They Called Us Enemy

They Called Us Enemy 
by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott 

Years later, the trauma of those experiences continued to haunt me. 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 shame...for something that wasn't their fault.

Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators...but they don't carry it the way the victims do.

One of my favorite lines from George Takei's story of his childhood, told with help from cowriters Eisinger and Scott, and artist Becker. He was 4 years old when the US entered World War II, so his childhood is intertwined with the slew of US legislation and the nationalistic racism that informed those bills. The biggest one of all, Executive Order 9066, was the one that rounded up people of Japanese descent living in America, displacing them from their homes and relocated them to various camps in the country. Part memoir, part history lesson.

Another example: after barring any Japanese from serving in the United States military, president Roosevelt introduced new legislation later in the war due to a need for soldiers. Instead of barring Japanese, they introduced a survey designed to interrogate the loyalties of the families interned in the United States, for the purposes of drafting the very people being interned:

I know, what a bummer. But what stood out to me was the optimism in the graphic novel. As a kid, George didn't know any better. He thought it was normal to be gathered into a train and transported with guards at the end of each car. When he asked his dad what was going on, his dad told him they were going on a vacation, and he believed him. He just thought that all children had to play within the confines of a barbed-wire fence.

It's this optimism, as naïve as it was, that informs his worldview on America. We get glimpses on how George grew up, from his anger as a teenager to learning ("re"-learning) what the camps were like. On how he started participating in civil protests and volunteering in political campaigns. How he first broke into the theatre, and then into TV, and then into the modern world of conventions and social media. He looks back at it as an opportunity for growth. As long as it took, the country that wronged him and his family did make reparations.

There's another scene, where George Takei is volunteering for the presidential campaign for Adlai Stevenson. At the campaign headquarters, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt makes a visit with much pomp, and while George as an adult is absolutely ecstatic to meet this person, his dad feels sick and has to step away. It wasn't until later that George realized...his dad couldn't shake hands with the woman whose husband imprisoned his family. Contrast this to how George reflects on a different visit to the home of FDR:

It was a disastrous depression that Roosevelt pulled us out of.

It took that man, and his determination, and creative energy to establish all those programs, and lift the fortunes of our great country.

But as we were driving here today, I thought, 'I'm going to the home of the man who imprisoned me.'

And now I'm here in his home...only in America could that happen.

Both of their reactions are okay of course. They both lived through internment, but they lived through it differently, and he couldn't have had the experience that he had without his father. It was his father who protected his childhood innocence and naïve optimism in a time of great trauma and because of that, George is able to take that pain of internment and transform it into social change and hope. We could all use a little bit of that naïve optimism today.

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