George Takei: Family's imprisonment relevant today

His parents were in the bedroom packing, leaving the toddler and his two younger siblings to gaze out the front window. They saw uniformed men with bayoneted rifles approach the front door, and then pound on it, repeatedly.

Mom and dad had told them they would be going on a “long vacation.”

Long before his fame from “Star Trek” and his work as a human rights advocate, a 5-year-old George Takei was taken from his California home. He and his family, along with roughly 120,000 other American citizens of Japanese ethnicity, were put into an internment camp resulting from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

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On that morning in 1942, Takei remembers standing in the front yard and watching his mother emerge from the house, a duffel bag in one hand, his infant sister in the other and tears fresh on her cheek.

“I’ll never be able to forget that,” the 79-year-old actor said Sunday from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. “That was my introduction to executive order 9066.”

Takei told the entire story of his family’s stay in an internment camp, from their forced transportation in crowded trucks to eventual imprisonment, on the opening day of the library’s new exhibit, “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II” that coincided with the 75th anniversary of the executive order’s signing.

Takei, who Sunday published a CNN op-ed about hearing “echoes from the past,” spoke about his experiences with plenty of allusions to current events, specifically referencing President Donald Trump’s now-halted executive order banning from entry into the U.S. citizens of seven majority Muslim countries.

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Library director Paul Sparrow, the moderator, and Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania Law professor, also spoke about the past with an eye on today, as well as addressed the slightly awkward situation of discussing what many view as a stain on Roosevelt’s legacy at his presidential library.

“Constitutional protections were violated,” Sparrow said at the outset of the talk. “And the idea of what happened around executive order 9066 has such an impact on our basic understanding of our legal system.”

The relevance of this topic today wasn’t lost on many of the hundreds in attendance, including David Liu, a Taiwanese immigrant, and his wife, Margaret Liu, whose parents were Holocaust survivors.

“This is a time to discuss constitutional rights for American citizens and what can lead to the removal of those rights,” David Liu said. “I think, as the exhibit showed, fear is a strong determinant.”

At the center of the hysteria that led to the executive order, Takei and Roosevelt explained, was a stereotype — widely perpetuated by politicians like California Attorney General Earl Warren —  that Japanese American citizens' allegiance couldn’t be trusted.

Politicians like Warren let the “lack of evidence be the evidence,” Takei said, reporting that there had been no reports of spying or sabotage from Japanese Americans.

“And that is ominous,” Takei said. “Because the Japanese are inscrutable — you don’t know what they’re thinking. That was the stereotype.”

Never mind the fact, he pointed out, that his father grew up in America and his mother was born in Sacramento.

Roosevelt, great grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and author of “Allegiance: A Novel,” which analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans, said the executive order was a failure of political leadership as well as a failure of the people to fight the president on his decree.

“In the end, I blame to a large extent the American people for not standing up more,” Roosevelt said.

Many Americans removed themselves from the issue, Takei said, while he and his siblings were living in “degrading, painful conditions.”

When his family was moved to Tulelake Camp in California, one of the largest camps that housed around 18,000 people, his status as a prisoner really set in. There were three layers of barbed wire fence, he said. Tanks circled the perimeter during the day.

He was a prisoner stripped of due process, he said, jailed because of what he looked like.

“Just looking like the enemy,” Takei said, “was why we were incarcerated.”

One of his final points Sunday was that people need to remember these were not Japanese internment camps — they were American internment camps imprisoning American citizens. That distinction is important, he said, so people can accurately understand what was allowed to happen.

Air Force veteran Hugo Musto, 90, said though he understood why FDR signed the order at the time, he now knows its impact on families like Takei’s.

That’s why he said he was in attendance Sunday. He said it’s important to learn from the past, especially in today’s complicated political climate.

“We read books before this,” he said alongside his 87-year-old wife, Gene Musto. “In retrospect, it was an awful thing to do.”

Jack Howland: jhowland@poughkeepsiejournal.com, 845-437-4870, Twitter: @jhowl04