Primary Source Analysis: On December 8, 1941, U.S. Congress declared war on Japan. A wave of hysteria then flooded the nation. America was now immersed in a crisis. What were they to do with the Japanese? With sudden disregard to law and principle, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered military personnel to detain all Japanese-Americans west of the Mississippi. However, Miné Okubo objected to the President’s decision. Her graphic novel, “Citizen 13660,” underscored the human condition in these interment camps. Her work had spoken of the true fallacies that contaminated American culture. Thus, Miné Okubo had not only challenged American wartime policy, but the entire zeitgeist of the 1940s by identifying the humanity in the Japanese-American population. The Japanese were marked as an “enemy race” by the Federal Government on February 19, 1942 (Robinson, 78). That …show more content…
A Los Angeles Times article, here, had characterized the Japanese as animals, juxtaposing them specifically to “vipers” (Fryer, 83). That instant typified the mood of the nation — after all, the Japanese were portrayed as savages by the Federal Government. But, those words soon shaped Miné Okubo’s reality. When she first arrived to camp, she was assigned to a horse stall — that room became her home for the next few years. It was a “20 by 9 ft stall,” where hay and manure littered the floor (Okubo, 35). “Spikes of nails” jutted out from the film of horse hair that had coated the walls (Okubo, 35). It was a bleak reality for Miné Okubo. Her frown and grim eyes registered her mood of pure and utter disgust. However, what we learned from Citizen 13600 was that human emotion was at the epicenter of the human condition. Emotions were the very essence that distinguished us from the savages. Here, Miné Okubo had retained a sense of emotion even though America had likened her to an animal. Thus, as an act of true protest,