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. "[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh -- and if he is an American too -- blush." -- Pearl Buck Read more about Mine Okubo in the 2008 UW Press book, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html
“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.
A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes. Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive. Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory.
Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.
The New York Times bestselling graphic memoir from actor/author/activist George Takei returns in a deluxe edition with 16 pages of bonus material! Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in STAR TREK, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. THEY CALLED US ENEMY is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? George Takei joins cowriters Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
This is a rich collection of personal histories from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds which takes readers inside the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Treadmill is a truly unique and historically significant novel and the only book written about life in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II written at the time by an internee.Hiroshi Nakamura, along with his family, spent the war years in Salinas Assembly Center, Salinas, California; Camp II of the Poston Relocation Center, Parker, Arizona; and Tule Lake Segregation Center, Newell, California. It was during this period that he put down on paper what he was observing, experiencing, and hearing and expressed them in this novel. Nakamura captures exquisitely the thinking and mood of the people. It accurately evokes the fears, anxieties, suspicions, cynicisms and passions brought out by camp life. Nakamura &‘almost' succeeded in getting Treadmill published in the late 1940s. While editors and publishers thought well of the novel, they would not publish it as it was &‘too sensitive' an issue. Professor Peter Suzuki discovered Treadmill while he was doing some research on internment camps of Japanese Americans.This revised edition of Treadmill contains a new introductory essay by Professor Tara Fickle discussing the historical importance of Nakamura's work. Also included are a series of photographs of Japanese internment camps in California taken by renowned photographer Ansel Adams taken in 1943. Adams had unprecedented access to life inside the camps and these photographs provide an exceptional visual accompaniment to Nakamura's story.
"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
