Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: An Interview with George Takei Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

On today's episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon speaks with actor George Takei about his childhood experiences with forced removal and incarcerated camp life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Very excited to have you here today because I am speaking with legendary actor George Takei. George is most famous for his role at Star Trek, but he's been in dozens of productions. And George's family was incarcerated by the United States government when he was a child. His story is fascinating and compelling, and I'm very grateful that he took the time to share it with us today. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. When you were a child, do you remember any instances of feeling that people discriminated against you or people treated you differently because your family was Japanese? Well, as a teenager, I found out about that, but I have no memory, actual genuine memory as a child from babyhood to five years old. home in East LA on Garnet Street. So we actually were living where I was born at the time when

incarceration came down. Kids are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for. And I know you were quite young when all of this began to happen, but I am curious if you can recall the first time you picked up on something was different, something was changing. Do you remember that moment? My parents were very protective of us. I was the oldest. My brother was a year younger, and my baby sister was almost a year old. And my baby sister was almost a year old.

So I had no idea about that turmoil until that scary day. I turned five years old on April 20th, 1942. And just weeks after my fifth birthday, my father came into the bedroom that I shared with my brother and dressed us hurriedly and then told Henry and me to wait in the living room while our parents did some last-minute packing in their bedroom. So we were in the living room, bored to death. So we were standing by the front window, gazing out at the neighborhood, and suddenly we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. That was shocking. They carried rifles with shiny bayonets on them.

They stomped up the porch and with their fists began banging on the front door. My father came rushing out of the bedroom, answered the door, and literally at bayonet point, they ordered us out of our home. Henry and I were terrorized. We saw the soldiers coming, stomping up the steps. And that's the first memory I have of the change that happened in our lives. What did your parents tell you in that moment that had to be, as you mentioned, it had to be terrifying for a child? What explanation did your parents give you? They just said, we're moving. They didn't explain it. And they said, a lot of other Japanese Americans are going to be moving. So we're moving with them. They simplified everything for us and sanitized everything for us. I'm sure they were trying to just protect you from being afraid and trying to normalize your

life as much as possible. And I can understand from their perspective why they might have made that choice. So when the soldiers showed up at your house and your parents said, we're moving, what happened next? Well, my father gave Henry and me a box tied with twine to carry, and he had two heavy suitcases. And we followed him out onto the driveway and we stood there waiting for our mother to come out. And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that morning. forget that morning. We were loaded onto a huge truck with other Japanese American families who were already loaded on with their luggage, driven downtown to the Buddhist temple. And we saw a lot of other Japanese American families with their luggage there on the sidewalk and a row of buses on the street. We were unloaded from the truck and boarded those buses,

and this caravan of buses drove us out to Santa Anita Racetrack in the suburban area of eastern Los Angeles. And we were unloaded, herded over to the stable area, And we were unloaded, herded over to the stable area, and each family was assigned a horse table to sleep in, pungent with the scent of stink of horse manure, insects skittering around on the ground, the air filled with flies and other insects. And they took us, three kids, into that horse stall.

As a teenager, I had many after-dinner discussions with my father, and he said that was the most painful, humiliating, degrading, the scent of that pungent smell of horse manure. the scent of that pungent smell of horse manure. And my baby sister promptly got ill. And shortly after that, I got sick as well. And for some odd reason that I can't remember, my parents took our baby sister and Henry to get medicine or fill out some documents. And so I was left alone in that horse stall and asked our neighbor lady to look in on me. And she literally did because we were separated by partitions

that came to about eye level. And the next door lady would appear over and say, Georgie, are you all right? And I would say, I'm all right. So I have those memories of Santa Anita. Henry was happy to be sleeping where the horsey slept. And actually, I kind of joined in with that, except for getting sick. It was totally opposite reaction to what our parents had. So the same experience that was so excruciatingly painful for our parents. And we thought it's going to be fun to sleep where the horsies sleep, breathe deeply, and you can smell the horsies. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Little children think it's really fun to just sleep on a floor somewhere. That

seems very adventurous to small children. But your parents knew the gravity of what was happening. Oh, I mean, they lost everything. Our home, their business, their bank account was frozen. And later on, I know that they were subjected to people yelling at them, spitting at them. My father's car had three letters painted on it, J-A-P, that racist hate word. All that we never knew about until I was a teenager and had these discussions with my father. How long were you at Santa Anita for?

About four months. We were there temporarily while the camps were being built. And then it was announced that we're going to be moving again. And I remember asking my father, or maybe, you know, I mean, things that we talked about when I was a teenager merged with, I think, what I remember. I was a teenager merged with, I think, what I remember. And my father told me that we were going for a long vacation in the country and that we would be going by train this time. And I thought it was going to be fun, a long vacation and a train ride to boot. Henry and I had never been on a train before, so that was exciting. So I remember that hope. But then the other thing is, all the grown-ups were very sober, serious, and some people were crying. And so I couldn't understand. We're going on this vacation on a train.

And so, again, that dichotomy, the environment, and what I felt. Did your parents ever discuss with you? Did they know even? No, they didn't know. They didn't know where we were going. They never found out how it was decided who went where? No. No. So after you were there for four months and your parents told you were going on a long

vacation, can you take us back to when you arrived and got on the train? What was that train journey like for you? I remember even after camp, my mother described that journey as three days and two nights, three days and two nights, you know, with that kind of train track, rocking rhythmic repetition. She said it was three days and two nights, three days and two nights. So I remember those numbers. But what I remember was the chaos at the station when we were boarded. And I thought every vacation in the country by train had soldiers, a soldier at both ends of each car. It was many, many cars long lots of soldiers, and there were soldiers on the platform telling us where to stand, and now we board.

So I thought that along the way. And the other thing I remember is when we approached a town or a village, a cowboy town, I call them, cowboy town, I call them, because it was, you know, the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and then Arkansas was our ultimate destination. And it was boring and dusty and hot. But my mother's big duffel bag was a huge source of wonderful surprises. Even my sister got her own water canteen, and that was a special treat. And getting sips of lukewarm water out of that canteen. But she also had other things like bubble gum and suckers and animal cracker boxes that we played with, and storybooks that our father read to us. She was prepared for a long journey and things to keep us occupied. But that huge duffel bag also hid something else.

I talk about it in my book, They Called Us Enemy. It looked heavy, and I tried touching it and sure enough it was heavy and so we thought it was really packed loaded with lots of candies and suckers and other goodies it turned out my mother smuggled in her new portable sewing machine. Anything with sharp edges or points and mechanical were forbidden. It was really endangering us. She wouldn't let my father carry that huge duffel bag. She was smuggling in this sewing machine because she thought the children will be needing new clothes. We're growing. I was five, just turned five.

Henry was four. And my baby sister was turning into a regular human being that wore not just gowns, but trousers and so forth. And she marched past all those guards, hefting that heavy duffel bag. Did she ever get found out about the sewing machine? No. Near the time when we were about to be released, she told. That also speaks to her mindset that she believed she was going to be gone for a long time. Yes. It was a war happening. I mean, that's not what I knew then, you know,

but they're adults and Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. It was going to be a long, painful, dangerous, some people that thought that we were going to be executed. The train stopped in the middle of a desert, I remember. And I talk about this in my book as well. And for us, it was a chance, Henry and me, to run around and throw sand at each other and all that. But when I was a teenager and having discussions with my father after dinner, he said some people thought that we were going to be slaughtered on the desert. That had to be terrifying. I'm Jenna Fisher.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio!

Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Can you tell us a little bit about the differences between the assembly centers,

like you lived in for four months at a racetrack, and the camp that you took up residence in in Arkansas? As we approached the camp, the train started to slow down. And then we saw the barbed wire fence. And then we saw hordes of masses of Japanese Americans just standing, watching the new arrivals. And I saw the sentry towers and rows and rows and rows of black tarpaulin barracks behind the masked people there. And at night, there were searchlights that followed us when we made the night run to the latrine. My mother always felt that was so invasive. Each time we had to go to the lavatory, the lights would, as if we were going to escape.

We're in the middle of a swamp. Who could escape from there and survive? But for me, I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. So again, you know, the parallel experiences, what my mother felt and what I felt, totally opposed. I've read some other firsthand accounts of some of the camps that were in Arkansas, and the people talked about the mud and the rain and the mosquitoes. And I wondered if that was your experience too. Well, this is the story I tell often. It was reclaimed swampland.

They tore down the trees and built this prison camp. All the camps, all 10 of them, were built in the most isolated places. We were dangerous to America, so they wanted to isolate us from any kind of human habitation. Can you imagine the blistering hot deserts of Arizona, New Mexico? Wyoming is a high plains. It was cold and windswept and desolate. And we were in the middle of a sultry, hot, humid swamp. And when it rained, it turned right back into a swamp. And people had to make three trips a day to the mess hall to eat. Elderly people could not make it because their legs, feet would sink. Elderly people had to be carried by young men on their backs so that they could go to the mess hall.

And my father wasn't a young man. He was an early middle-aged man. But he was always volunteering for the distribution of the cots. The blankets were being handed out. He was a volunteer. And he helped organize the crew to build a boardwalk, a narrow boardwalk, connecting every barrack in the camp to the mess hall and the other essential place people had to go to, the latrine, the intake and the alcohol. But all the barracks were connected to those two essential places.

I remember across from our barrack was a mixed race couple, a Japanese man and a white lady. a mixed race couple, a Japanese man and a white lady. Mr. Amemiya was short and skinny, and Mrs. Amemiya, they weren't married. Interracial marriages were illegal then, but our parents told us that's Mrs. Amemiya. She was tall and rather portly, and she must have felt very, very awful being the sole visible white lady, and she never went to the mess hall. Mr. Amemia went to the mess hall and got two meals and brought it back, and they ate it in their barrack unit. And she very rarely came out. And occasionally she would come out and stand in the doorway and just look around for a while,

and then go back in. So Henry and I called her the ghost lady. She was white, and she wore this kind of a house coat, and she had snow white hair. So she was our ghost lady right across from us. And whenever she came out, Henry would say, she's out. She came out. She came out. What was school like in the camps? On my first day at school, this is at Rower, Arkansas, and the classrooms were barracks divided into different units. There was an American flag at the head of the classroom. And the teacher said on the first day, I'm going to teach you the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. And we'll begin every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance.

So you are to memorize it, say it without having to refer to notes. We will all memorize it. And I remember reciting our pledge and looking out the window, I could see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower as I recited the words, with liberty and justice for all. Too innocent, too young to understand the stinging irony in those words. What was the food like? This is from what my father tells me, and I think I remember,

but I think it's more influenced by my father when I was a teenager and discussing it. He said one of the early meals at Rohwer was what he called beef brain. And he had never heard of beef brain. Most of the people had never heard of beef brain. It was kind of a glop that they had over rice. And he said that night, the latrine got a lot of business. There are, of course, many, many ways that it was so humiliating and challenging to live under those circumstances, but to not be able to control hardly any facets of your life, including what and when you will eat, had to really exacerbate that for your parents. It was all according to the schedule and the routine and the food that the camp authorities sent. When you weren't in school, how did you pass your time? Was it playing in the barracks with your brother? Was there a playground?

What did you do with your time? We were two kids from Los Angeles in this fantastical, magical world. Beyond the barbed wire fence was what they called the bayou, black water, and huge trees rose up from it. And their roots emerged out of the water and twisted and turned and went back into the water and came out and went back in like a snake. It was fascinating. And some of the bayou came under the barbed wire fence and I saw little tiny black wiggly fish that were not too fast and I could catch them with my hand and put them in a pickle jar that we got from the mess hall and watch them grow.

And it was absolutely fascinating. These black fishies, as we called them, suddenly developed bumps on their sides, and the bumps got bigger every morning and one morning the bumps had broken and what looked like legs came out and the next morning their tail fell off and they turned into frogs and crept out of my jar as they escaped. Magical things were happening. All the discoveries that we made. And the butterflies were so different and big there. And the big boys, they were like 9 or 10 years old, played tricks on us. They said, there's a magic word.

And if you say that magic word just right the guards would let you have anything in the world that you want. But you have to walk up to the sentry towers and shout out to them all the things you want and then shout out in a loud voice and very fast that magic word. And so they taught it to me. They said the word is sakana beach. Sakana means fish and beach. And so I thought, what's so magical about that?

But, you know, if they'll respond to that, I'll do it. But the big boys said, you have to say it real fast, as fast as you can, and as loud as you can, because they're going to be up there. So I started with that in mind and started walking. And as I was walking, they said to me, you better do it right, because if you don't do it right, they're going to get mad and they're going to start shooting at you. And as I approached, the soldiers came down, were down and they were smoking at the foot of the sentry tower. And so I got close, as close as I could to the barbed wire fence, and I shouted out to them the magic word, Sakana Beach, real fast. Sakana Beach! Sakana Beach! They got mad, and they bent over and started throwing pebbles at me, and I ran like a bat out of hell, grabbed Henry's hand and ran.

And the two big boys were laughing away. I asked my mother back at the barrack, what's, what does this magic word, what's the magic in it? And my mother said, sakana means fish and beach is beach. So what's magical about that? We asked our father when he came back in the evening. He was a block manager, incidentally. My father spoke Japanese and English fluently, and so he was able to communicate with the immigrant generation as well as the English-speaking American-born generation.

as well as the English-speaking American-born generation. And so he was always away from us, dealing with some uproar in the block or with the block and the camp command. And when Daddy came back, Daddy couldn't figure it out, and he kept repeating, Sakana Beach, Sakana Beach. And then he started laughing, and he explained to us, you boys are good boys. You must never use that word. It is a bad word that's meant to insult people. And you don't want to use that.

That's right. I learned later on there are a lot of magical words that the Japanese internees had for the soldiers, too. I can imagine. I can imagine. Yes. I would love to hear about, maybe you learned about this from your parents when you were a teenager. How did they feel about things like the loyalty questionnaires that were given to people who were incarcerated? Do you remember that? Well, I know about that because that was a major change

again in our incarceration experience for my parents. You know, a private conversation was impossible there. The partitions in our barrack rooms were paper thin. We could hear the whispering in the next room, and they could hear the whispering. And rumors were running rampant. In the camp, the Japanese-American community became fractured. There were people that curried favors with the guards or with the camp command. And the people in the camp called them Inu, the Japanese word for dog. They are traitors. They're snitching on us. It was a rumor-filled place. But a year into imprisonment, the government had categorized all Japanese

Americans as enemy alien, which was preposterous, you know, to begin with. No thought, no evidence of anything. We had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. But because we look like this and they could find no other way to justify imprisoning us, they made up the term enemy alien. We weren't the enemy and we certainly weren't alien. My mother was born in Sacramento. My father was born in Japan but brought over to San Francisco as a child and he was raised and educated and spoke English fluently. He was like a Japanese American and yet they Yet they categorize everyone as enemy alien. And the government realized there is a wartime manpower shortage. And here are all these young people that they could have had in military service that they had categorized as enemy alien.

How to rationally justify drafting enemy aliens out of a barbed wire prison camp for service in the United States military. Their solution was even more outrageous than the imprisonment, the incarceration itself. They came down with a loyalty questionnaire. In the chaos and confusion of wartime, many incompetents got lodged in the bureaucracy of the military and of the government. And it was clearly these incompetents that were given the assignment of drafting the loyalty questionnaire. It was about 35 questions, most of them pretty standard. What kind of work did you do? Where did you do it?

How long? There were two critical questions that they needed to have yes answers to. Otherwise, you were disloyal. Question 27 asked, Question 27 asked, are you willing to serve in the United States military on combat duty or ever ordered? For my parents, they had three very young children. My sister was a toddler by that time. I was six years old. Henry was five. They were being asked to abandon their children in barbed wire imprisonment and their arms to defend the country that's holding their children in prison. It was outrageous to demand that parents give up their children and risk their lives as soldiers.

They answered the only way they could answer, honestly and truthfully, no. Question 28 was even more egregious. It was one sentence with two conflicting ideas. It asked, will you swear your loyalty to the United States of America and forswear your loyalty to the Emperor of Japan? The word forswear presumes that there is an inborn existing racial loyalty, which is insulting.

We're Americans. We never even thought of a loyalty to the Emperor, much less actually professed to have that. So if you answered, no, I don't have a loyalty to the emperor, that no applied to the first part of the very same sentence, because they were tied together. If you wanted to answer a yes, meaning I do swear my loyalty to the United States, that yes carried over to the second part meant that you were confessing that you had a non-existent loyalty to the emperor to forswear. It was an outrageous, illiterate, stupid question. And my parents' attitude was, they're not going to be toyed with like this. You lose with a yes and you lose with a no.

It's outrageous. And they answered no to that. And with those two no's, they were put into another category called disloyal. As a child at that time, I knew nothing about this except that my parents went on long walks, just the two of them. They couldn't talk about it in our unit because it'd be heard. They went on long walks around other mother's eyes were bloodshot as if she had been crying intensely. And both their faces were very serious. And then they put on a phony smile for us.

But I do remember their return from their long walks. And as an adult, how tort that must must have been for them knowing how dangerous their situation was already in the camp and to take that bold stance of answering those questions those stupid illiterate i mean the question 28 particularly to have no way of answering that correctly and knowing the great risks that they were taking by answering those questions in the way they did. And so with those two no's, they were categorized as disloyal and we had to be moved again. Yeah, we could not fit everything into one episode. I did not want to cut anything out of George's incredible story and insight. And so I hope you will join me next time as we conclude our powerful interview with actor

George Takei. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson.

Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.