History Daily - Saturday Matinee: History For The Reckoning

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

On today’s Saturday Matinee, famed actor, author, speaker, and activist George Takei takes us through his family's story of being incarcerated during WWII, simply for being Japanese. Link to History For The Reckoning: https://www.historyforthereckoning.com/2531545 Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.

Hey, therelhan there's Vanhoja Juamatuttuia Marlins. Eh, I don't know because I'm

never ever so I'm not newtos juomia yeah ha no, now what's you're up so much

so much S-market Tieter Elamon Rokka S-Market In my new live show

and check out Historydaily Live.com for upcoming dates I discuss an early period of

American history after the revolution but before the writing of the Constitution and this

was a fraught time the nation was just a newborn, and there were real crises, both foreign and domestic, that threatened the country. Had the wind blown a different way, maybe the United States would have been a failed experiment. Because at the time, the American government we had failed in two aspects. It did not provide the robust, centralized power and authority it needed to respond adequately to threats, and it did not provide the robust, enshrined individual liberties it needed to prevent that centralized power from sliding into tyranny.

That has always been attention in America. We want to secure our citizens' life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, but need a powerful governmental structure to do it, a government authorized to deprive life, liberty, and happiness. The line between protecting the public and subjecting the public can be blurry, and we've made mistakes. One of the most unfortunate was the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. And on today's Saturday matinee, we're bringing you an episode from the new podcast, History for the Reckons. with actor and activist George Tuchai telling his own family story

of this dreadful period. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow history for the reckoning. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. Herel, herelain, there's been

very much. Eh, hey, no, who you then are, we're all rightus-juomia. Yeah, ha. Well, what do you're doing? Well, S-Market, Tiette.

Elam is rawca. S-market. History for the Reckoning, a podcast that dives deep into the history that's hard to hear, but critical to understand. Season 1, American Concentration Camps, the story of World War II Japanese incarceration. Welcome to the prologue. I'm your host, Spencer Ford. Over this season of History for the Reckoning, we're going to do a deep dive with lots of facts and historical details about the incarceration of America's West Coast Japanese during World War II. But it's more than just dates and facts. These things happen to real people with feelings

and lives and families and stories. And no one is better equipped to share one family's story than someone who was there. Telling his and his family story, I'm honored to be joined today by George to Kay. George has spent decades in the public eye as a performer on stage, screen, and film, and such culture-defining works as the original Star Trek.

He's also worked tirelessly as an activist, speaker, and even an author. I invite our listeners to pick up his graphic novel. They called us Enemy, that digs even deeper into his family's story. George, thank you so much for joining me today. As my first question, how did your parents end up in L.A.? My maternal grandparents in the 1890s came to the Sacramento area,

and he ran these big farms, and my mother was born there. However, the rural California in those days was not too different from the American South, the racism there. And so all Asian and Latino children had to go

to a separate school. The white children went to another school. My grandparents didn't like that. So they sent all seven, would you believe, of their children, to Japan to be educated.

And my mother was sent to Japan to be a proper Japanese lady. So she was bilingual, more comfortable in Japanese. She went to Los Angeles after coming back to build a career. My father was born in Japan in a perfecture called Yamonashi at the foot of Mount Fuji. And when he was five years old, He lost his mother. She passed. My grandfather, he decided to immigrate to America with his two boys. My father was raised and educated in San Francisco.

But he also decided to come to Los Angeles and opened a high-end dry cleanies shop. And he knew Mr. Komai, the publisher. of the Rolfi Shinto. And he introduced them. And that's how my parents got married. And that's where I made my debut in Los Angeles. You're a performer at all times. That's true.

The next born was my brother Henry. And the last born, my father desperately wanted a girl. Oh. And he got his wish with a third baby. She is Nancy Reiko. Tell me about December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. What was your family's experience that day? I was four years old, and I have absolutely no memory.

But I do have, I turned five in April of 1942. Okay. And overwhelming, unforgettable memory I have happened the month after my. fifth birthday. My father came into the bedroom that I shared with my brother, Henry, and he dressed us to serve me and told us to play in the living room while he and our mother did some last-minute packing. My baby sister was in their bedroom in a crib. And so Henry and I went to the living room. There's nothing to do. So we were standing by the front window, just gazing out at the neighborhood.

And suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. They carried rifles with shiny bayonets on them. They stomped up the front porch and with their fists began pounding on the door. Henry and I were terrified, paralyzed. My father came rushing out and answered the day. door and the soldier said, get your family out of this house. And Henry and I stand right beside him. And my father said, we'll be ready in a few minutes. We're still doing some last minute packing. And the other soldier who was in talking brought his rifle up to my father.

her. We were, we turned to ice, Henry and I. And my father said, five minutes. And the other soldiers said, when it was talking, said, five minutes. Okay. And so he went back. But the guy, his rifle, came into our house, followed my father down the hallway and stood over my parents. And Henry and I stood there with a staring at that soldier, the one that I was talking, just terrorized. And shortly thereafter my father came, carrying two large suitcases and little boxes under his arm. And he put the suitcase down and gave both me and Henry about the same size box. He said, those are underwear and socks.

you carry them and you follow me and picked up the suitcase and the soldier ordered him to go out onto the driveway and wait. And the other soldier who followed him to the bedroom came out and my father and Henry and I were just standing there. And then my mother came out and she was scaring our baby sister. and this huge, heavy duffel bag and tears was screaming down her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that morning. It's seared into my memory. But that's how the Second World War began for us. There was a huge truck with other Japanese-American families packed on with their luggage.

and we were driven downtown to Little Tokyo, to the Buddhist temple. There was a row of buses there at the curb, and on the sidewalk was packed with other Japanese-American families with their luggage, looking very forlorn. And so we were unloaded, and we were loaded to the buses, and that caravan of buses, took us to Anaheim, where the Santa Needs racetrack is. We would unloaded from the buses and herded by, and there were other soldiers there now. There was a whole different scene. And these soldiers herded us over to the stable area.

And each family was assigned a horse stall to sleep in. A horse stall. there were insects darting around on the ground flies buzzing in the air and the stench of horse manure was overwhelming I was five years old then

just a month for my birthday but I still remember the pungence of that horse manure stench and I also remember my mother mumbling so degrading, so degrading, so degrading, so degrading.

And my father was stoic. He didn't say a word. My baby sister immediately got sick. Oh, no. And a few days later, I got sick too. And I remember going with my mother and my brother to the medicine dispensary and there were long lines and we stood in that line and I was telling my mother I'm feeling well my father was with our baby sister and we got the medicine and we went back there

and she was like like a statue next to us she was getting things for us uh water food but she would not leave us and we got well, but in that filthy environment. We were taken there in May, and I just remember all day long, things were happening. We had to go there, get the medicine, we had to line up to be checked for whatever. And it was usually my mother. My father spoke both English and Japanese. and because we had a lot of immigrant people, some complex things had to be explained to them in Japanese. And so my father immediately was taken away to be a translator or an explainer.

So my mother was the one that was with us all the time. And so Daddy was the one who took us to get clean there. at the San Native Racetrack, it was outdoors of the horses that were washed. Oh. We were treated like animals. And so it was Men's Day and two of us, the boys went with our father, and they closed us down, and Daddy scrubbed us down, and we dried off. And another day was the ladies' day.

And the ladies and the girl babies went and washed down. We were literally treated like animals. And the train was, they had these long trials. For men, I don't know what the ladies was like. But it was in September that we were packed into these trains at the Union Station. Henry and I were excited. Oh, sure. We were given two treats, a long vacation, and our first train ride.

Oh, what could be better. It was a great thing, but we always wondered why all the adults were all so sober, and some even were crying as, you know, we rocked on the train. And it was boring. Desert scene after desert scene. In Arizona, we started seeing the saguiled cactus race by our windows, blistering out train car, no air conditioning. And we thought it was part of going on a vacation, soldiers at the front end and back end of each car with rifles. I felt for those soldiers having to stay stiff like that on that long trip. And so occasionally, you know, would thump their rifles on the ground and sort of stretch.

But they were always there, and they were the ones that ordered us out. When we stopped in the middle of the desert, alarm went through the, what's going to happen? In the middle of nothing, they want us to get out? Are they going to abandon us? They said, out, everybody up, get out, get out, everybody up. And one of the Nis, as I said, he must have heard from the guards. This is to stretch our legs for a little bit of exercise. And Henry and I thought it was exciting.

And the minute we went down those steep stairs, I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it at Henry. And he chased me to them, we're running around in the desert. And one of the people on the train that we ran by grabbed me by the arm. And then he stopped Henry with a finger like this and brought us back to our father. And my mother didn't get out because those stairs were steep. And she thought, you know, they might shoot us out there. So she chose to stay in.

I mean, they got these rifles. Yeah. They're there for purpose. I remember my mother always talking about three days and two nights. Three days and two nights. That's how long that was. And on the day in the morning, we start seeing shrubbery and some trees. And then we saw that these trees were growing out of what I call black water swamp. Oh, sir. Huge tower increase. It began to slow down. The guards started roaming up and down the aisle. And I thought they were trying to scare us, acting like lions. They were saying, Southern accent.

And Nisei said, they're saying Camp Roar, We were getting near the camp. And then it was just rolling very slowly, and we saw barbedo our fence going down the left side. And then soon we saw other Japanese Americans crowded and silently just, you know, staring up. My mother recognized one of her friends, and she waved at her WANley. and Mrs. Imani was her name. She went a way back. We had reached the camp, and finally the train came to a stop.

And we all had to get out and line up right beside the train. And we all had tags, our name, birthplace, tied to our clothes. Was the government they never on a tag? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Back in Los Angeles, a man with walked down giving us our new address, the block, the barrack, and the unit number. And scrawled it on that car, scrawled it on the card. And we just lined up until they said, okay, the Kay family go with this group.

And we loaded out the trucks and driven to... the uh... the uh... the blunk that we were assigned to and our luggage dumped right by the mess hall and my father said I'll uh I'll go look for our

our unit came back and said and he brought to a ski young uh, uh, Nisei guys to help with luggage and uh ours was because I wrote the book I remember

the address. I looked up the address, a block two, barric F, unit A. So the two guys helped with our luggage. But that heavy duffel bag, my mother let no one carry. My father wouldn't carry it. And these two guys said, Mrs. Takeda, that looks to me, let me carry. Nope. She said, Yeah. And she carried that all the way to our barrack. And we were in unit. And the missile was right across the way. So that was to be our new home.

Hey, herel, here's, one-whoombedtuttuia. Uh, hey, I'll have never seen. Eich, no, who it then are you then are? We are not newtos, Joomie. Yeah, ha. No, where do you're doing? Well, S-Market, of,

Tieth. Elamon Roca. S-Market. Yeah, so you said there were blocks that are divided into barracks, that are divided into units. So just help the audience here to know what are we talking about. Describe what a barracks is like. Barak was wood frame, long wood frame, divided into units, and covered with black tarpe.

Okay. That's it. No solid wood wall, just a wood frame. And wrapped in the black tar paper. And there was a plywood over the roof. And that too was covered by that black tar paper. So long units and divided into units, small units. And we had the one on the right hand in there.

and it was a blistering hot day. Arkansas summers were very hot, and their thunderstorms are terrifying. I remember those thunderstorms. They were frightening. When the thunder came, it sounded like somebody was tearing the sky part, and then that thing, that literally shook, shook the barrack, because it was so loud.

And my father was, I don't know whether they were elected, but he was assigned the job of block manager because of this linguistic ability. How many people would you say were in a block? I would say over a hundred. Okay. A row of six barracks, six units in each barrack. Okay. And then in the middle was the mess hall. and laundry room, and then the women's latrine and the men's latrine.

And then six more barracks on this side that made a block. And these were in regular military fashion, you know, all across the landscape. It looks like a military camp, yeah. It was the same pattern. Okay. as a military can. Roughly how many people were in Rower when you were there? 8,000.

Okay. Like a town. Yeah. Messal was the central social bathroom. We ate there. We had to live life. And my father was a member of a baseball team in San Francisco. So he organized a baseball diamond or young men.

It was very sexist, only men. But as a block manager, he had to, you know, do these things. And we all were there cheering for, Daddy was a pitcher. Right. But he made sure that he rotated with other people to give them a chance. He was a politician. He had to very votes. Some nights there were dances organized.

Well, we would put to bed by her mother, but our barrack was right beside the missile, and so that's where the dances were held. And we were exposed to the music of Tommy Dorsey and all the popular bands of that time because we were in bed and we heard the music wafting over from the mess hall and for the old folks in the mess hall they had nights where

people sang classical old Japanese songs which to us sounded like somebody was being strangled and we had that kind of entertainment to drift off to sleep in

he'd organize teams to chop wood and deliver the woods to a common pile for each barrack and each family came and collected their log when we burnt them. But it was 20 hours a day. In fact, for my father, it was 24 hours a day when those horrific thunderstorms,

and when we needed our father the most, was when he was gone, because he was trying to stop a flood someplace, or, you know, on the camp in southeastern Arkansas was reclaimed swamp land. And when it rained, it turned right into a swamp. And some people got stuck in the mud and needed to do it. Pull down. And so young men had to carry them on the back.

And their feet went even deeper because it was two people to wait, you know. So my father had to deal with organizing that team to build a boardwalk, a skinny boardwalk. He got lumber, useless lumber, collected them, and the young men laid them and founded the pieces of lumber that they had sawed in uniformed. And my mother found rags that she washed and tore into strips. and braided them into the rugs so that we had something soft to step on. And we didn't want to bring the dirt in the muck from outside. So we took our shoes off, just like in Japan, and there were shoes at the front door. Right.

Because it was rough timber being used for floor. And the one thing she resented the most was the work that she enjoyed doing, cooking for us. She said they even took that away from me. Oh, because you're only eating in the mess hall. Right. And she said they took everything from us, even my cooking for my family. We had to eat and she was critical of the, these are all volunteer cooks members of our block, you know, that became men who became the cook. And she said, oh, that Mr. mother, he doesn't know how to mix

a teriyaki sauce. She said, the government took everything, everything for me. And she was serious about that. Tell me what did the children do, particularly the school year.

How did they handle school? We went to school. Okay. That school was another barrack. Okay. And it was a different plot. that we had to walk to, and the classrooms were bigger units than our habitations, and there's a blackboard and the American flag at the front,

and every morning we began with a pledge of legions to the flag, with liberty and justice for all. As you look out at the barbed wire, barbed wire, centriced towers, armed soldiers, looking down to I was. But the irony of that in a bar barbedo prison camp, I can see it right outside the schoolhouse window. It was the most anti-normal American schoolhouse. Right. Or a way of living. Although the irony is, I've gone back for pilgrimages to Roar, Arkansas. And we had one of the people that lived near our camp in a ramshackle house.

And she said, these people envied us because we had three meals a day. We ate three times. They were so poor that they didn't eat three meals a day. I don't know what they hate. We were told that. So let's skip ahead a bit to when was commonly known today as the loyalty questionnaire was handed out. What was your family's experience with the loyalty questionnaire? A year into imprisonment.

I mean, this is after they called us enemy alien and went through all the anguish, the thievery of what we owned, destruction of my father's business. And then a year of imprisonment, and then they realized there's a overtime manpower shortage. Here are all these healthy young men, so they decide, we need those people. The stupidity of the whole thing. If there were want us for our soldiers, they should have decided at the beginning before this happened. But the racism and the hysteria of the time blinded them. And the other irony is right after Pearl Harbor, young Japanese Americans, like any young American, immediately rushed to the recruitment centers to volunteer to serve in the military.

And the recruitment centers rejected them as enemy alien. The stupidity at the very beginning to reject us. And then a year later, after they've taken everything, imprisoned us, and caused all that anguish, and they realized they could use us. But we categorize as enemy alien. How to justify recruiting enemy aliens out of a barbedoar prison camp. So they come up with another outrageously ignorant solution. the loyalty questionnaire.

It was a series of about 40 questions put together by people who were, I literally, illiterate, didn't know the English language, grammar. There were two key questions that required, they needed to have yes answers, question 27 and question 28. question 27 asked will you serve in the united states military when ordered my parents had three young children i was six and henry it was younger and my baby sister was a toddler he asked well what what's going to happen with the children we have three young children yeah just checking yes mean you're going to take me tomorrow we have no idea well their answer is we have no plans for the children

That's it. What do they expect us to answer? I mean, abandon their children and bear arms to fight for the country. That's only their children hostage. They said, there's no other true answer. We answered, no. I asked my parents when I was a teenager. And they asked, no.

Question 28 was one sentence, but with two eyes. It asked, will you swear your loyalty to the United States of America and forswear your loyalty to the emperor of Japan? They just assumed, because of the space, that we have an inborn loyalty to the emperor. And structured in that sentence, I mean, do these people understand English? There was no way they could answer that truthfully. And so they said, we answered truthfully. The only answer that we could honestly give. They answered no.

And because of that, they were categorized as disloyal. What is the thinking of these people? I mean, are they educated? The most logical answers to both questions, particularly with we have no plans for the children, would be no. Any American, any normal parent would answer that way. And because of those two noves, they were categorized this, disloyal. And no one we couldn't have disloyalism mixed with the ones that answered, yes, yes, loyal. Because of those two no-nose, my parents had to be segregated from the rest of us, other Japanese-Americans.

There were 10 bar bar prison camps. They chose one, Tudely Lake in Northern California, as the segregation center for disloyals, a dry lake bed, no vegetation tumbleweeds rolling around on this bare landscape. Castle Rock to the north. It was a very desolate place. and the harshest of all the interment camps.

It had not one barbara fence as all the others did. They had three barbara fence to illustrate their overreaction to the whole thing. Just confounding their stupidity. They had

in the sentry tower, the other camps had an armed soldier looking down in at Tudu Lake, they had machine guns pointed down half a dozen tanks patrolling. Literally. Overreaction. What do you think is going to happen, guys?

They belong on a battlefield. But this is guarding innocent people who were enrage already. You know, many people answered no, no, because they were angry. After they treated us like this, you know, they're demanding this outrageous questionnaire. But so it was really a stupid, outrageous, and cruel. The harshest and the cruelest of all the ten camps. The other camps, yes, yes,es stayed in the camps that they were assigned. However, they had to suffer, because they understood question 28.

If I answer yes, that means I had been loyal to the emperor. I was born and raised and educated here as an American. How dare they accuse me of having me. But given the givens, I'm in the street. Let's cover ourselves by biting the bullet, and swallowing that ugly taste, and saying, yes, I will swear that I had been loyal to the emperor of Japan. And so because they were yes-yesses, they were eligible to be drafted.

And these are the young men who bit that bullet so hard. And they were drafted. And they said, you know, okay, we were forced to answer this. we're going to fight the best we can to get my family out from behind these barbedo fence. Let's go into Tully Lake. Apart from there being three fences, tanks, machine guns, how was the experience different from Rower? Tudley Lake was the most turbulent, fiercely violent count of them all. Well, you know, these are people that were angry, outraged.

And so it was a crushing together of the whole spectrum. of rage, anger, and sense of abuse. And many turned radical. There were riots. There were people shot. I remember waking up to these young men who said they're going to rise up when the Japanese army lands on the west coast of North America and join them and fight against America. So they jogged regularly.

They wore Achimaki, you know, the sedans. And out painted on them was the military Japanese symbol, the rising sun with the rays painted in red. And they jogged around the camp every morning, changing the route so that they cover other places.

And that was also a recruitment strategy to get others who were angry to join them. And I remember were waking up to the distant sound of their cadence counting. Washoy, washoi, wash, shoy, washoy, washoy, washoy. And that would get louder and louder as they got closer to our block. And the loudest when they jogged around their block. And then they started to fade as they went away from us.

And when they finished their jog, they got together and in unison, and shouted, Plinzai, Plinzai, binzai. They were Japanese soldiers. Japanese Americans turned into

Japanese soldiers, and they were fierce and single-minded, and you couldn't argue with them. They, this country, the United States, was a corrupt country,

and I'm not going to have anything to do with it, and I'm going to fight them when I, when they, when I can break out of these scants. They meant business, and that meant a clash with others who just went with the flow or grandpa, you know, is old. We don't want to abandon him, go with him.

And so there's a whole range of reasons for answering no and no. And they clashed. And there were riots amongst Japanese and Americans, and shouts were fired. people got killed. And my father took me to one of the discussions that at the camp headquarters that he regularly had, and discussed the situation there. And the radicals really got outrageous. And my father said, let's go. And then there were people outside. And there was a riot. And my father took my hand. I remember running back to her on the block. And the government retaliated. The jeeps came in and broke it up, but they didn't arrest anyone there.

They waited until night, and sometimes three or four nights later, and they would select individuals that they had spotted as a leader. And they would come in the dark of the night and just pull that man out. and I remember waking up, somebody in our barrack got pulled out, and I remember the woman saying, He's not one of them, please, please. And children are singing, Daddy, Daddy, don't go, please don't take him. And being taken away.

And so it was a place where there was a lot of emotions spilling out and there was no right and wrong. The radicals, too, made a good argument. And, you know, we sympathize with them, but not to the point of going out there and risking your lives. And so the camp was the most turbulent of them all. They built a concrete prison using people in camp and Dula Lake who had construction experience before the war. And they made them build this prison, concrete prison, with bars. and I went there

on a pilgrimage and it saw and the graffiti's written there and it was incredibly filthy unhealthy kind of sitting and they were brutalized oh there were brown

splashes on the concrete they were people's heads being bashed against the concrete but I turned brown over the years and so there was all that retaliation by the government. And so it was really a time bubble. Something was going to happen.

When the bill was passed by Congress that allowed people to renounce their citizenship, what was the effect on the camp and particularly on your family? Congress was sick and tired of all the news that they're getting from Tudley Lake. And they said, all right, if they desperately want to go to just, Japan will send them to Japan, you will give them a chance to renounce their citizenship. And so this was playing right into the radicals' hands. They used it. See, look, look, they do all this to us, and they want us to renounce our citizenship.

And they'll have that much more against us. And so they used that as a reason to proselytize more people. My mother did not want to renounce, but her family was paramount. It was the most precious thing. It was no longer a matter of citizenship. She was going to protect her citizenship. And again, the government played into the brink. radicals ends. Radicals said they are trying to get us all to renounce. Well, this is the way we show them.

And they had another campaign slogan, and not on slogan, but rationale. They're treating you like this. We're treated like garbage. And then Congress announced that they're going to close down to date. It's too much. We don't want to have anything to do with it. We're going to open up the gates and just close it up. Again, the radicals said, we're not going to play this game. We're going to renounce. We don't want to have anything to do with this. And when the government announced that they're going to close down to the lake,

that terrified so many people, including my mother, we're going to be put out there and those rednecks are still in a war Japanese are still killing white Americans and this is really dangerous but my mother said

I want my family protected and so I'm going to assist that the government keep a Tudule Lake operating and enough of those people were gathered And so the government decided not to close down.

Can you imagine? Not to close that. The bar-bar offense that imprisoned us were also the bar-bar fence that protected us from these rednecks out there. And so they decided to keep doing it, they're operating. So the logic for her was, I give up my citizenship. So now I am an alien and they'll keep me as an alien. Yeah. Okay.

So then eventually they do shut down the camp. So how did that transition happen for your family? Well, my mother was on a list of people to be on the first ship going to Japan. Wow. My mother's name was there. And my hero is this man name. Wayne Collins, a CLU attorney in San Francisco. No one, not even Japanese Americans,

lawyers would touch Japanese American cases because of so hopeless. Wayne Collins was a courageous and principled law attorney and he came to the rescue. He said these people were forced into this decision with a gunpoint at their heads. This is unjust. And they cannot be sent to a war-torn country where the people there are scrambling in the rubble for food.

They, we must not do another injustice to these people. And Wayne Collins fought the case for her. And whether it wasn't on that ship. But he literally went running up the gang panic to pull some of the people whose names were on that list. To say, you're off the list. You don't have to go to Japan. So these are people that said, I made a mistake. I should not have renounced my citizenship.

Right. When they got the lawyer. Yeah. Okay. And my mother, unfortunately, got the word that she doesn't have to be on that ship before she was there. It's an incredible story. And it's been revealing about how fragile American democracy can be. Hey, therel, there's been vanholy newmattuttuia.

Uh, hey, I'll have never seen. Hey, well, who'd you then are, so who'd you then ought to be? Yeah, ha. No, where did you dovet? Well, S-market, of, tientiest, tient. Elamon rawa. S-market. So after your family left the camp, where did you first go?

Because the business is gone, you don't have any. roots down anymore. Nothing. And beyond that, it was dangerous. I mean, hatred was still out there. The rednecks were still there, taking those pot shots. And Los Angeles, too, had people who had pot shots taken at them and assaults. And that rumor came back to us. It was too dangerous to go as a family. So my father said, I'll go first. I'll look over the situation, get a job, and find a place to stay.

And so week after week, he wrote my mother saying how hostile the situation is and difficult it is to find a job and a place to stay. And he said there are a few good people. So I'll keep on trying He was gone for 10 weeks until finally when the letter came

My mother said Daddy has a job And he's found a place To stay We're going to go back to Los Angeles We were the last ones To leave our block They started closing down the missile

One by one and our missile had closed down, and so we were going to the next block's missile to eat with the remaining people there. We had a pet dog, a street dog that we adopted, and we couldn't take our pets with us. And so for me, as a nine-year-old boy, it was a heart-breaking thing to have to leave black.

Blackie there. I hugged him and I cried and Black was there winging his body and happily not understanding the situation. And when the car came picked us up in our luggage and we had to leave Blackie behind. I heard his desperate barking. Oh. Feet away as we drove him away. So you joined your father in L.A. What was it like when you got there? He was there at Union Station waiting for us. And we spotted him standing on the platform immediately. And so we yelled and shouted and waved.

And he saw us and waved back to us. And Henry and I were off the train the minute that it stopped. And we went running down. And daddy was anchored down with his arm outspread. But Henry and I threw ourselves and did. his arm and knocked him over. I still remember that. And he was laughing when we were laughing.

And my mother was carrying her baby sister. And she lifted daddy up. And we had one great big family hug. And he said, we're going to go right through the heart of downtown Los Angeles to her and new home. We got on the train, and it went, he said, we're going to go through the old little Tokyo, went past a railway station, and then turned onto First Street. And what he called the old little Tokyo was there, but there were all black people there.

Oh, sure. Because when we all vacated, there was all that vacancy and this surge of African Americans in the South. who came to work on the war plants on the need housing. And so there were these neon signs with the Japanese characters that read Far East Cafe. But it was all black people there. And I looked up and my father said, this is Little Tokyo? How come there? It's all black people.

And said during the war, this area became, came to be called Bronzeville and then it made a left turn onto a street called Broadway Broadway and that's where all the great movie palaces were

and all the big department stores were and I they had colored lights I mean I'd never seen lights with color in them in a prison camp and this blazing of these

the row of marquise with red lights like what zigzagged and blue lights that bubbled up and I mean it was blinding it was the most incredible alien planet that we had landed on and we

kept walking and walking and then he said this is a street where we have our hotel room it was Skid Row literally Skid Row literally bodies lying on the sidewalk, leaning on the walls, others staggering, bending over the curb and partying.

We were shot and again, my mother tightened her grip on us, and we picked up our pace, and Daddy picked up at this space, and then we walked up these wooden steps. I had never been in a two-store, more than two-store building. steps that go way up there. I was scared. We're supposed to go back then. That was our first stone. We thank God it was a second floor. And there was a smell in the hallway, one room, two beds.

What job had your father found? He found a dishwasher's job in a Chinatown restaurant. Only other Asians would hire Japanese, Americans, coming back. That was our return to Los Angeles. I wonder if we can skip a couple decades forward. We're in the mid-70s now. So you're well into your career. You are doing very well as an actor at this point. But that's when the political movement of redress really started gaining some momentum. I wonder, what was your sense of the feeling within the Japanese-American community around redress? I imagine there were complicated feelings, but what was your impression?

Well, because this J.A.L. guy was a good friend of mine. I was exposed to the campaign to get people to testify. Many were the Japanese community, particularly Japanese Americans. The Japanese culture is a selfie-facing character. Like in gift-giving, this is something very humble, but please accept. But also uncomfortable talking about their own pain or a situation. We went on a campaign to persuade people to testify, but many demurred because of, they don't like to be in the public eye, maybe because of the internment. And the press would question you, and you'd have to respond. The younger ones, like me, were eager to participate in that. And many who had not experienced the internment and were yet more American than Japanese wanted to testify.

But there were also, like this woman who was hated by everybody, Caucasian woman, who was one of those that advocated for our internment and was a very focal supporter of the internment, even though that was passed and saying that was a good thing that America did. She was there every day listening to the testimony, and that woman who testified yesterday, but she knows nothing about it, the internment.

this white woman telling a Japanese American internie that, and she had, she was so cheeky. And if I had the chance, I would have strangled her in public. The Liberty's Act of 88 passes. The president signs it. What was your feeling? Maybe it was even years later when you finally got. So I guess I should tell the audience,

the bill stipulated that anyone who applied for it would be given $20,000 as reparations, but also there was a congressional and presidential apology that came in the form of a letter. So do you remember when you received yours? I do indeed. They paid it in the order of their age. So I was one of the last. Of course. I think I got mine in 1991.

Okay. This bill was signed in 88. So I was the tail end of that. It also said you had to be alive at the side. of the bill in 88. Oh, okay. And the people that suffered the most, people who were enraged the most,

people who were pained the most, had passed by that time. My father, in our family, was the one who not only had his own pain and suffering, but those of others he took on during the camp, and he had passed. And I said to my mother, my mother was still alive. I said, my only regret is that Daddy wasn't here to receive this and to know that that apology was signed.

And my mother said, Daddy always knew this day would come. And I know that she was saying to kind of comfort me, but I think she was right. my father had faith until he died. It sounds like he really believed in America that it would eventually do the right thing, and that's incredible. I'm sure he would have testified. So moving from, oh, I guess I just say, so you received this letter, what did the apology, in addition to the money, mean to you personally? Well, the money, I didn't feel I deserved because I was a child. I didn't go through

I mean I went through the whole process but I was too young to really experienced that I remember that riot where my father took my hand and we ran like bats out of hell but you know the ones that were

really involved in that riot for Owen Con are the ones that really deserved the apology and I didn't deserve it. So at that time, we were fundraising for the founding of the Japanese American National Museum. My whole $20,000 went into the founding of the museum, plus some that I took up in my pocket. We're very proud of that building and what it stands for.

So moving into today, you've told us your, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your family, experiences, this very crucial part of American history that you lived through. What is your hope through your activism that you've done throughout your life, but particularly in the political moment that we experience today and decades into the future, what do you want people to take away from learning stories like yours? Because they haven't learned a lesson of the internment, and there is a profoundly important lesson of democracy to be learned. I mean, due process alone, the importance of that. You need evidence, facts, before you imprison anybody.

And that's what we've been doing. We've had some presidents that were not very good. And there's an important human lesson to be learned, not just Americans, but a human lesson to be learned. And we didn't learn the lesson from World War II. and now we are repeating it, multiplied threefold. It is outrageous.

And I'd like to think there are more intelligent Americans, more Americans with a sense of humanity and principle and understanding of our democracy and how precious it is. We've got to learn the lesson. And I don't have many years left,

But I'm going to use that as those years to get that lesson known to my fellow Americans. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. Thank you for joining me for this interview, George. Season 1 of History for the Reckoning is made possible by support from the J.A.C.L. Mount Olympus chapter, as well as generous financial support from the Takahashi Family Foundation and the J.A. Community Foundation. The music was produced by Patrick Coffin. If you want to support the show, follow us on Instagram at History for the Reckoning. Sign up for our newsletter at History for the Reckning on Substack,

where you'll also find the show notes for each episode, or support us financially through Patreon at patreon.com slash history for the reckoning. Herel, herel, herel, here. Hey, there's been, come back. Hey, no, who you then are you? We are not newtos juomia. Yeah, ha. No, where did you gett from?

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