Reading post: Citizen 13660

I have finished my ninth book for the 2022 Classics Challenge: Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo, published in 1946. I chose it to fulfill category #5: A classic by a BIPOC author (all of my authors are BIPOC, so it was just a matter of choosing one to fit in this slot). This book was actually published before my previous book (Yokohama, California), but since that book was accepted by a publisher in 1941 (but publication was delayed until 1949), I read it and wrote about it first. Then I picked up Citizen 13660, and finished it the same day. This book is about life in the internment camps, published immediately after the war, so it seemed appropriate to read it next.

One of seven children, Miné Okubo was born in Riverside, California, in 1912, so she was two years younger than my previous author, Toshio Mori. According to an article in Daily Art Magazine, in Japan her father was a scholar and her mother was a calligrapher with a degree from an art school, but after emigrating to America they became a gardener and a homemaker. Okubo earned a BA and an MFA from UC Berkeley, studied art in France and Italy on a fellowship, and then painted murals for the WPA from 1939 to 1942. And then, like all Americans of Japanese descent, she was pointlessly thrown into the camps, first Tanforan and then Topaz (in Utah), like Toshio Mori.

I don't think I knew about the camps when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and yet I feel as though I did know. There was some reason we felt sorry for Japanese Americans (according to my mother), for something that had happened to them during the war, but I don't think I was clear on what it was. Maybe she told me and it didn't sink in. I didn't really understand until we lived in Ridgecrest (2009-2013) and visited the Manzanar National Historic Site. So it's weird for me to read about Miné Okubo having to stay in a horse stall (the manure-covered floorboards having been hastily covered with linoleum) at the Tanforan racetrack. I remember Tanforan as a stop on the train when we took it to San Francisco to see the Christmas decorations.

Of course, I looked at the Caltrain website just now and there is no Tanforan station. San Bruno is the closest one. According to Wikipedia, the Tanforan racetrack was destroyed by fire in 1964 and a shopping center was built there in 1971. Maybe there never was a Tanforan station. I feel that my memory is faulty here. I don't know.

The most interesting thing about Citizen 13660 is that it is a graphic novel -- or graphic memoir, to be more exact. I like graphic novels/memoirs (Alison Bechdel's books are favorites), and I had no idea that they had been around so long. According to Wikipedia, the earliest one is thought to be from 1837, and there were some in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Citizen 13660 is still a very early example, and it stands out because it's not a comic book. It's a very serious, almost deadpan, illustrated memoir of Okubo's experience in the camps. I wonder if Art Spiegelman might have been inspired to write Maus after reading Okubo. Of course, Okubo's pictures are all of people (unlike the mice and cats in Spiegelman's work). She herself is in every picture, sometimes as the subject and sometimes as an observer.

Okubo is an artist, not a writer. This was her only book, but she had a long career as a professional artist. Still, the book is well-written, intelligent, very skillfully done. I like the line about the hogs:

The hogs ate everything we left, and ultimately we ate the hogs.

The pictures are deceptively simple, but they actually convey a lot. She explains that she started drawing these pictures when she was in the camps, so they are very accurate. She includes details that I haven't read about elsewhere.

Her descriptions of the camps reminded me, oddly, of the covid pandemic. Hold on, I can explain what I mean. She describes how everything was thrown together quickly and thus didn't work well. The sewer system in both camps, Tanforan and Topaz, was constantly failing and had to be redone. There were far more people than the camps were ready to accommodate. There was never enough of anything, food, supplies of all kinds. It made me think of the covid shutdown -- schools scrambling to go online, mask requirements when there weren't any masks available, all of that. Obviously the covid shutdown was necessary and the Japanese American internment camps were anything but, but both are examples of the government trying to do something really big really quickly, and having trouble.

Apparently there was some controversy when Columbia University Press published this book in 1946. Some people felt it was too soon after the war. Many Americans were not ready to admit that Japanese Americans should not have been put in the camps. But there was enough interest to have kept the book in print ever since.

Ultimately it was important evidence of what the camps were really like and may have helped achieve the formal apology to Japanese Americans from Congress in 1988.

I found Citizen 13660 fascinating and highly recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the internment camps.