At one camp, another boy tells him the barbed wire is there to keep dinosaurs out. "I saw people crying and couldn't understand why," he remembers. When everyone is forced to wear tags - "to keep track of us, like cattle" - he thinks it's just another train ticket. That's the first of numerous occasions when young George's innocence protects him. Now we were crammed into a single, smelly horse stall." "They had worked so hard to buy a two-bedroom house and raise a family. "It was a devastating blow," Takei writes. At one point they're forced to sleep in horses' stalls, but George views this as an adventure: "We get to sleep where the horses slept! Fun!" For his parents, of course, it's no such thing. Allowed to keep only what they can carry, Takei's parents must sell off their belongings for next to nothing. It's spring of 1942 when Takei's family is first taken from their Los Angeles home. His outlook provides a striking contrast to government officials' stale attempts to explain, excuse and ultimately seek forgiveness for the evil they've done.īecker also helps dramatize the contrast between George's and his parents' experiences of their ordeal. Even as the Takeis are wrenched from their home, transported hundreds of miles and forced to live in camps, young George's openness and curiosity are unflagging. It's young George's point of view that shapes the story, imbuing it with childlike energy. The very structure of Takei's narrative underlines this fact more than a political speech ever could. What the government did to Takei and some 120,000 other Japanese Americans can't be undone, no matter how many speeches public officials deliver or how many checks they send. But no matter how polished his words - or how many zeros on the restitution check Takei receives in 1991 - such attempts at official remorse ring hollow. "Here we admit a wrong: Here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under law," President Reagan is shown saying in 1988. government's tardy attempts to establish a sense of collective shame about America's wartime internment of Japanese Americans. This irony becomes most evident at the conclusion of Takei's book, where he depicts the U.S. "It should rest on the perpetrators, but they don't carry it the way the victims do." "Shame is a cruel thing," writes George Takei in They Called Us Enemy, his new graphic novel about his childhood years in an American concentration camp during World War II. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title They Called Us Enemy Author George Takei, Justin Eisinger, et al
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