26 pages • 52 minutes read
Miné OkuboCitizen 13660
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPages 50-100Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 50-75 Summary
During the first month at Tanforan Assembly Center, Okubo started to document the daily activities of the camp through sketches and drawings. She noted that hundreds of new people would enter the camp each day, contributing to overcrowding. Due to the overcrowding and poor housing conditions of the camp, there was little privacy. Okubo remarks that the women’s latrines had few partitions. Many women could not get used to showering and going to the bathroom in the open, so they took to creating their own makeshift partitions. Additionally, there was no privacy in the barracks as neighbors’ voices carried.
Pages 76-100 Summary
There was no leaving the camp except for emergencies or death. The camp also enforced a strict curfew for rising and returning to their stalls. The “Caucasian camp police” (60) would patrol the camp to make sure that these instructions were followed. Internees tried to make the best of their camp life. When the opportunity for employment arrived at the camp, several able-bodied internees began working but were paid very little. Okubo began working as an art instructor in the camp, teaching young children. Several other internees tried to beautify the camp, planting victory gardens. A group of landscape architects also transplanted plants and shrubs into the center field and created a body of water called North Lake, forming a park in the middle of the camp.
While internees took part in different pastimes such as sports, boating, and dice games, there was also a lot of idleness at the camp. Confined to the camp, many men would fall asleep in various places, especially at the grandstand where many people usually gathered. People also congregated at mess halls too long after meals had been served, often doing nothing. Several internees tried to organize a self-elected government, which would give the Issei or first-generation Japanese Americans the same voting rights as Japanese American citizens. However, the camp administrators shut it down.
Pages 50-100 Analysis
Despite already being confined in Tanforan Assembly Center, internees were also under the watchful eye of the “Caucasian camp police,” which made internment life comparable to incarceration. While the registration process was initially positioned as voluntary and for the good of Japanese Americans, the camp appeared to be a penalizing place. The internees were treated as if they were criminals who needed to be monitored for danger.
This surveillance by the camp contributed to the dehumanizing effects of internment life. Okubo details the idleness that she witnessed among other internees. For Japanese people, idleness is considered a negative trait. Yet the constraints of internment life, which included barring internees from interaction with their jobs and communities, limited what internees could do in the camp. They were forced to sleep and loiter in places because they had nothing else to do. This was not only culturally disruptive for the internees who frowned upon idleness as a trait, it also contributed to a diminished morale and sense of self.
Despite the debilitating circumstances, the internees managed to find ways of creating familiarity and routine in the camp. Okubo notes how several internees had started to beautify the space through landscaping, an attempt to mitigate the harsh and monotonous surroundings with greenery. This was true too of the creation of sports and games.
The desire for self-governance was also part of this attempt to return to civic life as well as to improve upon it. While then US policy forbade the Issei from voting, the form of self-governance imagined at the camp would have given these first-generation Japanese Americans a democratic voice. Considering the heavily surveilled environment, this self-government would have been politically transformative for the internees, particularly as it created a right to vote for those who did not have that privilege in the US at the time. Yet the camp administration stopped this self-governance effort, knowing that giving too much political voice to the internees would disrupt the order necessary to contain them.
