They Called Us Enemy

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in ‘Star Trek,’ he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten ‘relocation centres,’ hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. ‘They Called Us Enemy’ is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.