Over 2,000 sketches became her defining art.
June 28, 1912: American artist and writer Miné Ōkubo was born in Riverside, California.
Miné Ōkubo was already an accomplished artist.
She earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, studied in Europe under renowned French modernist Fernand Léger, and worked alongside artists including Diego Rivera on public art projects during the Great Depression.
Her future seemed to lie in galleries and murals.
Instead, it led behind barbed wire.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Ōkubo and her family were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry.
She was assigned prisoner number 13660.
Citizen 13660
Most people would remember that number with shame.
Ōkubo transformed it into art.
While incarcerated at the Tanforan Assembly Center and later the Topaz concentration camp in Utah, she drew constantly. Using charcoal, watercolor, and pen and ink, she produced more than 2,000 drawings and sketches documenting everyday life behind barbed wire.
She sketched families eating in mess halls, children attending school, long lines, cramped living quarters, and the routines that defined life in the camps.
Her drawings were neither dramatic nor sentimental.
They simply showed what incarceration looked like.
The First Documentary by Incarceree
After the war, Ōkubo carefully selected 206 of those drawings to accompany her own written observations.
Together, they became Citizen 13660, published in 1946.
The groundbreaking book became the first illustrated memoir of the Japanese American incarceration written by someone who had lived through it.
It offered Americans something government reports never could. It showed incarceration through the eyes of someone who had experienced it. But Citizen 13660 did more than preserve one woman’s memories.
Built from more than 2,000 sketches, it became one of the most important firsthand accounts of the Japanese American incarceration, helping generations of Americans understand what life behind barbed wire actually looked like.
A Legacy That Helped Change History
In 1981, Miné Ōkubo testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), the federal commission established to investigate the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. She presented Citizen 13660 to the commission, where it had already become a widely recognized and respected reference on the incarceration experience.
The commission’s work ultimately helped lead to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the U.S. government formally apologized for the incarceration and provided redress to surviving victims.
Ōkubo’s book has since been taught in classrooms across the United States in courses on American history, art, war, and Asian American studies. In 1984, Citizen 13660 received an American Book Award, and in 1991, the Women’s Caucus for Art honored Ōkubo with its Lifetime Achievement Award.