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 101-153Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 101-126 Summary
After the Wartime Civil Control Administration issued two center-wide inspections by the US army, it was determined that the conditions of Tanforan Assembly Center warranted moving internees to a more permanent location known as Topaz, the Central Utah Project. Okubo and her brother packed their belongings and boarded a train with the other internees that was to take them to Topaz. The train ride lasted several days, introducing many of the internees to new terrain that they have never seen before.
Pages 127-153 Summary
When Okubo and her brother arrived at Topaz, they were assigned a new barrack and another member to their unit. The camp administrators did not allow two-person family units, so Okubo and her brother decided to invite a lone male university student to their unit. The three of them began working at the Topaz Times, which a newspaper distributed throughout the camp to keep internees informed about the center and the world outside. Camp administration would censor inappropriate content.
Topaz was only two-thirds of the way constructed, which meant that internees had to take it upon themselves to steal lumber to patch up their barracks to keep themselves warm during the cold nights. When winter came, the camp administration gave internees potbellied stoves to warm themselves. The internees also received winter clothing from leftover World War I army supplies. During the winter, everyone dressed exactly alike in the same army surplus clothing.
Pages 101-153 Analysis
To Okubo and her brother’s surprise, Tanforan Assembly Center was not the permanent camp, despite having started to build a routine and life there. While Tanforan was close enough to the Bay Area where she and her brother lived, the new camp in Utah was situated in a completely different terrain that introduced new weather conditions for the internees from California who were unaccustomed to the harsh desert winter. Additionally, move from Tanforan to Topaz raised the question of whether internment life would be temporary, as the internees anticipated, or permanent. By moving farther away from California, the internees had an even less clear sense of how long they were to be interned.
In addition to this uncertainty, life became increasingly rough for internees due to the harsh winter conditions of Topaz that camp administration was not equipped to handle. Okubo notes that the camp was only partially constructed when she arrived, which meant that the barracks were fashioned in haste and not properly insulated for the cold. The delivery of potbellied stoves and army surplus clothing to the internees were temporary solutions to an infrastructure problem. Okubo’s descriptions of these items seem to portray a pattern of fast and ill-designed decision-making from camp administration.
The camp had little resources to offer its internees, which contributed to unlawful behavior such as the stealing of lumber to patch up the holes in their barracks. Okubo mentions that mothers were most skillful and daring at stealing lumber to emphasize the pervasiveness of stealing as an act of desperation. Mothers had to steal to keep their children warm. Stealing was not an easy choice, but a necessity given the failures of camp administration to assist in their basic survival.
