LITMIR.BIZ

      4. Birth of a Citizen

       Miné Okubo and the Politics of Symbolism

      Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo's illustrated memoir of her personal experience during the wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Like many works of art and literature by African Americans, Citizen 13660 has often been assimilated by latter day critics into the protest tradition.¹ These critics make much of Okubo's trickster nature and her use of double-sided combinations of words and images as weapons of resistance. Pointing to the disjunction between the narrative and Okubo's accompanying drawings, they contend that beneath the text's apparently clear (and supposedly inoffensive) surface narrative lurk various subversive and radical messages awaiting decryption by the attentive reader. For example, Pamela Stennes Wright finds that Okubo employs two narrative strategies throughout her book—an overt narrative that documents the story of a loyal American citizen who “must come to an understanding of her evacuation and internment” plus a covert narrative that suggests the injustices of official policy by depicting the massive disruption it wreaked on Japanese Americans.² “The genius of Okubo's book,” Elena Tajima Creef adds, “is the unusual combination of visual and literary narrative that allows her to tell both stories…[pairing] its provocative, and subversive, use of the autobiographical ‘I’…with the observational power of the artist's ‘eye.’” ³

      Even though I find the various critical explorations of subversive currents in Okubo's work engaging, they tend to privilege a rather recondite subtextual reading as the essential version. Worse, they focus so single-mindedly on locating resistance and agency as to obscure some of the complexity of the work.⁴ The emphasis on Okubo's perceived resistance risks drawing attention away from the circumstances in which her work was created, as well as her own original intentions. These are not simply matters of academic interest. The project that was to become Citizen 13660 evolved within the specific political context of the wartime and immediate postwar period, as Japanese Americans began to leave the camps and resettle throughout the United States. Okubo's work was promoted by the War Relocation Authority, the government agency responsible for running the camps, and by its liberal allies outside of government as part of a larger program of assimilation and absorption that they designed for the Nisei. She collaborated in this operation, not only in her choice of illustrations for the book and in the brief texts she wrote to accompany them but also in her various public statements characterizing herself as a writer and fixing the meaning of her narrative. In sum, the conscious meaning that Okubo applied to the text and the critical readings it received at the time of its initial appearance deserve central consideration if the work is to be properly understood.

      An examination of the gestation of Citizen 13660 reveals the selfconsciousness of Okubo's creation and how and why certain meanings became attached to it. Tracing the evolution of Citizen 13660 requires a certain attentiveness. For her own reasons, Okubo tended to deny the intentionality that was a feature of her output more or less from the beginning. In the publicity for her book when it was first published during the 1940s, she stated that the illustrations in Citizen 13660 grew out of sketches she did throughout her confinement in order to document the story of camp life for her friends in Europe and the United States.⁵ She continued in later life to affirm that she had intended the illustrations as a private gift for “my many friends who faithfully sent letters and packages to let us know we were not forgotten,” and only afterward thought of turning them into a public project.⁶ Only when the work was republished in 1983, in the heyday of the redress period, did Okubo reveal that her illustrations “were intended for exhibition purposes” from the first.⁷ Even then, however, she remained silent regarding the particular stages and modifications through which the project evolved.

      In fact, Okubo seems to have begun transforming her drawings into exhibition material by late 1942, not long after she left the Tanforan Assembly Center and arrived at the Topaz camp—or even earlier, if we are to believe a letter that University of California vice president Monroe Deutsch sent Okubo at the time that Citizen 13660 was published: “You have done exactly what you said you would when you were in my office prior to the evacuation period—you kept your sense of humor and portrayed the amusing incidents in your life at Tanforan and Topaz.”⁸ In any case, Okubo's first effort to show her images of camp life publicly was through her submission of two drawings to the spring 1943 show of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art (today known as SF-MOMA), where she had frequently displayed her work in prewar years.⁹ It is impossible to be certain as to when Okubo conceived of sending out art on the camps for display, but it can be assumed that it was well before the show actually opened. Whether or not the show's curators specially vetted her contribution in advance, it certainly would have been standard practice for them to ask artists to send in their drawings enough ahead of time to allow for the mounting of the show. Furthermore, Okubo very likely would have done all she could to get her work in extra early, given the uncertainties of wartime mail service from Topaz.

      The San Francisco Museum show opened in March 1943. Okubo's camp art drew special attention for both its style and its subject matter, and “On Guard,” a study of two camp guards, won the Artist Fund Prize. Both of Okubo's works received special praise from a critic in the magazine California Art and Architecture:

      Two entries of Miné Okubo, one of which was given the Artist Fund Prize [deal with the war]. [“On Guard”] is a fine monumental drawing of two sentries guarding a Japanese Internment camp, done solidly as a mural, in black and white tempera on paper. The two soldiers with their guns on a hilltop make a bold and strong design against the small bare barracks of the distant camp. Evacuees, done in the same medium and style, is a similar muralesque treatment of a Japanese family struggling with the problems of baggage and removal. Both of these drawings have a simple rich pattern of blacks and grays that is very fine.¹⁰

      On March 21, 1943, the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday supplement This World included a reproduction of “On Guard.” Such attention, especially from the West Coast press, lent Okubo special visibility among supporters of Japanese Americans. A school lesson plan that a Quaker group

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