Bill Kerwin's Reviews > They Called Us Enemy

This graphic memoir by George Takei—who was imprisoned, along with his family, in the U.S.’s World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans—is timely, moving, remarkably objective, and historically necessary.

It is timely because, once again, we have concentration camps in America. Children, snatched from the arms of their mothers, are confined in large wired enclosures as demeaning as cages. Their crime? They dared to cross the border into what was once considered to be the Land of Freedom, in a desperate attempt to escape hunger, poverty, gang violence, and sexual exploitation. It is true that Takei and his family were the victims of yet a crueler irony: they were American citizens. Yet the callous brutality of what is essentially a white man’s government toward people who are different from themselves makes these two situations much the same.

This memoir is particularly moving because it is viewed primarily through the eyes of the children, the most undeniably innocent of all victims, and often the most oblivious. We see them playing contentedly through the railroad journey the camps, unaware—until years later—of the humiliation their parents suffered and the challenges they faced. The pain of the adults becomes more poignant in isolation, and the distance it causes between children and parents compounds the crime.

It is also remarkably objective, taking care to show the occasional non-Asian American who acted with compassion and courage, from the anonymous man who regularly delivered carloads of books to the internment camps to lawyer Wayne Collins who led the fight against deportation during the “renunciation crisis.” It also shows its objectivity—as well as a little irony too—in its account of how many Japanese—including Takei’s father—worked to organize the detainees into a mutually helpful community, organized democratically in a quintessentially American way.

We all owe our thanks to George Takei because, above all other things, this memoir is historically necessary. For it is only by seeing the evil our nation has caused in the past that we are able to recognize the evil happening now and do what we can to stop it.