Avenger of the Week | Miné Okubo, Artist and Writer

Miné Okubo, born in Riverside, California, was one of the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans forced into internment camps in a now-acknowledged shameful act by the US federal government after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 3066 barred Japanese and Japanese Americans from living on the West Coast, and they were detained and sent to inland camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

Determined to show life in the camps and her feelings about it, the then 30-year-old artist, writer, and art graduate of University of California at Berkeley made more than 2,000 drawings, along with writings, during her two years in internment. After the war in 1946, a book of 200 of her drawings and writings was published, Citizen 13660 (her assigned internment number), providing a rare visual depiction and the first inside account of the consequences of the Order. In the preface of a 1983 edition of the book, Okubo said:

"In the camps, I had the opportunity to study the human race from the cradle to the grave, and to see what happens to people when reduced to one status and one condition. Cameras and photographs were not permitted in the camps, so I recorded everything in sketches, drawings and paintings.

"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."

Illustration by Miné Okubo — waiting in line for supper, Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California, 1942 — at the Japanese American National Museum

Illustration by Miné Okubo — women's community toilets, Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California, 1942 — at the Japanese American National Museum

Illustration by Miné Okubo — community toilets, Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California, 1942 — at the Japanese American National Museum

The daughter of two Japanese artists who emigrated to California, Okubo and her brother were separated from their parents and were initially sent to Tanforan internment camp for six months, a former racetrack in California where they lived in a 20x9-foot horse stall that smelled of manure and were made to sleep on beds made of  hay. They were later sent to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, where Miné organized art classes for children and adults, drew and wrote for the Topaz newspaper, and started a literary magazine.

After the war, Okubo mostly lived in New York City and worked as an illustrator and painter, Her works appeared in Time, Life, and The New York Times, as well as her illustrations in children’s books. She was also an art instructor at her alma mater, Berkeley.

In 1981, she testified about her internment experiences before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to seek an apology and restitution for the injustices carried out against Japanese and Japanese American communities by the US government during the war. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to recognize the illegal removal of people of Japanese ancestry from their homes in World War II. Internees were also awarded financial compensation in the amount of $20,000. Okubo used the money to pay off debts.

Okubo’s book Citizen 13660 won the American Book Award in 1984, and her work received an award from the National Women’s Caucus of Art and is displayed at the Japanese American National Museum and the Smithsonian. She continued painting until her death in 2001 at 89.

For her resilience and her art, which chronicled a dark part of history that should not be forgotten, for her generosity in teaching art to others in internment, and for her voice in public testimony on the experiences of internees, Miné Okubo is GenderAvenger’s Avenger of the Week.

The @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek is Miné Okubo, a Japanese American whose family endured life in US internment camps in the 1940s. She chronicled their lives through art and writing and gave public testimony to seek justice. #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-mine-okubo