Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: An Interview with George Takei Pt. 2

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Today on Here's Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon continues her conversation 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. So excited to have you with me today. This is the second part of our interview with legendary actor George Takei. George is best known for his role in Star Trek, but he's been in dozens of different productions. And his family was incarcerated when he was a child by the United States government. And what he has to share will change us. So let's dive into the second part of my conversation with George Takei. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. And this I remember, how torturous that 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,

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. Where were you moved to after that? Of the 10 camps, one camp in Northern California by the Oregon border, Tule Lake was selected as the segregation camp for disloyals.

And those that answered yes, yes at Tule Lake were moved out. And all the other nine camps that had people that answered no, no, were moved to that camp. And Tule Lake became the single most notorious of all 10 camps. It also became the biggest and most populous. Most camps held from about 6,000 to 11,000. Tule Lake held 18,000 people who had already been through the meat grinder of the loyalty questionnaire. So they were agitated, angry, fearful, highly stressed, outraged people. It was also the most bristling

with military armament. Tule Lake had three layers of barbed wire fences, where the other nine had just one layer. Tule Lake had machine guns installed in the sentry towers, aimed directly at the people down there, installed. The other camps had just armed guards up in the sentry towers. And the most outrageous of all, they had a half a dozen tanks patrolling the third perimeter, the third Barbarthas. Tanks are vehicles of warfare that belong on a battlefield, not intimidating and goading people that are already intensely stimulated with this visual threat. If you try to escape, you're going to be gunned down. I mean, it was an outrageous and the most shameful and stupid overreaction by the United States military.

And it was also the most fraught. The community was fractured. We were all, you know, against that kind of incarceration. But within it, there were people, young men who incidentally had, right after Pearl Harbor, had rushed to their recruitment centers to volunteer to serve in the U.S. military, like all young Americans. This act of patriotism was answered with a slap on the face. They were categorized as enemy aliens and refused military service. And these people were so angry that their attitude was,

you're going to call us the enemy? By gum, we're going to show you what kind of enemy you have to put up with. There were others who may have been loyal to the emperor, and these people became a group called Hoshidang. They were radicalized, and they became the equivalent of the Black Panthers during the civil rights movement. And they started a campaign to get the people in Tule Lake to renounce their citizenship because they said they're going to renounce their American citizenship. And they began a campaign of intimidation and threats. And my father, again, was a block manager at Tule Lake. And I can't imagine.

You know, my father really, when we had these after-dinner conversations, he never really went into detail on all that he experienced. He had to be the reasonable man. The community were broken up into factions. People who said, I used to be a loyal American, but now America treats me in this way. And he would say, calm down, calm down. But they're going to threaten these other people and get try to get them to join with them and so there were a lot of friction within the community as well as the government reaction was to get all the radicals and imprison them they built a jailhouse a concretehouse, where people who had construction experience before the war were forced to build their own jailhouse.

And there were other barracks in the same area. And that was called the stockade, where all the people who had, euphemistically put, expressed their feelings in camp and were dragged out. And I remember, this is something I still remember from my two late days. There were these Hoshidan guys, people who said they're going to be loyal to the emperor. When Japan lands on U.S. soil, they're going to rise up and join the Japanese army and join the fight. And so they want to stay fit so that they can be soldiers when Japan lands on U.S. soil. And they would jog early in the morning. And they used the Japanese cadence, washoi, washoi, washoi, as they jogged.

And I remember hearing their washoi, which woke me up early in the morning. And off in the distance, I'd hear the and as they came closer to our block, you know, getting louder as they came by and getting softer. And when they concluded their jogs, they would all rally together and make speeches and go, Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! And scatter. And then the jeeps would come roaring in with the soldiers and with their rifles.

But they scattered by that time and they'd be in the barracks. And they didn't want to pursue them because that would cause a riot. So what they did was they waited until night, and at midnight they would come and drag a young man out of a barrack. And their wives or their mothers would be saying, He's a good boy, don't take him. And I remember hearing those women's cries as well. Tule Lake was an intensely fractured camp. Tis the season for shopping, and with Rakuten,

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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. When was your family finally allowed to leave? Because they were no-nos. That was a term that, it was, no-no became a derogatory term. At the time of the loyalty questionnaire, there were others, thousands of young Japanese Americans who bit the bullet. They hated being incarcerated, and they were willing to do anything to get out. And they bit the bullet of compromise, the taste of compromise, and answered those two

offensive questions with yeses. And so, you know, they confessed essentially that they had been loyal to the emperor. Of course, that's not true, but that was the only way they could get out with their yes answers. And they were drafted and women were put into the wax. The women were put into the WACs. The men were put into a segregated, all-Japanese American unit. I'm sure you've read about and heard about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. They were sent to the battlefields of Europe where they were used like cannon fodder. They were sent into the most dangerous missions, some battles that were stalemated for months on end. And they were sent out in wave after wave after wave. And they were fiercely determined, fiercely determined to show them what they're made of.

And then they fought incredibly heroically. The first wave would go in and fought intensely, gunned down. The second wave would go and fight equally heroically and gunned down the third wave and fourth wave and fifth wave. The 442nd sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit in the Second World War. And when the war ended, they came back as the single most decorated unit,

the 442nd Regiment of Combat Team in the military history of the United States. They were welcomed back on the White House lawn by President Harry Truman, who said to them, you fought not only the enemy, but prejudice, and you won. It's an amazing story. Tule Lake and the heroism and the sacrifice and the incredible courage and sacrifice that they made, as well as the courage and sacrifice that the Hoshidan made. I mean, two sides of the same coin, the radicalized Hoshidan in Tule Lake and the incredible heroism

under all that racism. I mean, the highest combat casualty rate because there were all Japanese Americans fighting in the most dangerous missions of the war. And so your question was, how long were we there? We were released in February of 1946. And as others were released earlier, everything went by rumors and whispered confidences. It's dangerous out there. White people coming to visit us were shot at by the rednecks. And so we knew it was dangerous. All that the government gave us was opening the gates, giving us a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States, plus $25. We were impoverished.

We had nothing. The government had taken everything. $25 to begin anew in a hostile America. It was right after the war. Right. My parents decided to go back to Los Angeles. Housing was impossible. Jobs were next to impossible.

My father's first job was as a dishwasher in a Chinatown restaurant. Only other Asians would hire us. Our first home was on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and to us the camps were horrific but never was it as smelly human excrements everywhere on the street, in the hallways, wherever we went. And we were walking down the sidewalk and a derelict glaring at us came staggering at us. And we were terrified. We thought we were going to be attacked.

We stopped. And then he collapsed right in front of us and barfed. And my baby sister, who was, what, four or five by then, she yelled to my mother, Mama, let's go back home. Her whole life was behind barbed wire fence. To her, that was home, To her, that was home because that was better than being freed. Freed in that cesspool. It was horrific. But because my father had served as block manager, which is something of a leadership position, calming people down, relaying the command's orders at the missile.

The war was over. He was no longer a block manager. And yet the people came to him for advice and assistance. And so he worked part of the day as a dishwasher. And in downtown Los Angeles, there's a section called Little Tokyo for the Japanese American community. And he opened up an employment office. And the only kind of jobs that he could find for other Japanese Americans in that climate climate was as dishwashers or janitors or gardeners which paid a pittance and he knew their circumstances and he didn't have the heart to charge them the fee but my mother was angry she said we have to eat too and so after a couple of months with his employment assistance job, he found a dry cleaning shop in East LA, my birthplace of Los Angeles, and we moved out of Skid Row. But the end of the war was not the end for us.

It continued on and on for a long time. And my parents are my personal heroes because of their strength of character, as well as physical strength and their perseverance and their resilience and the determination to give their three children a decent life. And all three of us got good college educations and good universities in this country. What is your hope for people who are listening to this today? hope for people who are listening to this today. What do you hope they take away from learning about Japanese American incarceration, from listening to your story? What is your hope? Our democracy has ideals that are precious, noble ideals, equal justice, rule of law, due process.

But as precious as these ideals are, they're very fragile. Lincoln said, and my father used to quote that to me often in during our after dinner conversations. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our democracy is a people's democracy. Which means that the citizens have a responsibility as well as the benefits of those ideals. We have a job. My father said President Roosevelt was a great

president in the 30s when the country was plunged into a horrific economic depression. Their spirits were completely broken. He had to galvanize them to bring the economy back up, to give them the motivation to say, yes, it can happen. We can be working again. America can be a Greek country again. And he told them, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. Those are the words of a great leader. But he said, Roosevelt himself became fearful after Pearl Harbor, because that was a surprise attack. We weren't prepared. And Roosevelt realized he had all

of the West Coast open and vulnerable, and he became fearful. And the hysteria in the country was there to just sweep him up in that hysteria. And a great man like Roosevelt is also an imperfect human being. He's a human being. And he got swept up. And that's why this story of the interment is a very relevant story to our times today. A great man is still a human being with all of the potential imperfections that we as humans have. But if a mass of people are aware of that, and we are making progress in inches, there were a few people.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the great civil rights organization, as a national organization, took a neutral stand on such a critical issue as equal justice, because they were Roosevelt people. Only one chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union took a stand. That was the San Francisco chapter. And their attorney, Wayne Collins, Cisco chapter. And their attorney, Wayne Collins, is a personal hero of mine. He had not only the passion for our Constitution, but also the guts to stand against a sea of people. Even an organization like the Japanese American Citizens League, which is the Japanese American Community's ACLU,

during the war got co-opted. They became complicit with the government. And Wayne Collins hated the JACL for their weaseliness. He was an outspoken but passionate Irishman who loved the Constitution and had the guts to touch cases that no attorney in this country, not with a 10-foot pole, 20-foot pole, would touch. He took on the cases of the men who challenged the internment all the way to the Supreme Court and failed in 1944. way to the Supreme Court and failed in 1944. The Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu Yasui Hirabayashi. During the middle of the war, the Supreme Court ruled against the challenge to an

unconstitutional act by the country and signed by the President of the United States. country and signed by the President of the United States. It's a great country with noble ideals, but precariously there as our ideal, because we imperfect human beings are fallible. And that's why what you're doing, educating people to understand both the nobility of our ideals, our democracy, and how easily it can be challenged. And it's happening to us right now. This election, and we're speaking right before the midterm elections, And in Georgia, they are voting already. So our democracy is as noble as those words are, but as fragile as we are imperfect. I love that. I love that. I endorse all of your remarks. And I would love for you to tell people about your books so that they can read more about your experience and share it with people they know, share it with their children. which was published in 1994, titled To the Stars. But on the cover, you will see me in the Starfleet uniform looking up to the stars. I shamelessly wrote on the coattails of Star Trek.

But that is a part of my biography. That is. And so I use that as the bait. But the first third is about my childhood incarceration. And so, I wrote about that in To the Stars. The next book on the internment is called They Called Us Enemy. And I did that as a graphic memoir, or in other words, a comic book. As a teenager, I loved comic books. And I thought, this is a way to reach that demographic.

And next year, in 2023, I have a children's picture book coming out, tentatively titled Growing Up Behind Barbed Wire Pants, aimed at daddy and mommy and their kids. I've ordered your graphic novel for my children who love graphic novels. That's their favorite type of book to read. So I think you were absolutely right on the nose with choosing that format. It's inherently just interesting to keep that in check. Absolutely is. It became a bestseller. So keep on talking about it and keep me on the bestseller list for a few more months. That's right.

Yes. I'm so grateful for your time today. This has been incredibly useful. This has been just moving and I'm absolutely just thrilled to be able to speak with you. And I'm really grateful to be able to bring your story to even more people. Thank you. And I thank you because you are the person who are reaching out to that demographic that I think is so important for the future of America. And the future is happening right now. It absolutely is. What we do now matters. What we do now matters not just for today, but it matters for our descendants. It matters for the future

of America. And we can't forget that. And I'm really grateful for you. Thank you so much. As we say on Star Trek, live long and prosper. Isn't George's story incredible? I'm so grateful for his time. I'm so grateful to be able to learn from him. And I hope you'll join us next time for our final episode in our documentary series, Resilience, as we tackle all of your remaining questions. People have been texting them in, leaving voicemails for me, and we are going to answer as many as we can. So we'll see you again soon. 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. Thank you.