Citizen 13660

Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo

After the United States entered World War II all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated to internment camps. Miné Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people swept up from their homes. She and her brother were first sent to to the Tanforan relocation center, a former racetrack, in San Bruno, California. There they shared a horse stall that smelled of manure and given sacks to fill with hay for their beds. Eventually she was tranferred to the Topaz internment camp in the Sevier Desert of central Utah; it was a dry, windy environment with harsh winters. During the war over 11,000 people were sent there.
A professional artist, she made over 2,000 drawings in charcoal, watercolor, pen, and ink, depicting her everyday experiences in these camps.
In 1946, after the war ended, she published Citizen 13660 (her government assigned number while in the camps) which contains 206 drawings from her internment, each narrated with a short text describing what is depicted in the picture.It covers her life from the years before the war to her final day at the Topaz internment camp, showing the day-to-day lives of her fellow internees of Japanese descent as she lived it. It was the first published account of the experience from an internee and won the American Book Award in 1984. This edition includes a Preface she wrote in 1983.