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
