A Journey Through History and Memory
Actor and civil rights activist George Takei is continuing to spread awareness about the historical lessons of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States. His award-winning children’s book, “My Lost Freedom,” is set to be published in Japanese translation, reaching a new audience with the story of his childhood.
Takei was among the roughly 120,000 civilians who were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in camps at 10 remote sites across seven U.S. states during the war. The book, illustrated by Michelle Lee, tells the story of his childhood years spent in unjust detention. It became a bestseller and won a Golden Poppy award from California booksellers after its initial release in the United States in 2024. The Japanese version is scheduled for late-November publication.
In an interview before traveling to Japan for the launch, the 88-year-old Takei emphasized the role of fear and ignorance in the mass incarceration that began in 1942. He explained that Americans were swept over by war hysteria and racism, as they looked like the people who attacked Pearl Harbor. He also pointed out that America lacked an understanding of democracy and its own history, leading to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.
Takei was five years old when his family was sent to the Rohwer Camp in Arkansas and later the Tule Lake center in California, with the imprisonment lasting nearly four years. He is most known for playing Hikaru Sulu in the original “Star Trek” series and movies. He has also written about his family’s internment in the 1994 autobiography “To the Stars” and the 2020 graphic novel “They Called Us Enemy.”
Compared to the recent graphic novel, the picture book is aimed at a younger audience, similar to the age Takei was during his wartime imprisonment. He hopes that parents and teachers who read the book to children will also learn something from it. As a teenager, he became curious about his childhood imprisonment but found little information in school or public libraries. He turned to his father, Takekuma “Norman” Takei, for discussions on their family’s experiences and the importance of fighting for democracy and equality.
Takei sees parallels between the wartime atmosphere of his early childhood and the recent surge of xenophobia in the United States, especially amid the rise and reelection of President Donald Trump on anti-immigration policies. He noted that Japan is also struggling to accept newcomers as its population becomes increasingly diverse due to reliance on foreign labor.
At the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles this summer, Takei and other board members witnessed federal immigration agents conducting raids outside the building. The museum’s campus includes the courtyard where Japanese American families, including Takei’s, were rounded up by soldiers and put on buses to prison camps. He remarked that the situation felt like a reliving of the past, with soldiers now in camouflage and masks instead of steel helmets and rifles.
On the morning Takei’s family was forced from their Los Angeles home, he saw one of the soldiers aim a rifle at his father’s face. Though he was too young to understand what was happening, the memory remains vivid. He recalls the terror of the moment and the stupidity of the government, which deemed his entire family, including himself as a five-year-old, as “enemy aliens.”
An 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act, which enables detention or quick deportation of people from enemy nations during war, was used as part of the legal framework for mass incarceration of Japanese Americans after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. It has also been invoked by Trump’s administration in its aggressive push to deport immigrants on a wide scale.
“My Lost Freedom,” which recounts the period from the Pearl Harbor attack until Takei left the camp in March 1946, is titled “When we are robbed of our freedom” in Japanese. Crowdfunding was used in publishing the translated version.
In addition to his autobiographical writings on the topic, Takei has helped bring dramatizations of the historical issue to Broadway in the 2015 musical “Allegiance” and to television in the 2019 series “The Terror: Infamy.” He has also been active in the broader struggle to secure equality for the marginalized and protect their stories and perspectives, including serving as honorary chair of Banned Books Week for the free-speech group PEN America.
The actor, who is openly gay since revealing his relationship with his now-husband Brad in 2005, published a graphic novel this year about living as a public figure while hiding his sexual orientation. He hopes the book, “It Rhymes with Takei,” will also be published in translation in Japan to help the movement toward LGBTQ+ rights in the country.