The book shifts back and forth between that naive perspective and the more complicated and painful narrative of his formerly middle-class parents’ struggle to cope with the humiliation of having their property and savings taken from them, and their basic rights and dignity stripped away. (He decided to keep that secret from the other children, for fear of disappointing them.) He digs deep into his memory to vividly re-create what it was like to be a young boy growing up in captivity, from the adolescent neighbors who slyly tricked him into uttering curse words to the guards, to the camp Christmas party at which he discovered, to his shock, that the Santa Claus wasn’t the usual roly-poly Caucasian from department stores but rather a Japanese American imposter with a padded midsection to make him seem more jolly. They ate unfamiliar, bad-tasting food, relieved themselves in rows of toilets without stalls, and built their furniture from scraps of discarded wood. Takei recounts that they endured stifling heat and rainstorms that turned the camp into a sea of mud.
But before long, soldiers herded them and other Japanese American families onto a train, for the long ride to the Rohwer Relocation Center in eastern Arkansas, where they dwelled in wooden barracks surrounded by barbed-wire fences, under the scrutiny of riflemen in a watchtower. Takei’s mother clutched his baby sister as the family was forced to board a bus that took them to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they were quartered in stables reeking of horse manure. His dad frantically hurried to dress the boys as he pleaded with the soldiers standing in the doorway of the family’s Los Angeles home for a little more time. The story begins abruptly, with 5-year-old George and younger brother Henry being awakened one morning by their father, an immigrant who built a successful dry-cleaning business. The book ingeniously uses a medium that most of us first experienced as children - comic book-style drawings, dialogue balloons and sparse, simple narration - to help readers see it all through the eyes of the child he once was. In “They Called Us Enemy,” his graphic memoir, Takei has found a powerful way to deliver his message. He seems determined to jolt the rest of us out of our apathy and make us understand.
authorities and sent to internment camps during World War II, knows all too well how that feels. After all, we can turn off the set without actually being compelled to contemplate the plight of being imprisoned at a tender age in a strange, harsh place, at the mercy of forces that we don’t really understand.īut former “Star Trek” actor George Takei, who as a child was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans rounded up from their homes by U.S. In today’s America, we’ve seen the television images of migrant children in cages so many times that it’s all too easy to develop compassion fatigue.
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