The Contested Legacy of Miné Okubo’s World War II Art

Japanese American artist Miné Okubo is best known today for her illustrated memoir, which collects a tenth of the 2,000-odd pictures she created while interned in Utah during World War II. Activists championing redress for internment have long read Citizen 13660, which was published in 1946, as “a reproof of government policy, aligned against rather than with state objectives.”

Yet Christine Hong suggests that “the recuperation of Citizen 13660 within the politics of the redress movement arguably obscures more than it illuminates Okubo’s legacy as a wartime artist.” Instead of just critiquing internment, Okubo paved the way for “US-settled postwar peace—a pax Americana that would reconfigure the Asia-Pacific region as a US security zone” by establishing a link between Japanese American citizens and imperial Japanese subjects, Hong argues.

The slice-of-life drawings that make up Citizen 13660 were, according to Okubo, originally intended for friends outside the Topaz War Relocation Center, where she had been imprisoned.

Describing the artwork as “intimately detailed portraits of the wartime removal and mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 West Coast ethnic Japanese,” Hong adds that

[i]nsofar as the handcrafted image was her sole means of recording life behind barbed wire, Okubo’s drawings invite deliberate comparison with the camera image. A first-person chronicle of unspectacular scenes of daily camp life, Okubo’s visual memoir everywhere suggests keen observation and faithful, if hasty and unadorned, rendering.

But Hong also points to how a distinctive figure that represents the artist is included in almost all of the scenes in Citizen 13660—a creative liberty, since Okubo naturally could not have seen herself.

This “Okubo” character “anticipates and facilitates” the role of the external viewer, Hong explains. Through the illusion that readers could personally witness camp life, Okubo “facilitated the erasure of structural differences” between Japanese American inmates and those free in the outside world.

“In doing so,” Hong writes, “these readers, including those who had opposed the removal policy in the first place, perversely affirmed the ‘democratic’ value of the camps as an assimilationist experiment.”

In fact, liberal and patriotic interpretations of Okubo’s art helped her to secure her release from camp in early 1944, when Fortune magazine commissioned her as a contributor for a special issue. Okubo had just illustrated the December 1943 issue. Her drawings captioned “Submissiveness Is a Japanese Weapon That Our War Engineers Cannot Reproduce” and “In Death Two Japanese Find Fulfillment” depicted Japanese subjects as fanatically devoted to a divinely ordained government.

Her next collaboration with Fortune would be for the April 1944 issue. Headlined “Japan and the Japanese: A Military Power We Must Defeat, a Pacific Problem We Must Solve,” the issue addressed the policy questions of how the United States could “understand,” “defeat,” and pacify its wartime enemy, pairing articles by white American commentators with illustrations by the California-born Okubo and two other artists who were originally from Japan. In particular, Okubo was tasked with documenting “little Tokyos”—a loaded term that the editors took to mean both pre-war ethnic enclaves as well as the internment camps themselves.

With these projects, “Okubo was faced with the challenge of visually rehabilitating both the ‘enemy alien’ on the home front and the enemy in the Pacific as democratically inclined subjects capable of thriving in settings conditioned by the strictures of US militarism,” Hong observes. In Fortune’s pages, “camp sketches were presented as proof of the innate resilience and forward momentum of Japanese Americans,” writes Hong, with social aspects of camp life “viewed as a valiant microcosm of the resilience of American spirit on the home front.”

Many decades later, Okubo would mistakenly testify to a congressional commission that her art had also run in a wartime issue of Fortune in Japan—an error that Hong calls revealing.

“Okubo drew, quite literally, a continuum between Japanese Americans like her who had been mass incarcerated on US soil and Japanese civilians in imperial Japan whom she had no opportunity to encounter firsthand,” Hong writes. Moreover, “the compound citizen-subject that Okubo visualized…signaled a productive indeterminacy—a state of potentiality essential for a US-sponsored project of democratization.”

Citizen 13660 has developed a powerful reputation as a historical eyewitness account that serves “as documentary proof of government injustice and a self-evident argument for reparations.” Still, Hong notes that it must be read alongside Okubo’s Fortune illustrations and “in a continuum with her early-war, pre-‘evacuation’ repertoire” of government-sponsored public art. Ultimately, there remains an “elasticity around the social and political significance” of Okubo’s wartime work.

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