by Japanese Internment, Memoir
Okubo, Miné. Citizen 13660. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. First edition, second printing, 1947. Original gray cloth binding stamped in blue with Okubo's custom wraparound illustration. A graphic memoir and one of the earliest book-length accounts of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, told by one of its internees. Published in 1946 by Columbia University Press, this pioneering illustrated narrative recounts Okubo’s experience in the Tanforan Assembly Center and the Topaz War Relocation Center through expressive pen-and-ink drawings paired with prose. Okubo bore witness to her own community’s forced removal from the West Coast and confinement in remote, militarized camps, making Citizen 13660 a searing visual testimony of racialized wartime policy and its human toll.
The book is a sophisticated work of visual storytelling that centers Okubo’s experience as both participant and observer. Her illustrations document daily routines—registering, eating, bathing, waiting—as well as moments of despair and resilience, particularly among women, elders, and children. Citizen 13660 challenged prevailing wartime narratives and carved out space for Asian American artistic resistance. The book’s title refers to the number assigned to Okubo by the War Relocation Authority, underscoring the bureaucratic erasure of identity at the core of mass incarceration. It remains foundational in the fields of Japanese American history, graphic literature, and studies of state violence and racialized citizenship. Ownership signature to front free endpaper. Binding firm, boards clean and bright with only slight rubbing to spine tips; pages lightly toned as usual, otherwise very well preserved. One of the most important firsthand documents of Japanese American incarceration and among the first graphic works by an Asian American woman to be published by a major press, Citizen 13660 is a vital and enduring contribution to American protest literature and visual culture. (Inventory #: 22158)
The book is a sophisticated work of visual storytelling that centers Okubo’s experience as both participant and observer. Her illustrations document daily routines—registering, eating, bathing, waiting—as well as moments of despair and resilience, particularly among women, elders, and children. Citizen 13660 challenged prevailing wartime narratives and carved out space for Asian American artistic resistance. The book’s title refers to the number assigned to Okubo by the War Relocation Authority, underscoring the bureaucratic erasure of identity at the core of mass incarceration. It remains foundational in the fields of Japanese American history, graphic literature, and studies of state violence and racialized citizenship. Ownership signature to front free endpaper. Binding firm, boards clean and bright with only slight rubbing to spine tips; pages lightly toned as usual, otherwise very well preserved. One of the most important firsthand documents of Japanese American incarceration and among the first graphic works by an Asian American woman to be published by a major press, Citizen 13660 is a vital and enduring contribution to American protest literature and visual culture. (Inventory #: 22158)
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