Citizen 13660

Mine Okubo was one of 110,000 people of Japanese descent--nearly two-thirds of them American citizens -- who were rounded up into "protective custody" shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, her memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, was first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983 with a new Preface by the author. With 197 pen-and-ink illustrations, and poignantly written text, the book has been a perennial bestseller, and is used in college and university courses across the country. "[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh -- and if he is an American too -- blush." -- Pearl Buck Read more about Mine Okubo in the 2008 UW Press book, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html

Mine Okubo was one of more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens - who were forced into "protective custody" shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's illustrated memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, illuminates this experience with poignant drawings and witty, candid text. This classic in Asian American literature and American history, with a new introduction by Christine Hong, is available for the first time in both a traditional paperback format and an artist's edition, oversize and in hardcover to better illustrate the innovative artwork as originally envisioned by Okubo. "[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heartbreaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh - and if he is an American too - blush." - Pearl Buck "A remarkably objective and vivid and even humorous account. . . . In dramatic and detailed drawings and brief text, [Okubo] documents the whole episode . . . all that she saw, objectively, yet with a warmth of understanding." - New York Times Book Review

“To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless.” - Miné Okubo This is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Miné Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience. Born in Riverside, California, Okubo was incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and later at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. There she taught art and directed the production of a literary and art magazine. While in camp, Okubo documented her confinement experience by making hundreds of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches. These provided the material for Citizen 13660. Word of her talent spread to Fortune magazine, which hired her as an illustrator. Under the magazine's auspices, she was able to leave the camp and relocate to New York City, where she pursued her art over the next half century. This lovely and inviting book, lavishly illustrated with both color and halftone images, many of which have never before been reproduced, introduces readers to Okubo's oeuvre through a selection of her paintings, drawings, illustrations, and writings from different periods of her life. In addition, it contains tributes and essays on Okubo's career and legacy by specialists in the fields of art history, education, women's studies, literature, American political history, and ethnic studies, essays that illuminate the importance of her contributions to American arts and letters. Miné Okubo expands the sparse critical literature on Asian American women, as well as that on the Asian American experience in the eastern United States. It also serves as an excellent companion to Citizen 13660, providing critical tools and background to place Okubo's work in its historical and literary contexts.

The New York Times bestselling graphic memoir from actor/author/activist George Takei returns in a deluxe edition with 16 pages of bonus material! Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in STAR TREK, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. THEY CALLED US ENEMY is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? George Takei joins cowriters Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as "Japanese America's poet laureate." But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

This book examines the lives of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their World War Two-era confinement, including how they resettled nationwide, the mental and physical aftereffects of the former inmates, and their political engagement.

A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes. Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive. Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory.