By Audrey Fong
Actor George Takei is most famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, the helmsman of the starship USS Enterprise, on the television series “Star Trek” and in its many films. He is also known today for his activism and liberal politics. But what is less publicized is that he was one of over 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. For four years, Takei was shuffled around horse racing tracks and incarceration camps with his parents and two younger siblings, locked away like a criminal. Takei details his experience at these camps, his career as an actor and activist, and the U.S. history surrounding his life in his graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy. His memoir became a New York Times bestseller and in 2021, the U.S. air force handed it out to cadets as part of a new reading initiative. Takei’s graphic memoir serves as a critical history of Japanese American incarceration and its enduring impact.
Intermixed with historical facts about what led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans and about the aftermath of executive order 9066, the graphic memoir is told from the point of view of Takei, starting as a child and ending in the present day. Choosing to depict how these years of incarceration have affected his life and dedication to activism is one of many ways Takei illustrates the long-lasting impact of incarceration on the Japanese American community. While some may argue that the Japanese American community needs to “get over” what happened to them because it happened decades ago, Takei serves as living proof that there are still many people alive today, who experienced the camps. Additionally, the graphic memoir is dotted with Los Angeles landmarks that exist to this day such as the El Rey Theater and the Los Angele City Hall Building, where Takei’s parents married, to connect the past to present day, bridging the distance of time one may feel between WWII and today.
Even though much of the graphic memoir is told from an innocent, often optimistic, and idealistic point of view, reflecting Takei’s childlike innocence at the time, Takei is quick to point out that even if he originally looked at the displacement as an adventure, he now understands fully how inhuman and unjust incarceration was. As an adult, he continues to live with residual anger and trauma over what happened to his family and the Japanese American community. Some of the effects were immediately felt by Japanese Americans such as when “the financial assets, property, and business of nearly all Japanese Americans were seized” and how many Japanese Americans were forced to sell their “property for a fraction of its worth.” This financial impact hurt them immediately, displacing them from their familial homes and tearing them away from their sources of income. Individually, these losses were crippling and collectively, the United Press International estimates the Japanese American community’s financial losses to be about $6.2 billion. For Takei’s family alone, they went from living in a single-family home before the war to living in decrepit camps during the war and staying in seedy hotels and moving to a less affluent neighborhood after the war, illustrating his family’s own loss of financial comfort due to the war and incarceration.
This loss of financial status did not just hurt Japanese Americans’ financially, but also led to continued feelings of shame even after the war. Takei puts it simply, explaining, “For my parents, it was a devastating blow. They had worked so hard to buy a two-bedroom house and raise a family in Los Angeles…now we were crammed into a single, smelly horse stall. It was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience.” The feelings of indignity and mental trauma extend past their housing situation to how they were treated on the way to camp and at camp.
As if being labeled an enemy and being taken away from their home weren’t bad enough, Takei’s family was also “loaded onto trains headed east, but not before being ‘tagged’ to keep track of us like cattle. To my parents, it was yet another dehumanizing act” and in the trains, “there were guards stationed at both ends of each car as if we were criminals.” Both being labeled enemy and being treated as cattle were degrading experiences that Takei’s parents would go on to remember for the rest of their lives. After leaving the camp, Takei explains that these feelings of shame continued for many. Towards the end of the memoir, he writes that “most Japanese Americans from my parents’ generation didn’t like to talk about the internment with their children. As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by the shame for something that wasn’t their fault.” Shame is something hard to measure numerically and it is often dismissed in a society that doesn’t place as strong an emphasis on mental health as it does on physical health. However, it weighs heavily on the victims, and as They Called Us Enemy illustrates, it lingers on in the minds of those incarcerated. Scholar May Ann Takemoto’s work on Asian American mental health, especially of Japanese Americans who went through WWII and incarceration, is just one example of the real-life, long-lasting impact of incarceration.
On top of the financial struggles and mental anguish Japanese Americans faced due to incarceration, Takei also highlights a less obvious impact on the Japanese American community and that is the loss of community. According to California Japantowns, there were 43 Japantowns in California pre-WWII. Now, there are only three left in the state in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. The three that do remain are now much smaller than they were pre-WWII with the National Park Service reporting that only a third of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo community returned after the war. The disintegration and shrinkage of Japanese American communities on the West Coast were caused by a multitude of reasons with most relating directly back to WWII. The one Takei focuses on though is fear. One of the last families left in camp, Takei’s father returned to Los Angeles before the rest of the family to determine if it was safe for them to return. Despite the war ending and the incarceration of Japanese Americans being deemed unconstitutional, anti-Japanese discrimination was still rampant with some houses and businesses putting up anti-Japanese signs, such as one that read, “Japs keep moving this is a white man’s neighborhood.” Even though Takei’s family ultimately ended up returning to Los Angeles, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans didn’t. Thus, the disintegration and shrinkage of Japanese American neighborhoods along the West Coast.
This is a long-lasting effect of the war whose impact is hard to measure. Would Japanese Americans have continued living in ethnic neighborhoods? Or would they have moved out to the suburbs the way Chinese Americans left Chinatowns and entered different non-Chinatown specific professions? It’s hard to tell, but what Takei is showing is that the immediate effects of anti-Japanese sentiment, the loss of their property, and years spent in camp resulted in a shattered Japanese American community and precipitated the loss of Japanese American neighborhoods. And for anyone who is part of a community whether it’s based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, college attended, shared hobby, religion, or something else, one can easily understand how damaging the loss of that community is to one’s sense of belonging and morale.
Told by a beloved actor from a massively popular TV show, They Called Us Enemy makes a difficult time in history more easily digestible for those unfamiliar with the period and for those who may have initially supported the segregation of Japanese Americans because who doesn’t love Takei and “Star Trek”? But within these pages covered in cute cartoons of a wide-eyed child Takei and his relatable childhood anecdotes (such as when his mom saved him candy for the train ride to camp and his first time experiencing snow) is a terrible history about the disruption and oppression of an innocent ethnic group. Takei shows us the long-lasting impact of this period in history and how it has continued to affect not just those who experienced it, but the Japanese American community as a whole. He shows that he is unwilling to stay silent on this breach of the U.S.’s ideals and begs the U.S. to do better in the future. As one of the founders of the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, Takei has proven his commitment to keeping the memories and the history of this time period alive and accessible to the public. His work is critical not just to illustrate how the U.S. failed its people during the war, but also as a lesson for future generations that we must not discriminate based on ethnicity or lock up innocent individuals.
They Called Us Enemy is available from Barnes and Noble, Eastwind Books, the Japanese American National Museum, Kinokuniya, The Last Bookstore, and Powell’s City of Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.