They Called Us Enemy

In 1942, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were taken away from their homes and placed into dingy prison camps all over the US. They did nothing wrong, but had none of the legal means to prove it to the racist authorities. They were paying for the sins of their home country after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Classic ignorant thinking at its worst: because a small minority of the group committed the crime, the entire group is guilty. George Takei spent most of his tender childhood living under this kind of oppression as he and his family were among the Japanese-American families locked up in internment camps. Reading about this shameful experience through his eyes makes everything that much more heartbreaking. His young mind couldn’t comprehend the ignorance of those in charge. He tried to make sense of the barbed wire enclosures, deplorable conditions, and abusive army guards. Fast forward into adulthood and George Takei does everything in his power as an equal rights activist and Hollywood actor to make sure this terrifying history doesn’t happen again.This graphic novel is nothing short of a brutally honest look into the politics of fear. Powerful politicians will use their influence and charisma to rile up their supporters into believing that the less fortunate are what’s wrong with this country. We saw it with the Japanese internment in George Takei’s book and we’re seeing it today with the Muslim ban, the family separation policy at the Mexican border, and black people getting harsher treatment from law enforcement than whites. The one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This book has the power to educate its readers. When you familiarize yourself with your fellow world citizens, you’re less likely to judge them. That’s what “They Called Us Enemy” means to me and that’s one of the reasons it’s getting a perfect five out of five stars. The more educated we are, the better off we’ll be. That means leaving behind comfortable bigotry and thinking about what it’s like to be the other guy, which is often a horrifying reality.But of course, there will always be those contrarians out there who say, “It wasn’t all that bad!” These same people say it about black slavery, they call Mexican border detention centers “Summer Camp”, and they’ll no doubt say it about Japanese internment camps. Having guaranteed living conditions doesn’t mean those conditions are necessarily good. Did I mention the barbed wire fencing around the camps? Did I mention the abusive treatment from the soldiers? What about the fact that George Takei’s family had to live in a horse stall that smelled like rancid feces? What about the infighting among Japanese prisoners who joined the military to prove their patriotism and the prisoners who stayed in the camps to protest? Had enough harsh reality? But wait, there’s one more juicy detail: institutionalization. Some prisoners were so familiar with the routine life of the camps that they couldn’t imagine getting back on their feet in a normal society. Now imagine a child as young as George Takei feeling that way upon leaving the camp. You get to see all of this through the author’s eyes whether you want to or not. It won’t be pleasant, but it’ll be a necessary kick in the butt for the apathetic and fearful.Despite the shortness and quick pacing of the book, you will feel as though you’ve taken an entire US history course in one sitting. Let this be a message to you all. Treat your neighbors with kindness and respect. Treat your inferiors with the same level of understanding and love. If you see an injustice happening, don’t stay quiet. Be the activist you were meant to become. Be a passionate enough voice in this battle for equality that those in power will have no choice but to listen. Let your words haunt them like schizophrenic ghosts. Will this change anything? Let me put it this way: we don’t have a choice but to activate our activism. The world can’t survive without making progressive leaps and bounds. That is the nature of time. Any questions?

I love that this book is in a comic format. It made it so easy for me to read and I loved the sketches. I found the story very interesting to say the least and it brought to light the history that I had not heard about in detail even though my mother was in Hawaii at the time and experienced some of the aftermath. She never spoke of it which peaked my curiosity and enticed me to purchase this book. I am a fan of George Takei as Star Trek is one of my favorite movie series. I would recommend this book to everyone of all ages. Thank you, George for writing it.

Even though this appears to be a childlike comic book, it was fascinating for me to read as an adult. This is not my average book that I would read, but we ended up reading it because a friend and I went and saw the author speak in person at a university. I wanted my kids to read it afterward. Very sad and eye-opening.

So I want to start off by saying that I may be a touch bias in this review in that I’m both a massive fan of Star Trek, and also the granddaughter of a man who was in an internment camp himself, so this book felt extremely personal. I got it because I wanted to get a better idea on what the camps were like, and how things actually went down. I hadn’t been told my grandpa was in a camp until after he had passed, so this was a resource in understanding my own family history in a way that I had otherwise never gotten in any comprehensive way.It was a bittersweet read, as the art is beautiful, the story is extremely well told, and it felt like a really good mix of personal and historical, as it was both very much the story of a man’s family and childhood, while also being a view into the inner workings of the camps, and the politics involved during and after for Japanese Americans who lived through such an unwarranted tragedy. It was very personally touching, I read it in 3 days, I could hardly get myself to put it down.I recommend it to everyone, especially anyone with a strong interest in first-hand accounts of historical events, anyone who is related to a survivor of these camps who wants to better understand what happened and what their relatives experienced, or just anyone who wants to educate themselves or their children on this specific event in US history.

Nice art work and a great story of a Japanese family during the internment of Japanese citizens during WW2 with a nice twist at the end

I don’t often read either graphic novels or biographies typically. however this was an incredibly digestible novel and I feel like I know so much more information about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans than I ever did in any history class.

The story remains evergreen with just a change of characters. It tells a story untold and fits perfectly of what is going on in the world even now.

Important history of racial injustice is important to share to young people and this form of literature makes it accessible and palatable. Based on the actor‘s own personal experience, it is an important eye witness account.

Una historia conmovedora que rescata un episodio poco conocido de la historia de Estados Unidos y cómo la memoria de los japo-americanos se concilia con su pasado reciente.

George Takei is many things: as an actor he is most readily associated with being Mr Sulu on ‘Star Trek’ but his pan-Asian helmsman from the USS Enterprise is only a fraction of the story. A social rights campaigner for much of his adult life, Mr Sulu was an early sign of success for a young Takei, being a positive Asian character on American TV at a time when Japanese-Americans (and, pretty much anyone of non-Caucasian heritage) were not usually treated at all kindly by the ‘white majority’.The role gave Takei recognition and the springboard to further LGBT+ rights as well as the opportunity to address injustices around the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.While, as a UK reader of ‘They Called Us Enemy’, certain nuisances of the US constitution left me a little cold, the human story behind the treatment of a whole swathe of people - purely due to their racial heritage - is powerfully told and, as the book itself points out, the resonances in recent American history - given the actions of Trump - remain deeply concerning.Takei’s an inspiring individual who draws greatly on the inspiration of his own parents and, in particular, his father. This book is also an inspiration, illuminating an aspect of American history about which I had little awareness. It is also about more than one moment in history and how one set of people were treated during it, it makes it clear that this one episode is part of a wider continuum about the choices individuals and states make in treating people and their communities with respect and fairness. It also serves as a warning that advances in civil rights are rarely uniform and enduring: they ebb and flow. Gains, once made, cannot be assumed to be forever - far from it - and states can take decades rectifying wrongs. Rights need fighting for day-by-day so that they are maintained, something Takei does not flinch from, whether here or in his daily life and, for that, I commend him, his work and this book.

I bought this for my 12 year old son, who (like the rest of our family) is interested in the history of The Second World War. He read it in a few days and insisted I put my own book down and read it right after he finished. I found it a surprising mix of feel-good warmth and devastation. George Takei does a wonderful job of portraying how a strong and loving family can find joy in the most trying of circumstances. The descriptions of those trying circumstances brought tears to my eyes more than once. This mix of emotions is heightened by the very talented illustrations of Harmony Becker. Beautifully done, well worth the read.