To the Stars

by George Takei

  * * *

  Memories are our most precious possessions. They are the ultimate connective links to our past. My Rohwer remembrances may be only a child’s fragments of history, incomplete, disjointed, and simplistically intense. But I treasure every piece and broken shard, every brief and unfinished wisp of memory I have. Especially of that strange and dreamlike night when something woke me up—a sound, a discomfort, or perhaps intuition. I don’t know what. Something stirred me from my sleep.

  I woke and I saw a dim light glowing from the far side of our room. It was the kerosene lamp placed on the low chair Daddy had built for Reiko. Daddy and Mama were seated over it whispering. His voice was hushed, thoughtful, sober. Mama sat ramrod straight. There was something strong and determined about her posture. Her face was expressionless, but the light shone in two shiny wet streaks down her cheeks. She looked like she had tears streaming down.

  There was a long, silent pause, then Mama whispered something slowly and deliberately. She didn’t talk like she was crying. But when she breathed in, the tears in her nose made a soft sniffling sound. It was strange. Mama sounded like she was crying without acting like it.

  “Mama, don’t cry,” I said in a drowsy murmur. They both looked over at me, startled. “Don’t cry, Mama,” I repeated. They tiptoed over in their stocking feet, Mama quickly wiping her face.

  “Everything’s all right,” Daddy whispered to me. “Go back to sleep. Mama and I were talking about grownup things.”

  “Shhhh,” Mama said softly. “Don’t wake up Henry and Reiko. Everything fine.” And she tucked me back in. Reassured by that, I must have drifted back to sleep. That’s all I remember of that momentary waking. It wasn’t a dream. It really happened.

  Over the years, I have come to cherish that breath of consciousness that I was somehow granted. Because of it, I can claim witness to a discussion on a devastating event that again set the Japanese American internees reeling with confusion, shock, and anger. That sleep-fuzzed memory is my only connection with a wrenching decision Daddy and Mama had to make. Their decision was again to have us packing for another arduous journey—this time for a camp back in California, so poetically named Tule Lake.

  * * *

  By early 1943, the political winds of America were charged with the racist rhetoric of opportunistic politicians like Earl Warren, the attorney general of California. He became governor of the state riding on a fear campaign of potential Japanese American sabotage. The already volatile war climate was inflamed by Warren with his charges of possible Japanese American spying—what he called fifth-column subversive activity.

  In actual fact, there was not a single case of treason by Americans of Japanese ancestry. The only American citizens arrested for espionage against the United States during the entire war were two Caucasians. Yet, disregarding the facts and blind to the pain, injury, and anguish inflicted in pitiless succession on an already incarcerated people, the desk-bound bureaucrats of Washington responded with alacrity. They devised a program of astounding cruelty. It was a plan to document the loyalty of Japanese Americans held behind barbed wire. As the ultimate proof of fidelity to the United States, all male and female internees aged seventeen and older, regardless of citizenship, were required to respond to a Loyalty Questionnaire. The questionnaire listed dozens of questions. The two most crucial questions were Number 27 and Number 28:

  No. 27. Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?

  No. 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power, or organization?

  When Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941, many young Japanese American men, like most American men of their age, had rushed to their recruitment offices to volunteer for service. These genuine acts of loyalty were answered with a slap in the face. The men were summarily rejected and classified 4C, the same category as enemy aliens. Those already in the military at the time of Pearl Harbor—and there were approximately five thousand young Japanese American men in uniform at the outbreak of war—suffered the humiliation of being stripped of their weapons. Some even had to endure the outrage of being thrown into the stockade like common criminals. The fever pitch of anti-Japanese hysteria was epitomized by General John L. DeWitt, the commanding general of the Western Theater of Operation. DeWitt stated, “A Jap’s a Jap. . . . It makes no difference whether he is an American or not. Theoretically he is still a Japanese, and you can’t change him.”

  But with the war effort consuming manpower, President Roosevelt made a swerving, 180-degree turn in policy. He declared in February 1943, “No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship regardless of ancestry.” Japanese Americans could now volunteer to serve in the military.

  The substance of American citizenship—most vitally, freedom and justice—was torn away from us, but now we were not to be denied the “responsibility” of citizenship. Japanese Americans had the right to be killed for a country that had humiliated them, stripped them of property and dignity, and placed them behind barbed wire. That was the sticking point of Question Number 27.

  Question Number 28 was as subtly insidious as Question Number 27 was blunt. The stealth of this question was in the single sentence asking respondents to “swear unqualified allegiance” to the United States and in the same breath “forswear . . . allegiance . . . to the Japanese emperor.” If one answered yes, intending an affirmative to the first part, it was also “forswearing” a presumed existing loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. If one were to answer no to deny any such preexisting loyalty to “forswear,” then the same no also rejected allegiance to the United States. It was perceived by many as a trap question. The two questions became an incendiary combination that exploded in turmoil in all ten internment camps, from Manzanar, California, to Rohwer, Arkansas.

  When the dust finally settled, it is remarkable that so many internees answered “yes-yes” to the two questions. This paved the way for recruitment officers to sign up young men for military service. The large number of men who signed on is a tribute to their extraordinary determination to make true the ideals of the flag to which they had pledged allegiance daily in their classrooms, even in camp.

  For my parents, the struggle to answer the Loyalty Questionnaire was torturous. My father was raised and educated in America. He had chosen this country as his home. Until the war broke out, his plan for himself and his family had been to build our future here. But he had been born in Japan, and U.S. law denied naturalized citizenship to Asian immigrants, though their children born in the U.S. would be citizens. Question Number 27 asked if he would be willing to serve in combat for the United States, a country that not only rejected him for citizenship but had incarcerated him because of his race. At forty years old, with a wife and three children all interned by that government, he was being asked to go on combat duty for such a country.

  Question Number 28, in essence, asked him to be a man without a country. My father felt no particular allegiance to the Emperor, but Japan was the country where he was born. It was the place where he still had relatives and memories. This question asked him to discard all that and swear allegiance to a country that would not have him. For my father, this was ultimately the point where he had to say enough—no more! It was now no longer a question of any citizenship but of simple dignity. He answered “no-no.”

  For my mother, Question Number 27 was almost laughable in its preposterousness were it not so anguishing. She answered no. The most tormenting question for her was Question Number 28. She was an American citizen, born in Florin, California. Her children were all Americans and knew only this country. But she was married to a man her country rejected for naturalization and now considered an enemy alien. Her native cou
ntry uprooted her family and brought us all here to this crude one-room barrack in Arkansas. And now this inquisition, this insult piled on top of injury. Question Number 28 was asking her to choose between her country and her husband, her birthplace or her family, one or the other.

  It was this scene that I had witnessed in that brief waking moment in the dark of that kerosene-lit night. I saw the moment when Mama was making the decision to answer no-no on her Loyalty Questionnaire. It was an act that was going to have her categorized “disloyal” by the U.S. government and the beginning of Mama’s eventual loss of her American citizenship.

  * * *

  My final memory of Rohwer, like my first, eight months before, is framed by a train window.

  At breakfast in the mess hall that morning, I said my good-byes to Paul, Eddy, Tadao, and Akira. I didn’t say good-bye to Ford and Chevy Nakayama because they were going on the train with us. The ladies were sniffling as they bowed their final farewells to each other. Some of the teenage girls were embracing and openly crying out loud.

  At the train by the main gate, Daddy shook hands somberly with everybody lined up to see us off. Then we got on. From the window, all I could see was a sea of sad faces—faces of people who had become our friends. Paul, Tadao and Akira, Mama’s friends Mrs. Imai and Mrs. Yasui, our neighbors the Mamiyas, the Yasudas, and the Takahashis. Mama said we will never see them again. The black barracks that seemed so stark in their uniformity when we first arrived now had identities. They had become the homes of friends. The guard towers were no longer ominous sentinels but simply a part of the landscape. And even the barbed wire fence had become just my familiar playground enclosure. All this now we were leaving forever.

  The lurch of the train as it started to move was the tug that broke the emotional grip. The sorrow was uncontainable. Some ladies wept as if there were no bottom to their grief.

  The train quickly picked up speed. I kept looking back at the crowd of people as it got smaller and smaller. Soon, our friends who were lined up at the railroad siding became just a cluster of colors. The low-lying barracks became nothing but a dark line on the horizon. The tall guard towers were the only structures I could see distinctly. As they got smaller, the sounds of crying, too, seemed to fade into soft sniffles. I kept on watching until a fly buzzing on the window glass began to look bigger than the towers. Then the train turned a bend in the tracks, and the guard towers disappeared. They were gone. Rohwer was now only a collection of memories.

  3

  Chill Wind of Tule Lake

  TULE LAKE WAS—(AND IS)—a cold, windswept, dry lake bed near the northern California-Oregon border. It was the bleakest opposite of Rohwer. Where the southern Arkansas air was lush and sultry in the summertime, while crisp and invigorating in the winter, Tule Lake’s higher elevation, at four thousand feet above sea level, always made the air sharp and biting, with a cold that in winter could plunge down to bone-chilling frigidity. Instead of the soft dust of Rohwer, here there was gritty gravel and cutting little shards of hard fossils and rocks. From verdant Rohwer, we had come to a harsh landscape barren of any foliage except for the spiny tumbleweeds that rolled aimlessly around the stark, flat surface. The only landmark was Castle Rock, a great brown abalone shell of a mountain that loomed bleak and solitary to the east.

  Camp Tule Lake was an internment camp converted into a maximum-security segregation camp for “disloyals,” those who had responded no-no to the key questions on the Loyalty Questionnaire, or those who had applied for repatriation or expatriation to Japan, or those whose loyalty was questionable “in the opinion of the Project Director.” The barbed wire fence and guard towers were here, too, but unlike Rohwer, the fence was heavy wire mesh and “man-proof.” The guard towers were turrets equipped with machine guns. The outer perimeter was patrolled by a half-dozen tanks and armored Jeeps. The guards were battle-ready troops at full battalion strength. All this bristly armament was positioned to keep imprisoned a people who had been goaded into outrage by a government blinded by hysteria. Half of the 18,000 internees in Camp Tule Lake were children like me.

  * * *

  I liked our barrack in our new Block 80. It was right across the way from the mess hall. To an always-hungry six-year-old, it was great to be just a short dash through the cold to the noisy warmth and comfort of food. But Mama hated it. She didn’t like the loud clanging and banging from the kitchen that began in early morning with the preparation for breakfast and continued on until the last cleanup after dinner. She didn’t like the idea of people lining up just outside our windows three times a day, every day. But most of all she complained bitterly about the smell that blew across from the kitchen—the lingering aroma of mass cooking, combined with detergents and other chemicals from the dishwashing and the acrid smell of disinfectants from the hosing down of the floor after dinner. “Stink terrible,” was Mama’s simple summation of the problem.

  Daddy was philosophical. He said that was the trade-off. Here at Tule Lake, we had two rooms. Each room individually was smaller than the one we had at Rohwer, but combined, we had more space. We now had what we could call a bedroom and a living room.

  “What trade-off?” Mama persisted. “Now toilet so far away. Children can’t go so far in cold.” She was right about that. Sometimes it was sheer torture dashing through the wind, muscles tightly held, to the latrine. There were occasions when I didn’t think I could make it in time. I would barely get there, frenzy in my eyes, jumpy with tension, just on the verge of bursting. Fortunately, I never had an accident, though Henry did. That was when Mama started collecting big coffee cans, which she kept in the bedroom for us kids.

  There was another reason I liked being across from the mess hall. Life in camp was usually boring and monotonous. But the mess hall was the social focal point and cultural center of the block. We were closer and had better access to those great special events.

  Sometimes, after dinner, movies were shown in the mess hall. A big white sheet would be hung up at one end and a bulky, black projection machine set up at the opposite end. Because we were right across the way, we always had the best seats. I saw Paul Muni in Scarface, Bette Davis in a movie where she suffered a lot, and the Gangbusters serials. Of them all, I remember Charles Laughton most vividly as the tragic monster in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The movie was a transporting experience. I empathized with, of all things, this love-starved, deformed cripple whom people scorned and insulted. I discovered the fascinating world of old Paris through his pathetically misshapen eyes. I ached when he pined. I hurt when he agonized. And his final plummet down the tower of Notre Dame with the bells banging and clanging was unforgettably terrifying. I discovered the mind-expanding, world-extending, emotion-exhausting joy of the movies in the mess hall across from our tar-paper barrack.

  At other times, we saw old Japanese movies about samurai and ninja and tear-jerking contemporary stories about longsuffering mothers and widows. Apparently, the sound track on some of these Japanese movies was missing. When that happened, a man from another block who specialized in these things would come and sit at the bottom of the screen. He had a dimly lit script in front of him, and he would narrate in Japanese what we were seeing on the screen. Not only did he narrate, but he played all the speaking roles as well. He would do the deep voice of the gruff samurai, then immediately become the crystalline-voiced princess, then the cackling old crone—all matching the fast-moving drama on the screen.

  At exciting high points in the movie, like a sword fight scene, he had bamboo clappers that he would slap rhythmically and his assistant would crash small cymbals. The cymbals made drama-heightening “chang” sounds and the clappers a rippling “bara-bara” sound, matching and energizing the swordplay on screen. The old folks called all samurai sword-fighting epics “chambara” movies, and I could see why. Whenever the swords started to fly, the “chang” and “bara-bara” sounds filled the mess hall.

  I found the performance of the narrator completely mesmerizing. Wi
th his voice alone, he became so many different people; he suffered anguish, experienced joy, provoked fear, and stirred so many emotions—wonderfully. After the movie, I asked Daddy how one man could become so many people and experience so much. He told me these people are called benshi. In the old days in Japan when movies had no sound, these benshi provided the aural dramatic accompaniment, making the silent movies talk. He told me that a good benshi in those days was considered an artist equal to actors. I said, “I think the man we saw tonight is an artist.” Daddy agreed.

  * * *

  Daddy was again elected block manager of our new Block 80 at Tule Lake. And again we lost him to meetings, pressing matters, and crises. And Mama again began the work of making a home for us—this time from two rooms. The living room windows got new curtains, of course, but now we had an extra bed in the living room, for which Mama made matching cover and pillows. It became our sitting couch. And she found beauty even in the tumbleweeds that rolled around outside. Mama brought them in and made austerely elegant arrangements.

  Cold wind would blow up through the spaces in the floorboards and the open knots in the wood planks. Daddy covered the knotholes using lids from empty tin cans. The one luxury appointment of the living room we owed to the cracks between the floorboards. To cover them up, Daddy and Mama went to the camp canteen many blocks away and bought a square of blue linoleum spangled with white stars. It was so shiny and smooth. Henry and I loved sliding on it in our stocking feet, and Reiko shrieked with delight when Daddy pulled her around on the slippery linoleum floor.

  In the limited space of the other room that became our bedroom, there was no possibility of esthetic arrangement. It was jammed with five beds lined up side by side. But Mama made absolutely sure of one thing. None of the beds were kita makura—pillows to the north. This was bad luck. In Japan, dead people were laid out with their heads to the north, she told us. All of our pillows were laid to the south. Daddy was farthest away, then Mama, then a little space for entry from the living room, then in reverse birth order Reiko, Henry, and me. I was oldest so I was the farthest away from Daddy and Mama. And I had the window over me. I could stand on my bed and look out on the back side of the next barrack. The curtain over Daddy’s window on the opposite side was always drawn closed. That was the side that faced the mess hall.