By Order of the President by
On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why.
Children of Topaz by
The diary of a third-grade class of Japanese-American children being held with their families in an internment camp during World War II.
Citizen 13660 by
Mine Okubo was one of 110,000 people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of them American citizens - who were rounded up into ?protective custody? shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660 , her memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, was first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983 with a new Preface by the author.
With 197 pen-and-ink illustrations, and poignantly written text, the book has been a perennial bestseller, and is used in college and university courses across the country.
A Cold Wind from Idaho by
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, resulting in a cataclysmic series of events affecting all persons of Japanese ancestry then residing on the West Coast of the United States. So calamitous were these actions that a noted scholar asserted that this action constitutes "the defining event in the history of Japanese Americans." What does this have to do with a book of poetry titled A COLD WIND FROM IDAHO? Those Americans familiar with the Pacific Northwest Japanese American World War II experience will understand the imagery wrought by the title as being both evocative and apt. The metaphor of freezing winter winds chilling the body and then entering the soul of those affected conveys fittingly how the Japanese Issei and Japanese American Nisei encountered, braved, and then survived the cold iciness of Idaho's winters while they were huddled in a primitive American barbed wire concentration camp.
Democracy on Trial: the Japanese American evacuation and relocation in World War II by
Based on interviews with camp survivors and new archival research, an account of the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II offers a new perspective on a tragic episode in contemporary American history.
Desert Exile by
In the spring of 1942, shortly after the United States entered into war with Japan, the federal government initiated a policy whereby 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and herded into camps. They were incarcerated without indictment, trial, or counsel - not because they had committed a crime, but simply because they resembled the enemy. There was never any evidence of disloyalty or sabotage among them, and the majority were American citizens. The government?s explanation for this massive injustice was military necessity.
Desert Exile tells the story of one family who lived through these sad years. It is a moving personal account by a woman who grew up in Berkeley and was attending the University of California when the war began.
To better unerstand how such a gross violation of human rights could have occurred in America, and how the Japanese reacted to it, the author takes a backward look at her parents? early years in this country and her own experiences as a Nisei growing up in California. She evokes the strong anti-Asian climate of the years preceding the war, and provides an intimate glimpse of life in one Japanese American household.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changed in Yoshiko Uchida?s life. She tells of her father?s abrupt seizure by the FBI; one of the family?s frantic efforts to vacate their home on ten days notice; of being forced to live in a horsestall, deprived of every human privacy; and of being sent on to a bleak camp in the Utah desert, ringed by barbed wire and armed guards and plagued by terrifying dust storms.
But this is not simply an account of the day-to-day life in the Tanforan and Topaz concentration camps where the author lived; it is also the story of the courage and strength displayed by the incarcerated Japense. In particular, it is about the Issei (first generation immigrants) who, having already endured so much in a hostile society, still retained a remarkable resiliency of spirit as they established a sense of community, saw to the education of their children, and tried to live productive lives even behind barbed wire.
This is a beautifully crafted book, written with clarity, conviction, and insight. It should be read by all Americans so they will know and never forget what once happened in this country, and through that knowledge will never allow such a travesty of justice to happen again.
Farewell to Manzanar : a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II internment by
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."
Free to Die for Their Country: the story of the Japanese American draft resisters in World War II by
In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the censored images of Japanese American internment by
Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images--the majority of which have never been published--this book evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. Nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro narrate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps.
Imprisoned Apart: the World War II correspondence of an Issei couple by
"Please don't cry," wrote Iwao Matsushita to his wife Hanaye, telling her he was to be interned for the duration of the war. He was imprisoned in Fort Missoula, Montana, and she was incarcerated at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southwestern Idaho. Their separation would continue for more than two years.
Imprisoned Apart is the poignant story of a young teacher and his bride who came to Seattle from Japan in 1919 so that he might study English language and literature, and who stayed to make a home. On the night of December 7, 1941, the FBI knocked at the Matsushitas' door and took Iwao away, first to jail at the Seattle Immigration Stateion and then, by special train, windows sealed and guards at the doors, to Montana. He was considered an enemy alien, "potentially dangerous to public safety," because of his Japanese birth and professional associations.
The story of Iwao Matsushita's determination to clear his name and be reunited with his wife, and of Hanaye Matsushita's growing confusion and despair, unfolds in their correspondence, presented here in full. Their cards and letters, most written in Japanese, some in English when censors insisted, provided us with the first look at life inside Fort Missoula, one of the Justice Department's wartime camp for enemy aliens. Because Iwao was fluent in both English and Japanese, his communications are always articulate, even lyrical, if restrained. Hanaye communicated briefly and awkwardly in English, more fully and openly in Japanese.
Fiset presents a most affecting human story and helps us to read between the lines, to understand what was happening to this gentle, sensitive pair. Hanaye suffered the emotional torment of disruption and displacement from everything safe and familiar. Iwao, a scholarly man who, despite his imprisonment, did not falter in his committment to his adopted country, suffered the ignominity of suspicion of being disloyal. After the war, he worked as a subject specialist at the University of Washington's Far Eastern Library and served as principal of Seattle's Japanese Language School, faithful to the Japanese American community until his death in 1979.
Japanese-American Internment Camps by
In addition to providing the impetus for American entry into World War II, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor triggered the forced removal of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to remote camps in barren inland areas. The authors in this volume illustrate the arguments in favor of relocation, as well as provide personal experiences of the evacuation, imprisonment and interrogation by federal authorities, the day-to-day life in the relocation camps, and reentry into American society following the closure of the camps.
Japanese American Internment During World War II by
The internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II is one of the most shameful episodes in American history. This history and reference guide will help students and other interested readers to understand the history of this action and its reinterpretation in recent years, but it will also help readers to understand the Japanese American wartime experience through the words of those who were interned. Why did the U.S. government take this extraordinary action? How was the evacuation and resettlement handled? How did Japanese Americans feel on being asked to leave their homes and live in what amounted to concentration camps? How did they respond, and did they resist? What developments have taken place in the last twenty years that have reevaluated this wartime action?
A variety of materials is provided to assist readers in understanding the internment experience. Six interpretive essays examine key aspects of the event and provide new interpretations based on the most recent scholarship. Essays include:
- A short narrative history of the Japanese in America before World War II
- The evacuation
- Life within barbed wire-the assembly and relocation centers
- The question of loyalty-Japanese Americans in the military and draft resisters
- Legal challenges to the evacuation and internment
- After the war-resettlement and redress
A chronology of events, 26 biographical profiles of important figures, the text of 10 key primary documents--from Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment camps, to first-person accounts of the internment experience--a glossary of terms, and an annotative bibliography of recommended print sources and web sites provide ready reference value. Every library should update its resources on World War II with this history and reference guide.
Japanese Americans: from relocation to redress by
This revised and expanded edition of Japanese Americans : From Relocation to Redress presents the most complete and current published account of the Japanese American experience from the evacuation order of World War II to the public policy debate over redress and reparations. A chronology and comprehensive overview of the Japanese American experience by Roger Daniels are underscored by first person accounts of relocations by Bill Hosokawa, Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami, Barry Saiki, Take Uchida, and others, and previously undescribed events of the interment camps for "enemy aliens" by John Culley and Tetsuden Kashima. The essays bring us up to the U.S. government's first redress payments, made forty eight years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans began.
Journey to Topaz: a story of the Japanese-American evacuation by
Based on Yushiko Uchida's personal experiences, this is the moving story of one girl's struggle to remain brave during the Japanese internment of World War II. In a bleak and dusty prison camp, 11-year-old Yuki and her family experience both true friendship and heart-wrenching tragedy. Journey To Topaz explores the consequences of prejudice and the capacities of the human spirit. First published in 1971, this book is now a much loved and widely read classic.
Judgment without Trial: Japanese American imprisonment during World War II by
Judgment without Trial reveals that long before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began making plans for the eventual internment and later incarceration of the Japanese American population. Tetsuden Kashima uses newly obtained records to trace this process back to the 1920s, when a nascent imprisonment organization was developed to prepare for a possible war with Japan, and follows it in detail through the war years.
Along with coverage of the well-known incarceration camps, the author discusses the less familiar and very different experiences of people of Japanese descent in the Justice and War Departments? internment camps that held internees from the continental U.S. and from Alaska, Hawaii, and Latin America. Utilizing extracts from diaries, contemporary sources, official communications, and interviews, Kashima brings an array of personalities to life on the pages of his book ? those whose unbiased assessments of America's Japanese ancestry population were discounted or ignored, those whose works and actions were based on misinformed fears and racial animosities, those who tried to remedy the inequities of the system, and, by no means least, the prisoners themselves.
Kashima's interest in this episode began with his own unanswered questions about his father's wartime experiences. From this very personal motivation, he has produced a panoramic and detailed picture ? without rhetoric and emotionalism and supported at every step by documented fact ? of a government that failed to protect a group of people for whom it had forcibly assumed total responsibility.
Keeper of Concentration Camps by
Analyzing the career of Dillon S. Myer, Director of the War Relocation Authority during WWII and Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1950-53, Richard Drinnon shows that the pattern for the Japanese internment was set a century earlier by the removal, confinement, and scattering of Native Americans.
Last Witnesses Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanes Americans by
Sixty years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the mass incarceration of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them American citizens, the question could this happen again? remains unresolved. For the writers represented in this volume - novelists, memoirists, poets, activists, professors, students, professionals - the wartime internment is a central and as yet unclosed chapter of American history. Former internees and their children join with others to offer a cross generational and compelling story, told in part by some of the people who lived it, that continues to tarnish the American Dream.
Legends from Camp: Poems by
Winner, 1994 American Book Award. Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry finalist. "Recommended for classroom and library use, this book will add a fresh dimension to a growing body of literature that remembers, humanizes, and shares the Japanese-American internment experience for new generations."-- Choice
May Sky: there is always tomorrow : an anthology of Japanese American concentration camp kaiko haiku by
Traces the literary activities of Japanese Americans who became members of the haiku clubs while in internment camps during World War II.
Only What We Could Carry by
Surprising in both its emotional and intellectual range, Only What We Could Carry brings us intimate voices that express not only fear and anger, but humor, compassion, and self-doubt. Family photographs and original works of art add a visual record of life before and within the camps. Posters, political cartoons, and other memorabilia reflect the climate outside the internment camp gates.
The price of prejudice : the Japanese-American Relocation Center in Utah during World War II by 
A Principled Stand: the story of Hirabayashi v. United States by
In 1943, college student Gordon Hirabayashi defied the curfew and mass removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned. Gordon's brother James and nephew Lane have brought together his prison diaries and voluminous wartime correspondence, along with family photographs and archival documents, to tell the story of the Supreme Court case that in 1943 upheld, and on appeal in 1987 vacated, his conviction. Details of his religious faith, involvement in student movements, and experiences in jail give texture to his storied life.
Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II by
Part of Hill and Wang's Critical Issues Series and well established on college reading lists, PRISONERS WITHOUT TRIAL presents a concise introduction to a shameful chapter in American history: the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. With a revised final chapter and expanded recommended readings, Roger Daniels's updated edition examines a tragic event in our nation's past and thoughtfully asks if it could happen again.
Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 by
In 1982, a congressional commission concluded that the incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II resulted from racism, war hysteria, and failed political leadership. Against long odds, the commission's recommendation that the U.S. government offer financial redress became law on August 10, 1988, when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. This book is a case study of the political, institutional, and external factors that led to the passage of this controversial legislation. Based on extensive interviews with Senators, members of Congress, key members of their staffs, and lobbyists, as well as statistical analyses of roll call votes, this book provides a uniquely rich account of the passage of a federal law. It also places the campaign for redress in the broader theoretical context of the workings of Congress and the policy-making process.--Publisher description.
Silver Like Dust by
A young girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania eschews her Japanese heritage until she learns the details of the time her grandmother spent in an internment camp along with 112,000 other Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Ten visits : brief accounts of visits to all ten Japanese American relocation centers of World War II, relocation recollections, the struggle for redress, human relations and other essays by 
The Train to Crystal City by
"Focusing on a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, a dramatic account exposes a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II where hundreds of prisoners were exchanged for other Americans behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany."
Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II by
Whispered Silences presents memories and images of the American detention camps to which 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were sent during World War II. Haunted by a visit to one of the detention camps, fine-arts photographer Joan Myers embarked on an odyssey to record all ten of the camps where Japanese Americans were held, from the deserts of California and the Southwest to the swamps of Arkansas. The result is a series of evocative black-and-white photographs of the camps as they appear today and of items left behind in them - barracks steps, guard tower footings, cemeteries, dried up ponds and rock work from abandoned gardens, children's toys. Historian Gary Okihiro tells the story of the camps almost exclusively from the reminiscences of former internees, giving voice to the photographs' stark images. His essay extends to the earliest days of japanese settlement in America, interweaving historical background, personal accounts, and his own family's experience, moving between Japan, Hawaii, and the mainland United States. Whispered Silences relates a very personal and informal history of Japanese Americans and World War II. It compels us to feel the trauma of the wartime detention, which disrupted and ruined so many lives.
Years of Infamy: the untold story of America's concentration camps by
"A truly excellent and moving book . . . The story of the concentration camps for Japanese has often been told, but usually with an emphasis on the silver lining. . . . Michi Weglyn concentrates instead on the other side of the picture. Years of Infamy is hard hitting but fair and balanced. It is a terrible story of administrative callousness and bungling, untold damage to the human soul, confusion, and terror."-Edwin O. Reischauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan
Artifacts of Loss by
From 1942 to 1946, as America prepared for war, 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in harsh desert camps across the American west. In Artifacts of Loss, Jane E. Dusselier looks at the lives of these internees through the lens of their art. These camp-made creations included flowers made with tissue paper and shells, wood carvings of pets left behind, furniture made from discarded apple crates, gardens grown next to their housing�anything to help alleviate the visual deprivation and isolation caused by their circumstances. Their crafts were also central in sustaining, re-forming, and inspiring new relationships. Creating, exhibiting, consuming, living with, and thinking about art became embedded in the everyday patterns of camp life and helped provide internees with sustenance for mental, emotional, and psychic survival. Dusselier urges her readers to consider these often overlooked folk crafts as meaningful political statements which are significant as material forms of protest and as representations of loss. She concludes briefly with a discussion of other displaced people around the globe today and the ways in which personal and group identity is reflected in similar creative ways.
Confinement and Ethnicity : An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites by
Confinement and Ethnicity documents in unprecedented detail the various facilities in which persons of Japanese descent living in the western United States were confined during World War II: the fifteen �assembly centers� run by the U.S. Army�s Wartime Civil Control Administration, the ten �relocation centers� created by the War Relocation Authority, and the internment camps, penitentiaries, and other sites under the jurisdiction of the Justice and War Departments. Originally published as a report of the Western Archeological and Conservation Center of the National Park Service, it is now reissued in a corrected edition, with a new Foreword by Tetsuden Kashima, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington. Based on archival research, field visits, and interviews with former residents, Confinement and Ethnicity provides an overview of the architectural remnants, archeological features, and artifacts remaining at the various sites. Included are numerous maps, diagrams, charts, and photographs. Historic images of the sites and their inhabitants -- including several by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams -- are combined with photographs of present-day settings, showing concrete foundations, fence posts, inmate-constructed drainage ditches, and foundations and parts of buildings, as well as inscriptions in Japanese and English written or scratched on walls and rocks. The result is a unique and poignant treasure house of information for former residents and their descendants, for Asian American and World War II historians, and for anyone interested in the facts about what the authors call these �sites of shame.�
From Concentration Camp to Campus by
In the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the systematic exile and incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council was born. Created to facilitate the movement of Japanese American college students from concentration camps to colleges away from the West Coast, this privately organized and funded agency helped more than four thousand incarcerated students pursue higher education at more than six hundred schools during WWII. Allan W. Austin's From Concentration Camp to Campus examines the Council's work and the challenges it faced in an atmosphere of pervasive wartime racism. Austin also reveals the voices of students as they worked to construct their own meaning for wartime experiences under pressure of forced and total assimilation. Austin argues that the resettled students succeeded in reintegrating themselves into the wider American society without sacrificing their connections to community and their Japanese cultural heritage.
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians by
Personal Justice Denied tells the extraordinary story of the incarceration of mainland Japanese Americans and Alaskan Aleuts during World War II. Although this wartime episode is now almost universally recognized as a catastrophe, for decades various government officials and agencies defended their actions by asserting a military necessity. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment was established by act of Congress in 1980 to investigate the detention program. Over twenty days, it held hearings in cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast, with testimony from more than 750 witnesses: evacuees, former government officials, public figures, interested citizens, and historians and other professionals. It took steps to locate and to review the records of government action and to analyze contemporary writings and personal and historical accounts. The Commission�s report is a masterful summary of events surrounding the wartime relocation and detention activities, and a strong indictment of the policies that led to them. The report and its recommendations were instrumental in effecting a presidential apology and monetary restitution to surviving Japanese Americans and members of the Aleut community.
The Principled Politician by
This important biography tells the story of the only political leader to welcome Japanese Americans to his state during World War II, painting a vivid portrait of a courageous man forgotten by Colorado and never known by his country.
Tell This Silence : Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech by
Tell This Silence by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of silence and speech, especially in relation to activism and social-justice movements in the U.S. In particular, the very notion of silence continues to invoke assumptions of passivity, submissiveness, and avoidance, while speech is equated with action and empowerment. However, as the writers discussed in Tell This Silence suggest, silence too has multiple meanings especially in contexts like the U.S., where speech has never been a guaranteed right for all citizens. Duncan argues that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nora Okja Keller, and Anchee Min deploy silence as a means of resistance. Juxtaposing their “unofficial narratives” against other histories—official U.S. histories that have excluded them and American feminist narratives that have stereotyped them or distorted their participation��they argue for recognition of their cultural participation and offer analyses of the intersections among gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Tell This Silence offers innovative ways to consider Asian American gender politics, feminism, and issues of immigration and language. This exciting new study will be of interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's, American, and Asian American studies.
The Art of Gaman by
A photographic collection of arts and crafts made in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II, along with a historical overview of the camps"
Beyond Words: images from America's concentration camps by
More than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were interned in camps during World War II. This moving book developed from the discovery of art work done by detainees during their stay in the camps. The authors found and taped conversations with some of the surviving artists. They reproduce here over 75 art works and excerpts from recollections, four in their entirety. The remembrances are even more powerful than the pictures. The authors provide three chapters of historical narrative, which curiously are neither in chronological sequence nor presented conveniently for those unfamiliar with the broader context. Nevertheless, this is, overall, a highly recommended book. Charles K. Piehl, Director of Sponsored Progs . , Mankato State Univ., Minn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Colors of Confinement: rare Kodachrome photographs of Japanese American incarceration in World War II by
In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee.
The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps.
Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA's Photographic Section, 1943-1945 by 
Manzanar by
Ansel Adams photographs, an essay by John Hersey, and historical commentary document the day-to-day life in a World War II internment-camp
Miné Okubo: following her own road by
To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless.? - Miné Okubo
This is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Miné Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience.
Born in Riverside, California, Okubo was incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and later at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. There she taught art and directed the production of a literary and art magazine. While in camp, Okubo documented her confinement experience by making hundreds of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches. These provided the material for Citizen 13660. Word of her talent spread to Fortune magazine, which hired her as an illustrator. Under the magazine's auspices, she was able to leave the camp and relocate to New York City, where she pursued her art over the next half century.
This lovely and inviting book, lavishly illustrated with both color and halftone images, many of which have never before been reproduced, introduces readers to Okubo's oeuvre through a selection of her paintings, drawings, illustrations, and writings from different periods of her life. In addition, it contains tributes and essays on Okubo's career and legacy by specialists in the fields of art history, education, women's studies, literature, American political history, and ethnic studies, essays that illuminate the importance of her contributions to American arts and letters.
Miné Okubo expands the sparse critical literature on Asian American women, as well as that on the Asian American experience in the eastern United States. It also serves as an excellent companion to Citizen 13660, providing critical tools and background to place Okubo's work in its historical and literary contexts.
