California, Oregon, and Washington were declared military areas, and thousands of Japanese Americans were taken by force from their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps. Roosevelt issued an executive order enabling the creation of military areas from which “any and all persons” could be removed. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. The mass internment of American citizens and legal residents of Japanese descent followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. What happened next is the stuff of nightmares: Takei and his family were taken from their home and imprisoned, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, in camps situated in remote areas of the country. They stomped up the front porch and with their fists began pounding on the front door. Suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets. “My parents got us up very early” on that spring day in 1942, he recalls, “and my brother and I were told to wait in the living room while our parents did some last-minute packing in the bedroom. The opening scene of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf, 2019) is a memory that is still vivid to the 82-year-old actor, although he was not quite five years old when it happened.
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