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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 brought out shortly afterward in an effort to help raise public consciousness (to use a term unknown in the period) about the plight of Japanese Americans singled out Okubo for attention:

Miné Okubo is another artist who will some day be well-known as the others. She was given a traveling scholarship for her fine work and spent time in Europe studying art. She returned to the University of California to learn that she had been offered another year of study in Italy, but could not return to that country because of the beginning of the war.¹¹

Meanwhile, the positive response to Okubo's drawing led the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle (a liberal newspaper whose editor, Chester Rowell, had opposed evacuation) to commission further illustrations from the artist. Okubo obliged by sending a set of camp sketches. These, along with Okubo's brief commentary, were published in This World at the end of August 1943 as “An Evacuee's Hopes and Memories.” In a prefatory note, the editors of the magazine explained that Okubo's “debut as a writer was accidental—her explanatory notes with her sketches were so much more THIS WORLD simply incorporated them into an article.” At the same time, the magazine undertook “to document her objectivity” by interpolating with Okubo's text a number of quotations from a speech that Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, had made earlier at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.

As a result of Myer's comments being interpolated with Okubo's observations, her article bore the appearance of an officially sponsored publication. Of course, even without the symbolic imprimatur of the WRA, Okubo's readers would have understood that she was speaking from confinement and was thus subject to official censorship. Although Okubo doubtless felt limited in what she could say, her text does not reveal particular reticence or sugarcoating:

The train trip from Tanforan to Topaz was a nightmare. It was the first train trip for many of us and we were excited, but many were sad to leave California and the Bay region. To most of the people, to this day, the world is only as large as from San Francisco to Tanforan to Topaz. Buses were waiting for us at Delta to take us to Topaz. Seventeen miles of alfalfa farms and greasewood were what we saw. Some people cried on seeing the utter desolation of the camp. Fine alkaline dust hovered over it like San Francisco fog.¹²

The appearance of Okubo's sketches in This World occurred at an essential turning point in the history of incarceration. During summer 1943 the WRA completed its program segregation of confined Japanese Americans into groups it adjudged “loyal” and “disloyal.” With segregation completed—at a high cost to thousands of inmates who were further arbitrarily displaced, and with the “no-no boys” confined in a high-security center at Tule Lake, California—the issue of winding down all the other camps became paramount. On September 14, 1943, just sixteen days after Okubo's article was published, the White House presented Congress with a report on Japanese Americans. In his transmittal letter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that with the successful completion of segregation, the WRA could now redouble its efforts to resettle outside the camps those Japanese Americans “whose loyalty to this country has remained unshaken throughout the hardships of the evacuation.” In particular, Roosevelt promised that the Japanese Americans could return to the West Coast “as soon as the military situation will make such restoration feasible.”¹³

This presidential pledge helped mobilize the WRA, which had been badly buffeted by hostile press campaigns and congressional investigations, to refocus its attention on a task it had already undertaken on a small scale: planning resettlement. It also capped the gradual transformation the agency's mission had undergone during 1943 from constructing and managing camps in which to confine the excluded Japanese to the opening of regional resettlement offices and scouting out of areas for resettlement so that they could leave camp. This new mission did not consist simply of finding sponsors who would provide Nisei with jobs or education, or of helping migrants find housing.¹⁴ Rather, it amounted to implementing an overall quasi-official policy of dispersion of ethnic Japanese throughout the United States, and facilitating their absorption into the larger population.

The WRA, the War Department, the White House (notably First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt), and liberal and “fair play” groups—along with many Japanese Americans—broadly agreed that, by retarding assimilation and/ or restricting economic opportunity, the prewar ghettoization of Japanese Americans in “Little Tokyos” had helped inspire the hostility that led to evacuation. Therefore, despite their continuing conflicts over the justice of removal and the morality of the government's operation of the camps, these disparate groups joined forces to facilitate the scattering of the Japanese American population across the rest of the country. This, they believed, would be the best solution to the “Japanese problem” as it had existed on the West Coast, and would ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur. WRA director Dillon Myer expressed a widely held view when he claimed in 1946 that, on the whole, the Nisei were actually better off in the long run for their confinement experience and diaspora, since they could now establish themselves on an equal basis with other Americans.¹⁵ As harsh and punitive as the destruction of ethnic Japanese communities may sound to present-day ears, these Americans—including many Japanese Americans, and not just the JACL—looked upon the relocation process as a providential opportunity for the Nisei to enter the larger society and ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur.¹⁶

Government officials realized early that the key to opening the doors of the camps and ensuring the success of mass dispersal and resettlement lay in remaking the public image of the Nisei so as to reduce white suspicion and hostility toward Japanese Americans—a phenomenon for which the removal itself was largely responsible. Thus, although public relations figured only distantly, if at all, in the WRA's charter and initial mandate, the agency gradually shifted its program as the war proceeded. WRA staffers teamed up with colleagues from the Office of War Information (OWI) to produce an enormous pile of propaganda for public consumption, focusing jointly on the achievements of the WRA and on the loyalty and American character of the inmates.¹⁷ WRA efforts included informational pamphlets, documentary films, and speaking tours by WRA director Myer, former U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, and Ben Kuroki, a Nisei war hero. The WRA and OWI also exerted pressure on publishers and film producers to promote responsible media images of Japanese Americans and avoid hostile depictions.¹⁸

Liberal groups outside the government, especially those opposed to incarceration, gladly collaborated with the government's media campaign. Some of them may well have privately deplored the WRA's heavy-handed management of the Nisei's public image and suppression of internal dissent—certainly many supporters of Japanese Americans with experience of the camps considered the official picture excessively rosy—but they obviously felt that it was in the interest of all to downplay their differences in light of the enormous public opposition to Japanese Americans.

It is not clear whether government censors ever vetted Miné Okubo's drawings or text before the piece was placed in This World. It is reasonable to assume as much, though, given the wartime restrictions on inmates and the interpolation of Dillon Myer's words into the text. Such review was in any case common practice. When Eleanor Roosevelt drafted an article in support of the Nisei for Collier's magazine, “A Challenge to American Sportsmanship,” she first submitted her draft text to Myer for comment.