Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eyewitness history with pictures, February 15, 2000
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_.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Citizen 13660, September 14, 2002
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Graphic" memoirs, May 9, 2000
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.
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