9/9/2019
By Alex Ness
THEY CALLED US ENEMY
By George Takei
With Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and Harmony Becker
Publisher: TOP SHELF
From the publisher
"A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.
They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime."
I, like most everyone else, became familiar with George Takei through the television show Star Trek. I followed that with some of his voice work on Japanese movies. I liked his work. As a person older by a couple decades I had not become attached to the members of Star Trek the Original Series unlike most of my friends, but that wasn't anything about George Takei, my aims were different, and my interests went beyond Star Trek and the various movies, however much I liked them.
The writing of this graphic novel was excellent, it was tempered but also highly emotive. As it shares memories of a tragic time in American history you'd expect some sorrow and pain, but, it is measured in what it does, and by doing so with that emotional event told without hyperbole, it plays deeply in the heart of me.
The art is particularly effective, as it shows his life and those around him with neither excessive nor repressed emotional effect. You cannot see children and growing up in a concentration camps without it relaying a message, and the art makes sure to send the message well. I give this work the highest recommendation, even if you are an arch-patriot, especially if you are, I suggest you read this, and learn the human cost of racist driven policy.
The letter grade for this A.
I found myself as a 20 something person finding my world of academia in History and International Relations to be aimed at Japan, and having other field areas such as US history, and a personal interest in Military history, I had many angles to approach Japan, America and Japan, and the cross seeding of cultures and the exchange of such. I learned in my years between starting my college degree and beginning graduate school that during the Second World War, America had created concentration camps to hold both foreign aliens, and Americans of German, Italian and Japanese descent. I hadn't learned about this going through high school, and not even for most of my undergraduate work. That could be my fault, I wasn't the best student, facts are facts. I can tell you, the moment I read that fact, I felt a need to vomit. Now, you might think here is one of those liberal crybabies. But you'd be wrong. I wasn't red, white and blue ultra patriotic, but I did have a positive view of my country. When I learned that most of the German and Italian internments followed case by case considerations, but the Japanese Internment happened for the entire of the Japanese aliens, Japanese Americans, and all of their kin in the US, it made me sick over the racism.
Researching my master's thesis which featured the internment camps I learned how it took Americans of Japanese descent years to find freedom, for crimes they had never committed. Innocent of all crimes unless the crime was being Japanese of ancestry, they couldn't help but be guilty of that. Between their commercial property and farm lands sold for pennies on the dollar in fear of losing everything, which they nearly did, and the government using various laws to kick Japanese Americans from their own homes, the Japanese Americans lost almost everything. The eventual legal challenges and destroying of the laws aimed at removal, did not mean those damaged were made whole. Recompense from various administrations barely touched 10% of losses suffered.
You might say I was the target audience for THEY CALLED US ENEMY. After all, it tells the story of George Takei and his family. Through his eyes and storytelling we see how America treated the people who'd come to her soil, lay down roots, become citizens, despite hateful anti Asian immigrant laws and volunteer to serve in the military's most decorated for valor units who fought, despite their family being held in concentration camps in the country they were fighting for. I understand that I might be one who is in the target audience, and that would be true. But in reality, the target audience should be spread very wide, because we are speaking not about immigrants coming illegally, they came to work legally and had children, those children of the first generation became citizens. Those citizens then had children, and already by the 3rd generation, use of Japanese as a language was fading. They spoke English, they were citizens who contributed to the economy of California and everywhere else they lived.
I was moved by Takei's story of a family loyal and even loving of a country that treated them with disgust and abject racism. His life as a young person in camps was his normal, but it was lived where the barbed wire was meant to keep the occupants inside, and the machine guns, said by the government to be for defense, aimed inward at those it held, not outward. Since some of the arguments used offered the idea that the Japanese were being held for their own protection, it makes one wonder who were the villains, and for what use the machine guns on the wall and sentry tower for? Other arguments that suggested that the Japanese and Japanese Americans were being held out of fear of sabotage is not a argument that can be tested. How many actions did it prevent is impossible to know, but it is equally impossible to suggest anything would have happened otherwise.
Different moments in the book that did make me cry. Not because I'm Japanese, or Japanese American, but because of outrage. I'm an American, born in the same country as each of the Nisei (children of the first generation of Japanese immigrants, called the Issei). The rights I consider innate and universal to citizenship were not given to them. As a foreign race, the Japanese, they were considered disloyal, and treacherous. I had intended this to be a dispassionate article, where I spoke only about the event and the book about it. I find now having written more than I planned that I can't do that. If you're hoping to find a balanced and fair treatment of the Internment, I'd say, it isn't possible to do so when considering the cost to those interned. As a policy it was realized too late in the war that the action of relocation and internment was one based upon paranoia and fear, blended with racism. The camps holding the Japanese Americans were located in desolate regions, and for desolate moral reasons. Those who sent the Japanese Americans into camps were even more desolate of soul. Many Americans benefited from the relocation financially, but there were even famous Americans who benefited. One famous American was Justice Warren Burger who courted power by these acts punishing the Japanese Americans, and he ended up in the Supreme Court.
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