There were so many moments in this memoir that provoked thoughts for me. I'm going to mention the highlights from my notes in this review.
Takei reveals that when he was a teenager, post-WWII, he was angry that his father hadn't organized a protest against internment instead of acceding to it and bringing his family to a succession of camps. Takekuma Takei, George Takei's Japanese born father, then proceeded to confirm his son's accusation that Japanese are too passive which is definitely a stereotype. He said "Maybe you're right." Takekuma definitely wasn't a passive man. George Takei portrays his father as an activist throughout most of his life, but he was passive in this argument with his son.
I would have defended my decision. Protesters would have been rounded up and possibly separated from their families. Five year old George Takei would still have been consigned to internment camps, but he could have grown up without his father. I feel that Takekuma Takei did the best he could for his family under the circumstances. The other observation that I'd like to make about this scene is that it's extremely honest. George Takei was showing himself being immature in his thinking, and even showing prejudice against Japanese born people.
I was interested that Takei indicated in this memoir that Earl Warren's advocacy for Japanese American internment was due to political strategy. I ran a search on the topic and discovered that it was worse than that. There's an article written by Earl Warren's law clerk in the 1970's, G. Edward White, here. White says that the entire political class just before WWII, including Earl Warren, were deeply prejudiced against Japanese Americans. It wasn't just political strategy. They all sincerely believed in racist stereotypes due to segregation. White people never met any Japanese Americans during this period. White goes on to say that this is why it's so significant that Earl Warren openly stated in his memoirs that he'd been wrong about Japanese American internment and apologized. This may seem like too little too late, but it's actually a big deal when you consider that his fellow Supreme Court liberals Hugo Black and William O. Douglas never reversed themselves on Japanese American internment and never apologized for it.
Takei mentions that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Fred Korematsu v. the United States had been overturned. Fred Korematsu was a Japanese American who resisted internment and sued the U.S. government. The Supreme Court at the time upheld the decision of the lower courts that internment was the prerogative of the U.S. military and the courts couldn't interfere. It was overturned in 1983 on the grounds of suppression of U.S. Naval Intelligence's Ringle Report which found that Japanese Americans weren't in general a danger to the United States, and that the few that were had already been incarcerated before the internment order was issued. It was the U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fahy who suppressed the Ringle Report. I hadn't heard of the Ringle Report until I did the research for this blog post today.
Takei argues that if Japanese American internment was unconstitutional, so are the current internments of refugees seeking asylum. Racism is the motivation for both.
This is an important issue for me because like many American Jews, I have a refugee in my family. My father was six years old when he fled Poland with his family between the World Wars because of the pogroms against Jews. See the article What Were Pogroms? from My Jewish Learning for the history of pogroms. I actually hadn't known that the word "pogrom" is Russian until I read this article.
They Called Us Enemy should be widely read by people of all ages. George Takei's story brings home for all of us that internment for racist reasons is a truly terrible wrong.
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