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• 1 media/Jankee Title Graphic (2).jpg 2020-07-02T19:54:50-07:00 Bennie Nobori's "Jankee" 16 The Comic Strip of the Topaz Times image_header 2021-01-17T10:11:51-08:00 In what can at times be a rather dry and monotonous publication, one regular in the pages of the Topaz Times was always mining for laughs: Bennie Nobori's "Jankee." The young boy invited sympathetic readers to chuckle at the boy's various stumbles through camp life. Though humorous and innocent on the surface, Nobori used the Jankee comic strips as cover for leveraging critiques against the Topaz administration and the incarceration program more generally. 
  
  Take the first issue of Jankee, for example:
  
  
  
  Jankee first arrives at Topaz and is taken to his assigned barracks. In the next panel, looking around his barren quarters, a shrugging Jankee offers only two words: “No Furniture.” Later, as the young boy walks around camp, he passes by a stack of lumber, scans his surroundings for any sign of camp guards, and pilfers a plank from the pile. Jankee then begins to flee the scene, panicking at the sound of the safety warden’s yells ringing out behind him, before he falls unceremoniously into a ditch [See Figure1.6]. It is all too easy to miss the representativeness of Jankee’s memorable, yet ultimately futile mission to secure wood. But the opening episode in Jankee’s saga in fact reflects common practices in the early months of Topaz and may have even referenced an encounter which took place between a high school Nisei and a security warden, recalled in an oral history interview some 50 years later. 
  
  In the memoirs and testimonies of incarceree survivors one finds many references to the sheer emptiness of the camp “apartments” awaiting new arrivals to Topaz and  the communal project of crafting more dignified living spaces. In Citizen 13660, for example, Okubo recalled:
  Comfort was uppermost in the minds of the people. All were on the lookout for building material for partitions and furniture. Lumber and sheet-rock boards were scarce and well guarded, but since building material was not furnished to the residents as promised, they became desperate. With the passing of time and the coming of cold weather, stealing no longer became a crime but an act of necessity. 
  
  Recollecting her father's camp job as a carpenter, Tamiko Honda said, “We did not have the inner wall, we just had it tarpapered, framework on the outside, and it was getting very, very cold … they installed the sheet rock in all the barracks before they froze to death. But that was his carpenter job.” For incarcerees like Honda’s father hired by the WRA - often as amateurs - to labor on camp infrastructure and construction projects, the work provided access to building materials that could be used to furnish one’s own barracks and craft other items for oneself and one’s family. In addition to making a chest of drawers and an Adirondack chair for himself, for example, Honda’s father also made a sewing box for his wife which has continued to pass down through the Honda family. Those not lucky enough to enjoy such avenues of legitimate access to the wood piles were forced to fend for themselves. 
  
  The first “Jankee” strip was printed following multiple published pleas from the administration for incarcerees not to steal planks from the lumber piles, along with many empty reassurances that plenty of wood would be provided to all.  “Since sufficient wood is available,” one such article chided newcomers, “there will be no necessity for hoarding or nocturnal commando raids.” But the administration’s directives failed to change what had, by late October, 1942,  become popular practice. Eventually, the administration resorted to posting guards to keep watch over the wood stashes. “The precious scrap-lumber piles were guarded night and day,” Okubo commented wryly, “but in the zero weather the guards burned up most of it in order to keep themselves warm.” 
  
  
  Jankee’s decision to ignore the administration’s warnings and raid the piles anyway brought  him to the brink of confrontation with a member of camp security and led to personal injury when he fell into the ditch. From one perspective, Jankee’s comical failure seems a lighthearted cautionary tale for incarcerees with a clear message: Do not take wood from the piles, or you might get hurt. But from another angle, the comic can be read as Nobori’s contemporary witness testimony to very real events which unfolded in the camp. In a 1990 questionnaire sent by Akiko J. Tohmatsu to several former high-school aged Nisei from Topaz, she asked: “Do you recall any interesting stories regarding Topaz  Relocation Center?” Joe Suyetomo’s answer reconstructed a dramatic scene from one of his own commando raids, stating: “I was almost shot while trying to pilfer lumber for personal use.” 
  
  Reproduced below are all editions of the Jankee comic strip: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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