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Seiko Buckingham was an adult when she finally read her aunt Miné Okubo’s book about her experiences during the years she was detained in camps during World War II. Buckingham’s parents—like many Japanese American families of their generation—didn’t talk about what they experienced in World War II, even with their children.
“My parents never talked about incarceration. My mother said it was too painful for her to talk about,” Buckingham said on an episode of the podcast “The People’s Recorder” released in September.
After December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, the United States entered the war against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ultimately authorized mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and others, obliterating the civil liberties of over 100,000 American citizens.
That December 1941, Okubo was an artist whose star was rising. Just 29 years old, she had recently returned from a fellowship in Europe and was working with the prominent Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint murals in San Francisco. Then, one morning, she and her brother heard a news flash on the radio. Later, she sketched that moment in pen and ink: the two of them looking frozen at the breakfast table, stunned by the news that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Neither of them could believe that their own America was suddenly at war with their parents’ homeland, Japan. The news made them deeply sad. Still, as American-born citizens from Riverside, California, Okubo and her brother did not imagine the war would upend their lives.
That drawing appears in Okubo’s 1946 graphic memoir, Citizen 13660. With her images and spare text on each page, it describes how they and some 120,000 other Americans of Japanese ancestry were detained by the government in camps scattered across the West. Her sketches got around a prohibition banning detainees from taking photographs in the camps.
The title Citizen 13660 referred to the number that camp officials assigned Okubo to replace her family name. Her book became a timeless witness to that reality. The memoir won an American Book Award when it was republished in 1984, and it is regarded as the first book-length personal account of that harrowing experience. Rendered in a form she borrowed from comics, the graphic memoir was originally published nearly two decades before anyone coined the term “graphic novel.”
Okubo is one of three artists featured in an exciting new exhibition called “Pictures of Belonging” that opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on November 15 and runs until August 17, 2025. Curator ShiPu Wang says the exhibition offers a chance to reflect on “who defines American art in specific historical moments.” Okubo’s work throughout her life illuminated 20th-century America through a new, adventurous lens, says Wang. She was continually finding fresh approaches for her painting.
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Another artist in that company was Miki Hayakawa. Born in 1899, she arrived in America from Hokkaido, Japan, with her family as a girl in 1908. She studied art in San Francisco in the 1920s, and when her paintings were exhibited in 1929, she was hailed as a “genius” by the San Francisco Examiner, which said that her work “conveys beauty through her brush in irrepressible flashes.” Overlooked for decades after, Hayakawa nursed a passion for portraiture painting throughout her life. In her portraits, you glimpse a person’s interior life in emotionally complex imagery.
Her painting Untitled (Young Man Playing Ukulele) feels familiar, like a snapshot of a loved one strumming. The subject is leaning back casually, with the instrument lying on his chest. He’s focused on his left hand, as if he’s recently discovered the chords he can make. He may not even be aware of the viewer, although his hair is neatly combed and his shirt impeccable. The image is so intimate, says Wang, that “you wonder why she, as an artist who potentially was in a relationship with this person,” chose to portray him with his gaze averted, instead of looking at the artist. The scene gains further layers from its sense of mystery, and from Hayakawa’s warm tones and meticulous brushstrokes.
Despite her achievements, retracing Hayakawa’s career proved a challenge for the curator, an art historian at the University of California, Merced. Wang combed through three decades of exhibitions—from printed catalogs to newspaper reports—to piece together Hayakawa’s life as an artist.
His detective work uncovered how she had struggled to pursue her dream of a career in art. She married into a Northern California farm family in 1917, but within a few years she had left her husband, finding that farm life was incompatible with working as a painter. Wang’s speculation that she left home to pursue her artistic career fit with a family story, that Hayakawa’s father threatened to disown her if she didn’t settle down. She is missing from the family’s 1940 census record in Alameda, California, which may lend silent testimony to such a narrative. While much is unknown about her biography, it is thought that she managed to avoid wartime incarceration, instead moving on her own to New Mexico after the executive order was announced, although her parents were sent to camps in California and Utah.
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Hisako Hibi is the third featured artist. Born in Japan in 1907, Hibi followed her parents to the U.S. in 1920, landing in Seattle before settling in Los Angeles. After graduating from high school in San Francisco, she studied at the California School of Fine Arts, and in 1929 she showed work at the San Francisco Art Association’s annual exhibition.
Wang notes that Hibi’s landscapes reflect the trauma of wartime evacuation—she was incarcerated the Tanforan and Topaz camps—but, more broadly, her experience as a first-generation Japanese American (or issei) living in a new country, often without traditional family support. The way she represents places and nature in America connects her with childhood memories in rural Japan, Wang says, and “her immigrant’s journey of moving from place to place.”
Hibi used painting to make every location her own. Each landscape presents that specific place, but also grapples with the feeling of not belonging. She’s using “painting to assert and affirm her place at that location, at that time,” says Wang.
She was always searching for her individual language in art, and the complexity in her paintings became more pronounced after the war. Her painting Tanforan Assembly Center, representing the scene months after her arrival there, contrasts warm tones in the landscape with chilling gray rows of regimented dormitories. This image is further complicated by the point of view, which seems to be levitating—“painted from a floating, hovering position,” says Wang—as if lifted by the power of imagination. Hibi seemed to let herself rise to see her situation better. Wang calls that “a way to organize reality and to control the situation when they are put in such a sort of helpless environment.”
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“Pictures of Belonging” presents the work of artists Okubo, Hayakawa and Hibi in a loosely chronological way that allows visitors to follow their footsteps and track how they revisited themes and pushed boundaries again and again. It prompts questions of how they approached portraits and how that changed over time, as well as how they engaged with landscapes and the idea of place—and what they discovered along the way.
“Through sharing our bitter experiences of evacuation we may contribute something to the society,” Hibi said at an Oakland Museum exhibition in 1976.
The 1980s brought about a formal U.S. apology for interment and reparations for the people of Japanese descent who were detained in the camps during the war. In 1988, four years after the Citizen 13660 reissue won the American Book Award, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which featured the official apology and paid $20,000 to survivors.
All these years later, Seiko Buckingham sees her aunt Miné Okubo as a woman ahead of her time. She’s pleased by the growing interest in Okubo’s work—as a woman artist and as an Asian American artist. “Now,” she said on the podcast, “I realize her whole life is really incredible.”