Citizen 13660

Published as the last camps were being shuttered, artist Miné Okubo 's illustrated eponymous memoir has the distinction of being the earliest, first-person, book-length account of the American concentration camp experience. Always a vigorous booster of her own work, Okubo promoted the book that came to define her career as "the first and only documentary story of the Japanese evacuation and relocation written and illustrated by one who was there." *Citizen 13660* is today typically read and widely taught as a subtle yet discerning exposé of racist unfreedom at the heart of American democracy. This interpretation, however, obscures the degree to which Okubo's memoir, as the first published Nisei account of the camps, arose out of the fraught politics of the transwar years when every aspect of the mass incarceration process, including cultural representation, was scrutinized and subjected to a national security calculus. Anachronistic retrievals of *Citizen 13660* as a transparent critique of rights violations on a massive state-sponsored scale therefore overlook the fact that Okubo's illustrated account of life behind barbed wire was aligned, in its first circulation, with the objectives of the [War Relocation Authority ](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/War_Relocation_Authority/ "War Relocation Authority")(WRA), the federal agency in charge of the camps.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.