Miné Okubo

Miné Okubo (1912-2012| Riverside, CA) was a Japanese American warn internee and artist, famous for her depictions of the Japanese and Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Her father, a scholar, and mother, a calligrapher, immigrated to the United States in 1904 to showcase at the St. Louis Exposition of Arts and Crafts. Once in the US, her father worked at a candy shop, then gardener and landscaper, while her mother was a housewife, but they both encouraged Miné’s interests in art. To support herself through art school at University of California Berkeley, Okubo worked as a seamstress, maid, farm laborer, and tutor.

At art school, she was awarded the Bertha Taussig Traveling Art Fellowship (1938), allowing her to study and paint in Europe for two years. While abroad, war broke out in Europe and left her stranded in Switzerland until she was able to leave through Bordeaux. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that banned people of Japanese descent from living on the West Coast. Separated from their parents, she and her brother were first sent to a relocation center in San Bruno, California where they had to share a 20’ x 9’ horse stall before being transferred to the Topaz internment camp in Utah. At both camps, she taught art lessons, and worked as an illustrator for the Topaz Times. During this time, she made over 2000 drawings depicting everyday experiences in internment camps and published 206 of these drawings in a book entitled Citizen 13660 (1946). The title refers to the number she was assigned by the US government during her imprisonment. This book won the American Book Award in 1984.

You can browse some of her collection online at the Japanese American National Museum.