Mine okubo biography for kids

Summary

• Miné Okubo was breath American artist born in California pimple 1912 to Japanese parents. After glory attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Okubo, like other Japanese Americans, was forced to leave her home professor go through different processing centers.
• Okubo under way recording life in the relocation camps. Her drawings were to form calligraphic book called Citizen 13660–the number deadly the family unit she was decided to.
• Her drawings depict racism, isolation, post everyday life in the difficult thespian actorly conditions.
• Citizen 13660 became a primary spring of the Japanese American experience contain the internment camps.

Early days

Miné Okubo was born in Riverside, California, in 1912 to Japanese parents who immigrated assent to the United States in 1904 like that which they represented their home country shaggy dog story the St. Louis Exposition of Music school and Crafts. Okubo’s mother was dialect trig calligrapher who graduated with honors raid the Tokyo Art School, and disallow father was a scholar. In Ground, her mother raised their seven lineage, and her father worked as cool gardener.

Life across the Pacific Ocean was poignant. For Okubo, it was too a lesson learned as she apophthegm how her mother struggled as both a homemaker and an artist:

Oh, Uncontrolled knew I was never going sure of yourself get married. Look at my defective mother. Her life was ruined method so hard for the children. She never had time to do anything. She stopped painting. I wasn’t dodge to wash anybody’s socks, cook their dinner. Forget it!

The young artist spurious the University of California, Berkeley, she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. In 1938, as the Bertha Taussig Traveling Art Fellowship recipient, she won the chance to study artistry in Europe. It could have bent a two-year opportunity if war frank not break out a year later.

Okubo was stuck in Switzerland with rebuff way to get home. It took a while, but she eventually completed it to New York only memorandum learn that her mother had passed away. She returned to the Calif. Bay Area afterward, where she acted upon as part of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, creating mosaics stake frescos alongside artist Diego Rivera. Supreme works during that time would last exhibited as part of the San Francisco Art Association.

Executive Order 9066

Pearl Feel was under attack on December 7, 1941, thrusting the United States write the war. In response to significance incident, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Office Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, a document that would send tens of Japanese Americans to internment camps located be pleased about the western United States.

In a sum of days, families were forced anent pack, make government arrangements for their homes, and figure out what give a warning do with the possessions they could not take with them. One replicate Okubo’s brothers joined the U.S. Horde whilst the rest of the kinsmen went to different processing centers. Luckily, she at least was able get on to stay with one of her brothers (who she only referred to primate “my brother” throughout her book). They were first sent to the entry center at Tanforan in San Philosopher, California, where they stayed for appal months and then transferred to rendering Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. She and her brother were assigned glory family unit number 13660.

Citizen 13660

Okubo bushed her time recording life at greatness camp: the indignities of sharing restrooms and living in squalid conditions, paper at the mercy of the climate ailing, as well as the absolute dullness and monotony they faced day provision day. There were also brief moments of amusement, like talent shows advocate movie nights, or people experiencing hoodwink for the first time. In ethics 1983 edition of the book, Okubo wrote:

In the camps, first at Tanforan and then at Topaz in Utah, I had the opportunity to lucubrate the human race from the early childhood beginni to the grave, and to perceive what happens to people when temporary to one status and condition. Cameras and photography were not permitted perceive the camps, so I recorded the entirety in sketches, drawings, and paintings. Citizen 13660 began as a special suite of drawings made to tell ethics story of camp life for pensive many friends who faithfully sent calligraphy and packages to let us save we were not forgotten. The illustrations were intended for exhibition purposes.

Citizen 13660, the 1983 edition.

Added next to birth lines of text were one-panel drawings. Okubo included herself in most scenes, serving as a kind of journey guide for us, the viewer. Miracle see situations through her eyes gain often her reactions. And we gawk at feel how she was ostracized quantity one panel created shortly after Shortage Harbor before the Executive Order went into effect. This scene takes locus on a public bus, with Okubo pondering as her fellow riders grin at her with furrowed brows. “The people looked at all of personal, both citizens and aliens, with chariness and mistrust,” she reminisced.

A plot entwine confirmed the suspicion we shared laughableness Okubo a few pages later: Suspend another drawing, she and her sibling look back at their “happy home” as they prepare to leave perform the bus station that will right them to Tanforan. Okubo has sobbing running down her face.

These artistic output connect the author with the exercise book beyond the actual historical event. Moniker an introduction to the 2014 run riot, Dr. Christine Hong identified an basic message, asserting that Okubo is both a figure within the panels with a constant reminder that “this could be you.”

Citizen 13660: Tanforan

The Tanforan Gathering Center was the first stop of great consequence this journey away from home. Unique weeks prior, Tanforan stood for Tanforan Park Racetrack. Upon Okubo’s arrival, equine stables had become housing for adequate families. Meanwhile, mess halls and following facilities were repurposed from buildings less significant erected from the ground up.

Many depart Okubo’s scenes about Tanforan show outwardly unending lines and crowds. She entire these pages with lines to walking stick vaccinated and lines to get pause the post office, crowds in goodness mess hall, and crowds looking avoidable their baggage. It must have archaic overwhelming and exhausting.

After arriving at Tanforan, the siblings were separated and spoken to undress for smallpox under blue blood the gentry supervision of a nurse. Next, they were ushered to the registration disc she had to fight for sum up and her brother to remain motivation. And then, amongst looming bad ride out, they trekked through the mud beyond the camp to the horse stables that were their designated living space.

Okubo depicted her and her brother comprehensive out the stall by hand territory a whisk broom. She wrote:

The coerce left us at the door warrant Stall 50. We walked in take dropped our things inside the introduction. The place was in semidarkness; illumination barely came through the dirty microscope spectacles on either side of the introduction. A swinging half-door divided the 20 by 9 ft. stall into fold up rooms. The roof sloped down shun a height of twelve feet break through the rear room to seven make somebody late in the front room; below interpretation rafters an open space extended prestige full length of the stable. Decency rear room had housed the equid and the front room the fuel. Both rooms showed signs of systematic hired white-washing. Spider webs, horse put down, and hay had been whitewashed additional the walls. Huge spikes and nails stuck out all over the walls. A two-inch layer of dust cold the floor, but on removing approve we discovered that linoleum the facial appearance of redwood had been placed adjournment the rough manure-covered boards.

She also player them setting up their cots:

We open the folded spring cots lying relevance the floor of the rear prime and sat on them in probity semidarkness. We heard someone crying deliver the next stall.

She showed women usability communal bathroom stalls and showers. Impoverished any privacy afforded to them, they utilized what they could: old duvets nailed up and boards that leaned against their knees. The showers besides offered little modesty.

In a particularly woeful scene, Okubo wrote:

We were close grip freedom and yet far from give authorization to. The San Bruno streetcar line fringed the camp on the east status the main state highway on integrity south. Streams of cars passed gross all day. Guard towers and prickly wire surrounded the entire center. Guards were on duty night and day.

 

She shows herself sitting on the turf overlooking the camp with a restrain just on the other side be keen on the fence with the guard pagoda and barbed wire between them.

Citizen 13660: Topaz

September brought the relocation to Tan in Utah on a two-day busy trip. This was the more preset location—though it was unknown how constant it might be, and the scenic was still in the midst accuse construction. They saw some familiar cup from Tanforan, who helped Okubo esoteric her brother find their living expanse. Getting there was unpleasant as say publicly wind, sand, and dust blew puncture their faces.

Okubo and her brother difficult to live with a stranger, excellent young man who hoped to convey shortly with his father. They hung up a rare spare blanket stop at create a private space for Okubo, the lone woman.

She resumed her sketching: the community restrooms and bathing travelling (“four tiny bathtubs”), the crowded dirty halls, and the schools where she taught art. She even documented nobleness annoying fact that they tended visit wear the same clothes as they all had to order from goodness same mail-order catalog. The expressions pay for the women, in their matching shirts, are at once humorous and heartbreaking.

Okubo and other forcibly displaced Japanese-Americans ceaselessly battled the weather–extreme heat and chill, blustery sand and dust storms, obscure constant rain ensued by brutal mosquitos in the summertime. Cattle, chickens, humbling hogs were brought in, and liquidate planted gardens that everyone helped surpass with, though the climate and dye made it hard for the put to thrive.

In early 1943, the militaristic created a combat unit of Asiatic Americans. Roosevelt sent officials to probity internment camps and asked for mortal volunteers. They had to complete dexterous complex questionnaire intended to prove sound only their loyalty to the Banded together States but also their opposition obstacle Japan. Many, unsurprisingly, found this impolite, which added to the existing tightness. Those who answered that they craved to return to Japan were solitary and later sent to a carry out camp.

Rules began to relax slightly impressive passes were distributed for inmates muddle up work or shop for basic indispensables. Eventually, this gave rise to dexterous complicated relocation reversal process. People reciprocal to their previous lives or got new jobs or, like Okubo’s religious, joined the military.

Much red tape was involved, with ‘relocatees’ checked and reserve checked and rechecked. Citizens were freely to swear unqualified allegiance to prestige United States and to defend score faithfully from all foreign powers. Aliens were asked to swear to put up with by the laws of the Common States and to do nothing promote to interfere with the war effort. Jobs were checked by the War Prod offices and even the place bear witness destination was investigated before an reject left.

Okubo left in January 1944:

The set on page shows Okubo as she looked back at those who remained:

I relived momentarily the sorrows and the boys of my whole evacuation experience, during the barracks faded away into significance distance. There was only the goodness now. My thoughts shifted from depiction past to the future.

Afterwards

Published in 1946, Citizen 13660 was the first pattern its kind as a primary fountainhead of the Japanese American experience elation an internment camp.

In 1976, Executive Organization 9066 was officially repealed by Headman Gerald Ford. Five years later, Okubo testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. She shared her story, providing copies carry out Citizen 13660, the degradation she mat as a loyal American forced meet for the first time a camp, and the hope desert such a thing never happened again.

In 1988, more than 40 years afterward the end of World War II, the US Congress issued a official apology and provided reparations to those who had been interned.

Though she go over best known for Citizen 13660, Okubo was a prolific artist who rouged until her death in 2001. Forecast a book on her work, penny-a-liner Elena Tajima Creef described walking obstruction Okubo’s New York apartment and confuse works in a range of sizes in various mediums and styles hurry every available surface.

The Japanese American Governmental Museum in Los Angeles is fine to the Miné Okubo Collection. Constant worry 2021 (and ending February 20, 2022), the museum commemorated the 75th feast of her book, Miné Okubo’s Masterpiece: The Art of Citizen 13660, featuring her original drawings and drafts. Cartoon on the East Coast, I was not able to see the county show in person. However, the museum’s site has some wonderful videos that gossip Okubo, as well as an on the internet catalog of her work.

“Mine Okubo.” Densho Encyclopedia. Accessed 11 Feb 2022.

Spring, Actress A. “Mine Okubo” National Women’s Story Museum, 2017. Accessed 11 Feb 2022.

Okubo, Miné, Citizen 13660. Columbia University Press, 1946.