Module 3: "Riverside's Miné Okubo" and "Miné Okubo"

Mama taught her calligraphy, and Father endowed her with the Japanese philosophy of the Four Noble Truths, a guide to ethics.

When Miné felt lonely, she pictured Riverside as she remembered it, then painted what she loved most—a serene image of Mama, seated in front of her neighborhood church, Bible in her lap, a cat at her side.

The frugal Miss Okubo chose to take a freighter across the Atlantic, rather than travel via passenger ship, saying there weren’t many passengers on board the freighter, but plenty of grain!

In France, she learned more about art, and she learned about French accent marks. She quickly appropriated one for her own name, and, from then on, signed her work with an accent mark.

She portrayed truth and beauty with integrity, and she did it with such simplicity that a child of seven could appreciate and understand her renderings.

To refine her craft, Okubo attended Riverside Community College and, later, the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor, an event that would forever alter Okubo’s life as well as the lives of 110,000 other Americans of Japanese descent.

“[Miné 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—sometimes blush.”

“[Miné 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—sometimes blush.”

The New York Times Book Review called Citizen 13660 “A remarkably objective and vivid and even humorous account....In dramatic and detailed drawings and brief text, she documents the whole episode—all that she saw, objectively, yet with a warmth of understanding.”