TOKYO (AP) – The incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including children, labelled enemies during World War II is an historical experience that has traumatised, and galvanised, the Japanese American community over the decades.
For George Takei, who portrayed Hikaru Sulu aboard the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek franchise, it’s a story he is determined to keep telling every opportunity he has.
“I consider it my mission in life to educate Americans on this chapter of American history,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. He fears the lesson about the failure of US democracy hasn’t really been learned, even today, including among Japanese Americans.
“The shame of internment is the government’s. They’re the ones that did something unjust, cruel and inhuman. But so often the victims of the government actions take on the shame themselves,” he said.
Takei, 87, has a new picture book out for children ages six to nine and their parents, called My Lost Freedom. It’s illustrated in soft watercolours by Michelle Lee.
Takei was four years old when President Franklin D Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, declaring anyone of Japanese descent an enemy of the United States and forcibly removing them from their West Coast homes.
Takei spent the next three years behind barbed wires, guarded by soldiers with guns, in three camps: the Santa Anita racetrack, which stunk of manure; Camp Rohwer in a marshland; and, from 1943, Tule Lake, a high-security segregation center for the “disloyal”.
“We were seen as different from other Americans. This was unfair. We were Americans, who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Yet we were imprisoned behind barbed wires,” Takei wrote in the book.
Throughout it all, his parents are portrayed as enduring the hardships with a quiet dignity. His mother sewed clothes for the children. They made chairs out of scrap lumber. They played baseball. They danced to Benny Goodman.
For Christmas, they got a Santa who looked Japanese.
Takei’s is a remarkable story of resilience and a pursuit of justice, repeated throughout the Japanese American experience.
It’s a story that’s been told and retold, in books like the 1973 Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston; Only What We Could Carry, edited by Lawson Fusao Inada more than 20 years ago; and The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, which just came out, compiled by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung.
Executive director David Inoue of the Japanese American Citizens League, headquartered in Washington DC, believes the message of Takei’s book remains relevant. He said discrimination persists today, as seen in the anti-Asian attacks that flared with the COVID-19 pandemic. Inoue said his son has been taunted in school in the same way he was growing up.
“One of the important things about having books like this is that it humanises us. It tells stories about us that show we’re just like any other family. We like to play baseball. We have pets,” Inoue said.
Takei and his family were sent to Tule Lake in northern California because his parents answered “No” to key questions in a so-called loyalty questionnaire.
Question number 27 asked if they were willing to serve in the US armed forces.
Question number 28 asked whether they swore allegiance to the US and would forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Both were controversial questions for people who had been stripped of their basic civil rights and labelled enemies.
