They Called Us Enemy is George Takei’s memoir of growing up in Japanese internment camps during World War II.
On December 7, 1941, as the Takei family decorates their Christmas tree, a news bulletin interrupts music on the radio. It tells listeners that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. will declare war on Japan. Mama and Daddy are worried, and rightly so—over the next few months, elected officials like California’s attorney general Earl Warren and Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron purposefully stir up anti-Japanese sentiment. They insist that all Japanese Americans are loyal to the Japanese Empire and that Japanese Americans are conspiring against the U.S. This culminates in President Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, which creates the legal framework for the internment camps.
Soldiers escort the Takei family—Mama, Daddy, George, and George’s little siblings Henry and Nancy Reiko—from their home in Los Angeles at gunpoint. The family goes first to the Santa Anita Racetrack, where they live in a horse stall. Then, a few months later, the family boards a train bound for Arkansas. Five-year-old George sees this as a grand adventure, since Mama packs a bag of sweets for them and Daddy says they’re going on vacation. George and Henry have no idea that it’s not normal to ride a train with armed guards posted on either end. For the adults, the journey is terrifying and demeaning.
At Camp Rohwer, in Arkansas, the family settles in. Mama reveals that she smuggled in her sewing machine and sets about beautifying the family’s cabin, while Daddy begins to organize the community. He soon becomes the block manager, which allows him special privileges like taking the family on a jeep ride outside the camp. George and Henry throw themselves into discovering as much as they can about their new home. They catch insects, look out for dinosaurs supposedly hiding beyond the barbed wire, and become the victims of a mean trick played by two older boys, Ford and Chevy. Though conditions in the camp are sometimes horrific, George has many happy memories of this time.
In February of 1943, with white soldiers dying in droves, the military needs more soldiers. President Roosevelt decides that Japanese Americans should be able to serve—if they can prove their loyalty. This results in interned people being required to fill out a loyalty questionnaire with a ridiculous and racist premise: that Japanese Americans aren’t real Americans and must give up loyalty to Japan before they can serve. Two loyalty questions become infamous: if people answer yes to both, they can join the military. But for those who answer no, some go to jail while others, like Mama and Daddy, are simply transferred to Camp Tule Lake, the highest security internment camp. George loves living near the mess hall at Camp Tule Lake, but the camp poses many other problems. The guards fear that internees have become radicalized, so there are often fights—both between guards and prisoners, and between prisoners themselves—and frightening middle-of-the-night arrests.
Unbeknownst to the Takei family, in the summer of 1944, one of the most damaging parts of internment begins to take shape. H.R. 4103 works through Congress and is signed into law. It gives Japanese Americans the “right” to give up their citizenship. Not long after it passes, the Supreme Court rules that the camps must shut down in six months to a year, causing panic among the internees who fear the racism they’ll experience outside the camps. To keep the family together, Mama renounces her citizenship, though it means they’ll be deported to Japan.
The following summer, internees get the news that the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war ends days later, and the government cuts services to the camps to convince people to move out. But the Takei family can’t leave because Mama renounced her citizenship. A California lawyer, Wayne Collins, represents almost 1,000 Japanese Americans who were pressured to renounce their citizenship—and he saves nearly all of them, including Mama, from deportation. After this, the family relocates to Los Angeles.
As a teenager, George becomes curious about the internment camps. After dinner most nights, he and Daddy talk about the camps. Though George is angry that Daddy didn’t protest internment, Daddy insists he did what he had to do to keep the family safe—and he shows George that protest can take many different forms. To show him one way of protesting, Daddy takes George to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign. Daddy regularly insists that American democracy is the best in the world, because it’s a people’s democracy and it can always get better.
George attends UCLA, takes several acting jobs (including ones that allow him to spread awareness of Japanese internment) and, finally, he is cast as Sulu in Star Trek. There, he’s able to show millions of TV viewers that Japanese Americans are honorable and competent. He also sits on a number of committees and speaks out about Japanese internment. Over the years, he watches the U.S. atone for internment: first by agreeing to formally apologize and pay reparations to surviving victims in 1988, and then by upgrading Japanese American veterans’ military honors to the Medal of Honor in 2000.
Unfortunately, Daddy dies before he can see any of this happen. But George notes that while he’s seen Daddy’s idealized vision of the U.S. come to life, as with the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, he’s also seen the country ignore the lessons of the past, as it did when the government separated migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. George continues to use his fame and his public standing to speak out about injustices and ensure that people don’t forget the horrors and the lessons of Japanese internment. It’s essential, he suggests, to learn from the past to avoid repeating it.
