By PETER YOON, Rafu Digital Editor
The crowd sat with quiet reverence in the Social Hall of Gardena Buddhist Church as George Takei took his place at the podium.
Though the hall was filled nearly to capacity, he focused his attention on the entering students of the Wisteria Chugakko, who had spent the last few weeks learning about the history of Japanese Americans.
“Now my true audience is here,” said Takei as the students found their seats.
“It’s a pleasure to be here with you to share something of our common history. I’m closer to it than some of you young folks here, but it’s a story that’s very important for all of us to know… By all, I mean all Americans. This is an American story.”
Takei shared his origin story in Japanese and Spanish, recounting his birth in East L.A. and the taste of his mother’s tacos and enchiladas. He spoke of the importance of language in shaping him and other Japanese Americans, but he also spoke of the tremendous impact that the incarceration had.
Takei recounted Pearl Harbor, describing the destruction and tragic loss of life to the students, some of whom had never heard of the event before. He described how that event led to the paranoia and war fervor that swept North America.
“I say North America because it affected Canadians as well … Overnight Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were looked at with suspicion and fear and outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. On the sidewalks, we were yelled at, spat at, assaulted. Our homes, our businesses, our cars were graffitied and the government got swept up in the madness as well.”
Mandatory curfews and frozen bank accounts were a preamble to what was to come. “It was devastating. Some families lost their entire life savings … and then it really got intense.”
On Feb 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
“I will never forget that terrifying early May morning,” Takei recounted. At the tender age of 5, he and his 4-year-old brother watched frozen in terror as soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets entered their home and ordered his family to leave their home at gunpoint.
He and his brother carried boxes out of his home as they waited for their mother, who came out with a duffel bag over one shoulder and his infant sister on the other arm.
“Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I will never forget the terror. It’s seared into my memory. It was the most horrible day of my life.”
They were taken to the Santa Anita Racetrack where each family was assigned a horse stall to sleep in as they waited to be sent off to the camps.
“It was still pungent with the stink of raw horse manure,” Takei remembered. “There were insects creeping along the ground and flies in the air, and very quickly my baby sister got sick, and a few days later I got sick, too. It was only my mother’s drive to survive that nursed us back to health.”
They stayed in the stalls for 4-5 months, after which they were told they would be moving again.
“I asked my father, ‘Daddy, where are we going?’ He told us we were going on a long vacation to the country by train.”
The young George was excited about the prospect of an extended vacation by train. He and his brother Henry had never ridden a train before. The young child had no clue why the women on the train were crying, nor why there were armed soldiers at each end of the train car.
The train ride took three days and the deserts of Texas gave way to forests growing out of pools of black water. Roar, roar, roar, Takei remembers the soldiers saying as they walked up and down the aisles, thinking they were trying to intimidate him and the others. Not knowing that they were announcing their arrival at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.
The camp was built parallel to the railroad tracks and soon he saw the massive groups of Japanese Americans looking at the arriving train. Rows and rows of tarpaper barracks, with sentry towers scattered throughout, were to be their new home.
“The latrine had no partitions, just a row of toilet pots on the concrete floor. The absence of privacy was unbearable and that extended to the barracks as well.”
He began school in those camps. He remembered being taught the Pledge of Allegiance and beginning each day of school with that pledge.
“‘With liberty and justice for all.’ Right outside my schoolhouse window, I could see the barbed-wire fence and guard towers. I was too young to understand the stinging irony of those words, ‘liberty and justice for all.’”
After a year of imprisonment, America suffered a manpower shortage and looked to the detained Japanese Americans, categorized as enemy aliens, to serve in the military. In order to justify the use of “enemy aliens” in the military, they issued the infamous loyalty questionaire.
Question 27 asked if incarcerees would bear arms to defend the country that had imprisoned them. “My parents answered truthfully. They didn’t want to leave their children in imprisonment to bear arms for this country.”
Question 28 asked if Japanese Americans would swear their loyalty to the United States of America and forswear their loyalty to the emperor of Japan. “The word ‘forswear’ assumes that we had an existing, inborn, racial loyalty to the emperor. If you answered truthfully, ‘No, I don’t have a loyalty to the emperor,’ that would imply that you weren’t loyal to the United States. If you answered yes, that yes meant that you were confessing to a nonexistent loyalty to the emperor.
“It was a no-win question. You lost with a no, you lost with a yes. My parents answered truthfully, and because of those two nos, they were labeled as disloyal. No-nos.”
The “no-nos” were sent to Tule Lake in Northern California to be segregated. Takei recounted three layers of barbed-wire fences, sentry towers armed with machine guns, and half a dozen tanks placed to intimidate the incarcerees.
Those who chose to “swallow the ugly taste of compromise” and answered yes to the questions were placed into a segregated military unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Used in the most harrowing battlefields, the 442nd proved their valor in battle after battle, becoming the most decorated of any military unit in U.S. history.
Post-war, the camps were thrown open and incarcerees were given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the U.S. along with $25 to begin life anew. Discrimination and war fervor-induced hatred were still going strong.
Takei recounted his after-dinner conversations with his father, who was a staunch believer in American ideals. “Our democratic ideals are noble, but the people sometimes make mistakes,” he remembered his father saying. “We as citizens have a responsibility to vote, but it’s also a people’s democracy. It is a democracy that’s participatory. The people have to take on the responsibility and engage in the process of government.”
Takei took his father’s advice to heart and spent his teen years in student government and volunteering for various political campaigns.
By the ’70s, Japanese American political efforts bore fruit. Japanese Americans had representation in the House of Representatives and Senate. This coincided with a push for recompense or “redress” for the damage done by the U.S. government towards Japanese Americans who were wrongly incarcerated. Takei himself spoke before a federal commission, urging them to make amends for that terrible mistake.
In 1982, the commission released its report, attributing the cause of the wrongful incarceration to three factors: war hysteria, racial prejudice, and the failure of political leadership. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan apologized to Japanese Americans on behalf of the citizens of the U.S. and authorized monetary restitution to those alive when the Civil Liberties Act was signed.
“I was deeply moved by that event,” said Takei. “It took a lot of time, work, and dedication by Japanese Americans working together with others fighting for the fundamental ideals of our country. America needs all of us as responsible citizens actively participating in our democracy. We are the ones that make it strong, we are the ones that make it true, we are the ones that make it a shining system.”
Photos by MICHAEL KOMAI/Rafu Shimpo