‘Star Trek’s’ Takei reflects on horrors, real and imagined

Bill Knight column for 8-8, 9 or 10, 2019

            Part of what makes horror scary is the feeling of helplessness, whether witnessing or enduring the shock and terror.

            The horrors at hand in confinement camps containing kids in caged conditions akin to kennels horrify many Americans. But detention sites for migrants actually might be worse than terrible images seared into George Takei’s memory.

            Yes, it’s happened here before.

            Takei, the 82-year-old “Star Trek” actor, activist and author, was 5 years old when his family had their home and assets seized and were forced into internment camps during World War II. Now, as the series “The Terror: Infamy” starts its 10-episode run at 8 p.m. Monday (Aug. 12), Takei – a consulting producer also featured in a supporting role) – has released a new graphic novel based on his experiences in the 1940s: “They Called Us Enemy.”

            The AMC show continues the tone of last year’s “The Terror,” only this season it’s set during World War II at internment camps, where unknowns seemingly cause bizarre deaths among imprisoned Japanese-Americans. Part ghost story and part social commentary, the show has creators and cast members who hope it inspires people’s resistance to injustice as well as entertaining audiences.

            “I know what concentration camps are,” Takei tweeted to his 10 million followers last month. “I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.”

            Takei’s gripping, tender memoir (Top Shelf Productions, 204 pp., $19.99 paperback) – co-written by Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, with black and white illustrations by Harmony Becker – recounts the confusion, dread and outrage felt by Takei, his family and their fellow prisoners. His dad, Takekuma Norman Takei, was a longtime U.S. resident and dry-cleaning businessman, and his mom, homemaker Fumiko Emily Takei, was a U.S. citizen born in Sacramento. They were a few of the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry – apart from citizenship or years living in this country – swept up after the racist Executive Order 9066, based on fear and ignorance, was signed by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and upheld by Congress and the courts.

            “They Called Us Enemy” is provocative and painful, poignant and revealing, comparable to other graphic-novel tales of history such as Civil Rights hero and U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ “March” trilogy released in 2013-2016, and to Brian Woods’ “Rebels” series about the roots of the American Revolution, published in book form in 2016 and 2018.

            Unlike the Trump administration’s policy, families such as Takei’s stayed together, even if they were housed in manure-stained horse stalls or stark, guard-towered garrisons that made military barracks seem like country clubs.

            Becker’s art is often almost as heart-wrenching as the circumstances and the dialogue that propels the plot. Takei’s mother made clothes, his father organized neighbors, and young George went to school (unlike today’s asylum-seeking kids, who have no books, beds or basic needs, from food to soap). They were relocated to a camp in sultry, rural Arkansas, then – after responding “incorrectly” to a prisoner questionnaire on loyalty – to a facility in California.

            In a cruel irony, despite a federal lawsuit (“Korematsu v. U.S.”), the executive order was never struck down until last summer, when U.S. Supreme Court John Roberts commented that it “has no place in law under the Constitution” even as – in the same ruling – the Court upheld in a 5-4 vote President Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations. In Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, she wrote, “By blindly accepting the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying ‘Korematsu’ and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”

            Recently commenting on current issues about immigration in America, Takei said, “We have reached a grotesque low. Children are being torn away from their families at our southern border … this administration is so incompetent.”

            In an emotional reflection of heated discussions challenging his father’s apparent acceptance of their incarceration, Takei remembers his dad saying, “American democracy is still the best. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Depression, and he did great things. But he was also a fallible human being, and he made a disastrous mistake that affected us calamitously. But despite all that we’ve experienced, our democracy is still the best in the world because it’s a PEOPLE’S democracy, and the people can do great things.”

            Can we do a great thing about horrors conducted in our names?