Actor George Takei remembers his internment

Transcript, for anyone else who prefers text (all content is the property of the creators, all mistakes of transcription are mine):

VOICE (FDR): “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
NARRATOR: It’s December, 1941, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is about to take America to war.

VOICE (FDR): “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

NARRATOR: Japan had just attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was the strike that brought America into the second World War. But in the weeks that followed, it wasn’t only Japan that was seen as the enemy

TAKEI: I remember that morning, when two American soldiers with bayoneted rifles came stomping up to the front door of our home to order us out, and I remember my mother was… her face was just streaming with tears.

NARRATOR: George Takei was four years old that day; a child, and an American citizen. But after the strike on Pearl Harbor, a threat in the eyes of the state thanks to his Japanese ancestry. He, his parents and his younger siblings were rounded up and sent into detention

TAKEI: We were first taken from our home to a nearby racetrack and forced to stay in a horse stall; all five of us in one horse stall. For me, it was kind of fun, but now, thinking back, how degraded, how humiliated my parents must have felt.
 
NARRATOR: The soldiers were acting on an executive order signed by President Roosevelt himself. “By virtue of the authority vested in me,” it says, “I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas from which any or all persons may be excluded.” It said nothing about Japanese-Americans, but some senior officials did.

VOICE (quote from one such senior official): I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps. Damn them. Let’s get rid of them now.

NARRATOR: One of the areas marked off as a military zone was America’s west coast. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, 110,000 Japanese-Americans lived there. Within a few months they were all gone, sent to internment camps in the country’s interior

TAKEI: When we arrived at the internment camp itself, it was surrounded by barbed-wire fences. There were sentry towers with machine guns pointed at us. We were housed in barracks, tarpaper-covered, flimsily, quickly built barracks. We could see the ground underneath, between the spaces on the floorboard, and there were latrines that we had to go to, and at night when I made those runs, searchlights followed me, but that became a part of the normality in my life.

NARRATOR: Some Japanese-Americans regained their freedom by agreeing to sign up to the US Army and fight in the war, but many, like George’s parents, felt too angry and betrayed to buy their release in this way. They refused, and George and his family were moved to a new, high-security camp in northern California. A new mood of mistrust and resentment followed them and, here and there, a desire for America to lose.

TAKEI: The younger people were much, much more volatile, and I remember at the second camp, waking up in the morning, hearing these young men jogging around our block with the Japanese cadence “Wasshoi, Wasshoi, Wasshoi,” which always regularly woke me up, and they would end their morning exercise by gathering together and saying “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” and they wore these headbands with the rising sun; the red rising sun painted on the white headbands. They were determined to rise up when the Japanese forces landed on continental US. 

NARRATOR: What was the guards’ reaction to that?

TAKEI: Oh, well, they wanted to get the leaders of those groups, and there would be these midnight raids, and it was quite arbitrary, they had no evidence or basis for it, and frequently they were mistaken. And so that fed into the whole turmoil of the camp. The riot that I remember–one person from our camp was taken like that and they were taken to the stockade. Can you imagine? A stockade within a concentration camp. I remember Jeeps come roaring through the gate at the group of people that were gathered, and there were soldiers standing with rifles pointed at us, coming right toward where we were clumped, and I remember my father taking my hand and we started running like mad, and people all scattered, and I remember hearing the other people yelling at the military police, calling them ketos. 

NARRATOR: What does that mean? 

TAKEI: It’s a kind of a curse word, which I didn’t know. So I asked my Daddy. He said, “It means hairy people.” Hairy race. It’s a racial epithet for white people.

NARRATOR: For some people, he says, life in the camps simply became too much.

TAKEI: People became very depressed and suicidal, and if you walked toward the barbed-wire fence, and did not obey the sentry’s order to stop or go back, you were shot. It was a form of suicide.

NARRATOR: And people would do that on purpose?

TAKEI: People committed suicide by marching toward the barbed-wire fence, defying the orders of the sentries.

NARRATOR: Three years after he arrived in detention, George remembers hanging around the camp latrines. The only place, he says, where you could press your ear to forbidden short-wave radios and learn what was happening in the outside world. The news he heard that day was momentous: the war was over. He and his family could go home. 

TAKEI: Coming back to Los Angeles was a real shock to us. Seeing tall buildings was absolutely mind-blowing, and then seeing neon signs, lights that bubbled and blinked and flashed and had colors, blue and red and white, was absolutely amazing. The streetcar went down Broadway and we passed a movie palace’s marquees and I was just dumbfounded. Amazing colors. And the fabulousness of those department store windows: elegant-looking mannequins, dolls, looking so incredibly unreal and stylish and elegant and beautiful. And then we got off and we started walking with our suitcases, past one block and another block, until we started smelling urine and bars with the smell of stale alcohol. My father found a place for us on Skid Row. That was our first home. And I remember the–and my little sister shrieking. She said, “Mama, let’s go back home,” because the internment camp was our normality. That was our home. And being out was so scary. 

NARRATOR: It took forty years for the US government to apologize to its internees. Forty years before a federal commission concluded there had been no military necessity for detaining them, that the practice had been based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. Two-thirds of the prisoners during that time were US citizens. None was ever charged with a crime.