Citizen 13660 Book Review

Essay by ti2014College, UndergraduateA, July 2014

download word file, 5 pages 0.0

Jonathan Vieyra

In the book, Citizen 13660, the author Mine Okubo describes her experiences during the time of Japanese internment and at the internment camps. Mine's book highlights the efforts of the evacuees to rebuild a community within the internment camps, and the hardships and discomforts of everyday life in the camps. Many of the struggles faced by the evacuees revolved around the most essential things such as, housing, food, and privacy. Overall the general purpose of Mine's book is to remind us of the injustice that was done to Japanese Americans during WWII.

I don't think Mine completely understood or agreed with being interned. She believed that since she was a citizen she had more rights than non-citizen Japanese Americans, which would keep her from being interned. "It was a real blow when everyone, regardless of citizenship, was ordered to evacuate". Mine does not fight relocation at all, and I think she didn't because she had already witness the internment of non-citizen Japanese Americans, so citizen or not she had already come to terms with the internment of the Japanese.

I also believe Mine didn't fight internment because she felt that it would be better than living with the general public where she would be judged and antagonized. Mine states that after Pearl Harbor, "people looked at all of us, both citizens and aliens, with suspicion and mistrust".[1: Mine Okubo. Citizen 13660. Seattle (University of Washington Press, 1983), 17.][2: Okubo, 12.]

One of the ways the Japanese dealt with housing was by furnishing their homes as much as possible. For example Mine states, "Everyone was building furniture and fixing up barracks and stalls." One way the bachelors dealt with privacy in their housing was by building walls of Jericho. Mine mentions that some of the bachelors "built 'walls...