THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The American met George Takei (famous as Lieutenant Sulu from Star Trek) in the penthouse suite of the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hampshire Hotel in London’s Leicester Square, to talk about the truth behind George’s startling show, Allegiance.
In 1942, following the Pearl Harbor attack, more than 125,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly incarcerated in concentration camps in the west coast states of the USA. In this extract from an hour-long interview George describes how the horrific ordeal began.
It was racism that got us put in prison. Our imprisonment was based on a lie. They suspected us of a being spies, saboteurs, Fifth Columnists, and they had no proof, no evidence.
The Attorney General of California at that time was Earl Warren, who later went on to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was an ambitious man. He had his eyes on the Governor’s seat and he needed a hot issue to run on. California, the whole United States, was aswirl with hate toward American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Now, my mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was born in Japan but his mother passed when he was a boy so my grandfather decided to start life anew in America and he brought his two sons. My father was the younger of the two, nine years old I think. He was reared and educated and went to college in San Francisco. He spoke English as fluently as he spoke Japanese. He was an American to all rights and purposes. We were Americans. But because we looked like this the country went hysterical.
Earl Warren, made an amazing statement. He said, ‘We have no reports of spying, or sabotage, or fifth column activities by Japanese Americans. And that is ominous. Because the Japanese are inscrutable.’ That racist stereotype. ‘And because they're inscrutable, we can't tell what they're thinking. And so it would be, as a preventative, prudent of us to lock them up before they do anything.’
Lock them up before they do anything! For this attorney general, the absence of evidence was the evidence. He ran on that and eventually became governor, but that speech swirled all through the country and ended up at the White House. Influenced by that kind of campaign, coming from the West Coast, the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be summarily rounded up with no charge, no trial, no due process, and imprisoned in ten prison camps. Soldiers rushed into orphanages and rounded up parentless Japanese American children. Some were biracial - women had affairs and their child would not be accepted by either society, Japanese American or the larger American community. What threat were these children with no parents to the United States government? They were rounded up and put into Manzanar, one of the camps in California. It was mass hysteria on a governmental level.
My family was rounded up but they didn't have the camps built yet. We were temporarily housed in the horse stalls of Santa Anita racetrack. Can you imagine going from a home with a front yard and a back yard to be forced to sleep with your very young children in a stinking horse stall. The stench of raw horse manure, insects skittering around on the ground and flies buzzing around you. I’d just turned five, my brother was four and our baby sister was an infant. She promptly got sick and couple of days later I did too. The degradation and the humiliation for my parents...
We were there for a few months while all the camps were being built, then we were put on a train for a three day, two night journey across the southwestern desert. On the third day we started seeing black, muddy water with trees rising up from it, their roots coming up, twisting and going back in like a snake. And then we saw the barbed wire fence.
They built the prison camp parallel to the railroad track. Then we saw masses of Japanese American people just standing there, staring at us, the new arrivals. Behind them I saw rows and rows of black tarpaper barracks and sentry towers with stern looking soldiers staring down…
To find out a lot more about George’s family’s imprisonment, his musical Allegiance, his love of Britain and the best thing about being George Takei, subscribe to The American magazine here
For tickets and information for Allegiance go to www.allegiancemusical.com
