraph was more like a caption, with constant passive voice as well as mostly simple sentences. This was that. People did this. There was something here. It didn't engage me in a literary sense. We didn't learn a deep insight into the feelings of the author; she didn't often tell us what she felt or thought. That made it harder for me to connect with the experience too. This book seems strictly to be a record of life in two camp, not the reflections and thoughts of someone who lived in one. It is a story not of an individual, but of everyone who was interned.

The text was littered with irony and humor though, which prevented the story from becoming too dark. Without the levity occasionally provided, this book would have been harder to keep reading. Sometimes the humor shows in the drawings, such as her sticking out her tongue or tripping over a bush, but more often the text provides a dry humor and could bring a subtle smile to your face.

Rating:
Summary: Citizen 13660
Review: In her book Citizen 13660, Mine Okubo describes life in the Japanese-American internment camps established by the U.S. government soon after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. The camps were for all people of Japanese origin in the United States, both citizens and noncitizens. Mine, a college student, and her brother were taken by train to temporary barracks, then later they were moved to their permanent quarters at Camp Tanforan. Life at the camp was hard; living quarters were small and nearly without privacy, people fought over the scarce supplies and they had to line up to eat, use the bathroom, and wash. It was stiflingly hot in the summer, and it grew surprisingly cold for a "desert" in the winter. Mine, however, made it through the internment years and soon returned to "normal" civilization. Soon after the war, she wrote and illustrated her book, Citizen 13660. Her story takes you inside the internment camps and shows you what life was really like for an American of Japanese descent in 1945.

Rating:
Summary: "Graphic" memoirs
Review: Mine Okubo lived and painted for more than 50 years in the same Manhattan studio apartment. She died in 2001. She was known not just as Citizen 13660 from the internment camps, but as a talented and dedicated artist (see her profiled in the video Persistent Women Artists ... . This book, a reprint of the 1946 original, uses her deceptively simple style to tell how she was forced to leave behind the life of an American college student to become a Japanese-American detainee, and what her artist's eye observed in the camps.

Rating:
Summary: It will break your heart while evoking a smile of admiration
Review: Mine Okubo's book "Citizen 13660" outlines the paradoxical optimism surrounding the separation from society of all people in America of Japanese descent after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. While dipping gently into the philosophies of racial loyalties, Okubo demonstrates with her drawings the hardships endured by these people during their separation. The drawings and the writing hardly tell the same story. While the narrative is peppered with humor, irony, and optimistic perception, the artwork shows the grim reality of the hard work, poor weather, lack of privacy and sanitation, all for the sake of prejudice. "Citizen 13660" is a fair account of both viewpoints, a realization of the dark side of human nature, until one reads about the lighter side, or vice versa. In a word, this book is bittersweet. It will break your heart while evoking a smile of admiration. A worthy addition to any historian for its informative value, as well as any lover of literature for the story it tells.

Rating:
Summary: Eyewitness history with pictures
Review: Okubo's book is a valuable eyewitness account of a sad period of U.S. history, the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during WWII. I don't know anything about Okubo's life, but her book suggests she was one of those relocated. The book is illustrated on every page with great, expressive pen-and-ink drawings, and each picture is accompanied by a caption thoroughly explaining the scene depicted. The story begins with her family awaiting relocation orders, being sent to two different camps in the interior valleys of California, and concludes with her release. She does a great job documenting daily life in the camps, like the ways the prisoners created a community by organizing school for their children, publishing a camp newspaper, staging performances, etc. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Okubo's book is her lack of anger and bitterness. One would think forced relocation would spawn a lot of anger, but she emphasizes positive aspects of life at the camps, and even expresses some wistfulness about leaving upon her release. I'm not sure how we should read that--is it the genuine response of a young, resilient woman who was able to see the whole experience as an adventure? Her attempt to dignify the prisoners by emphasizing how well they made the most of the oppressive conditions? Or, seeing that the book was first published in 1946, a conscious effort not to voice more outrage than mainstream America was willing to tolerate from a Japanese-American woman so soon after our war with Japan? I wish I knew. In any case, Citizen 13660 is a very important document, which deserves a place next to other illustrated accounts of prisoner camps like Art Spiegelman's _Maus_ and _The Book of Alfred Kantor_.

Rating:
Summary: Publishing CITIZEN 13660 Okubo's Lifelong Dream
Review: This powerful graphic novel was drawn and written by Artist Mine Okubo when she was a teenager at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Okubo's elegant black and white drawings and wry text make CITIZEN 13660 on a par with Art Speigelman's MAUS as a war time testimony.
It was Mine Okubo's lifelong dream to have the art and writing from her internment experience published in a proper book.
I first saw these powerful stark drawings when Author Artist Betty LaDuke told me about her favorite teacher and showed me a worn copy of the original 1946 printing of CITIZEN 13660. LaDuke was nominating her mentor for the National Women's Caucus for Art Awards, and went to Okubo's New York City apartment to photograph the hundreds of art works that filed the small space. Okubo would be the first Asian American woman honored by the WCA, which began its Honor Awards in 1979 with a ceremony at the White House recognizing Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Selma Burke, Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel. Betty and I sat on the Honor Awards Committee and co-edited the catalog when Mine was honored with an exhibition at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 1991. One of my favorite memories is meeting Mine and introducing her to my baby daughter. She was a dignified classically beautiful woman with clear luminous skin and eyes, and a rapier wit. There is a great picture of Mine with me and Betty in the great hall of The National Museum of Women in the Arts standing with the other Honorees Otellie Loloma in her traditional Hopi dress, Mildred Constantine, Delilah Pierce and Theresa Bernstein who couldn't remember if she was 102 or 105. The Honor Ceremony was a highlight in women's art history. It was the first time the WCA Honorees included women from all four directions. Mine Okubo and the other Honorees stood there because of decades of their own hard work and determination and the love, devotion and support of many others like Betty LaDuke, the women of WCA and The National Museum of Women in the Arts.
It was Mine's lifelong wish to see CITIZEN 13660 published properly. It finally was in 1983, two years after WCA honored her and decades after she first created it in 1946. It is a beautiful book with a bold important cover, both text and art is stark and truthful, but not without humor. Okubo's seminal memoir could finally take its rightful place among other war testimonials.
Okubo and others of her generation blazed a path as a woman artist when it took great determination and grit to prevail. Artists today have an easier go of it because of the courage of pioneers like Okubo.