Takei’s mother clutched his baby sister as the family was forced to board a bus that took them to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they were quartered in stables reeking of horse manure. His dad frantically hurried to dress the boys as he pleaded with the soldiers standing in the doorway of the family’s Los Angeles home for a little more time. The story begins abruptly, with 5-year-old George and younger brother Henry being awakened one morning by their father, an immigrant who built a successful dry-cleaning business. The book ingeniously uses a medium that most of us first experienced as children - comic book-style drawings, dialogue balloons and sparse, simple narration - to help readers see it all through the eyes of the child he once was. In “They Called Us Enemy,” his graphic memoir, Takei has found a powerful way to deliver his message. He seems determined to jolt the rest of us out of our apathy and make us understand.

authorities and sent to internment camps during World War II, knows all too well how that feels. After all, we can turn off the set without actually being compelled to contemplate the plight of being imprisoned at a tender age in a strange, harsh place, at the mercy of forces that we don’t really understand.īut former “Star Trek” actor George Takei, who as a child was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans rounded up from their homes by U.S. In today’s America, we’ve seen the television images of migrant children in cages so many times that it’s all too easy to develop compassion fatigue.

They called us the enemy