George Takei, Life at the Rohwer Internment Camp, 1994

Actor George Takei, a veteran of both stage and screen, is best known for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu in the original television series Star Trek. Most fans, however, are unaware that Takei spent part of his childhood with his family at two Japanese internment camps: the Rohwer War Relocation Center in rural Arkansas and the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California. In 1994, Takei recounted his childhood internment memories in To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei. Since this excerpt is taken from Takei’s autobiography, it reflects his own personal experiences as a child in an internment camp, but the reader can use this source to make more generalized observations about the internment experience.

“Rohwer!” the MPs continued bellowing. We rolled slowly alongside the barbed wire fence — so slowly that it seemed the train was forcibly impressing upon us each detail of the place to which it had brought us. In the bright sunlight, we could see each and every barb glinting and flashing like sharp, deadly gems strung out along the new wire fence. We passed tall guard towers with armed soldiers staring down at us. Beyond the fence, a distance away, we could see internees who had arrived earlier lined up and waving forlornly. Beyond them were rows upon rows of black tar-paper-covered Army barracks aligned in military parade precision. Mama recognized a friend among the people out to greet us, and she managed a wan smile and a wave. Daddy just stared out the window in intense silence. With a final lurch, the train came to a stop. Our grueling three days and two nights were finally over.

I jumped up from our hard wooden seat. I couldn’t wait to run out of the car. But Daddy grabbed me, made me sit down, and said we had to wait our turn. In as orderly a fashion as a trainload of exhausted, unwashed and nervously apprehensive people could muster, we gathered our luggage from the overhead shelves and under the seats and filed out in silence. Only the commands being shouted by the guards could be heard over the scuffling and the thumping of the mass exodus.

We waited beside our train car in the blistering Arkansas sun for quite a while before we finally heard someone shouting, “Takei family of five.” A guard with a clipboard was calling out our name. “Takekuma Takei and family.”

“Right here,” Daddy shouted back. The guard strode over and began to tag all of us with a card that read 6-2-F. We were told to continue to wear the ID number card that had been attached to our clothes at the beginning of the journey. Daddy seemed to stiffen as he was being tagged.

“What is this?” he said. It was more a demand than a question.

“That’s where the driver’s gonna take you,” the guard with the clipboard answered, “6-2-F.” It was the address of the single room that was to be our new home. Block 6, barrack 2, unit F.

All of the Block 6 people were loaded onto an open truck with their luggage, and after another quick check by the guards at the gate, we were driven through the camp entrance and past the waving group of early arrivals. Mama waved and nodded politely to the face she recognized. “It’s Imai-san,” she whispered. Daddy didn’t say anything. “Mrs. Imai. From North Hollywood,” she emphasized. Daddy remained impassive.

The camp had a huge, sprawling layout. We drove past block after similar block of black tar-paper barracks all the way to the southern edge of the camp. Every block was set up exactly alike. There were twelve barracks to a block, with six units of rooms to a barrack. Each block had six barracks lined up on each side with the toilet-shower-wash building and the mess hall in the center. A dirt road and a drainage ditch surrounded each block. A block was planned to house about 250 people. Rohwer had 33 blocks in all and, at its peak, a population of almost 8,500.

The driver unloaded us by the Block 6 mess hall and drove off to pick up more new arrivals. Our block was at the southern border of the camp right beside the barbed wire fence. We could see a guard tower, and it could see us. Daddy went off to locate 6-2-F, leaving Mama and us kids with the luggage.

While Mama, carrying our sister in her arms, chatted with the other ladies, Henry and I sat on the luggage waiting. Beyond the fence we could see a forest of tall trees with thick, shrubby underbrush. It was dense with dark shadows. From the distant depths of the woods, we occasionally heard eerie “caw-cawing” sounds. The forest looked and sounded like a scary place beyond the barbed wire fence.

“You know what the funny sound is?” a voice asked. I looked around. A big boy about eight years old sat on a nearby pile of baggage waiting for his father to come back.

“No. What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a dinosaur out there,” he whispered to us confidingly. Henry and I looked at each other. We had never heard of this thing.

“A dino-what?” I asked.

“A dinosaur, dummy,” he replied. “Don’t you know about dinosaurs?” We both shook our heads. “They’re great big monsters that lived millions of years ago and then they died.”

“They died?” That’s strange, I thought. “Then how come we can hear them out there?”

“Well,” he said after a long ominous pause, “the only place they didn’t die is right here in Arkansas. That’s why they put this fence up. To keep them caged in.”

“Oh,” I said. It was comforting to learn that those sharp barbs on the fence would keep the cawing monsters from attacking us.

“Okay. I found 6-2-F.” Daddy was back and he had with him two young men who had volunteered to help us. They grabbed all our baggage, big and small, arranging the smaller pieces under their arms. One of the young men even tried to take Mama’s big bag full of goodies, but she insisted on carrying that herself. “It’s heavy, Mrs. Takei,” he persisted. But that bulky cornucopia she never let anyone carry — not even Daddy. Mama brought it all the way from Los Angeles to Arkansas by herself, and she was determined to get it to our new home without help. I wondered what other surprises she had in store for us.

We tagged along after the struggling ragtag band with Daddy in the lead. It was hot and dusty, and they kicked up a golden cloud of fine Arkansas dirt. The black tar paper, instead of absorbing heat, seemed to radiate shimmering waves of hotness. Thankfully, Barrack 2 wasn’t too far off, and Unit F was the room at the near end of the barrack. Daddy stamped up the three raw-lumber steps in front of 6-2-F and opened the door. The heat that blasted out was enough to almost knock him over. If it was hot outside, it was a roaring furnace inside. Black did indeed absorb heat.

Daddy asked the young men to set our baggage down outside and thanked them for their help. Then he plunged into the baking-hot room to open the windows. He came staggering back out panting and drenched in perspiration. Half-cooked and florid from the ordeal, he gasped, “Let fresh air get in for a while, and then we’ll go in.” From her goody bag, Mama produced a big white cotton handkerchief and wiped Daddy’s brow.

When we finally went in, the air was still heavy and warm. The room was a bare sixteen-by-twenty-foot space with raw-wood plank walls, three windows, and a floor of wooden planks. And sitting in one corner like a big, fat practical joke was a solitary piece of furniture—a black potbellied stove. “Don’t touch it,” Daddy warned us kids. “It might still be hot.”

Mama stood near the door silently appraising the room. She was still carrying her goody bag. “What we sleep on?” she asked.

“They’re distributing Army cots at the other end of the block,” Daddy said. “I’ll get some people to help me bring them here.”

Just then, we heard voices and stamping and thumping from the other side of the wood plank wall. It was our next-door neighbors moving in.

“Holy jeez, it’s hot in here,” a male voice said. Some loud thumping could be heard and then, “Thanks very much.”

“Anytime. Don’t mention it,” another male voice replied.

“Yell when you need help,” the first voice said.

“We hear right through wall,” Mama whispered, distress knitting her brow. “We not have privacy.”

Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped,” Daddy whispered back. “I guess that’s the way it’s going to be.” He went out to bring in our baggage. I couldn’t understand why they were whispering with such concern in their voices. I thought it was fun to be able to listen in on the neighbors talking.

When Daddy got all our baggage inside, Mama finally set her bulky carryall bag down on top of the pile of suitcases. I had a feeling the moment had arrived. Mama looked at all of us smiling and announced, “I show you something.”

She reached in and hefted out a heavy rectangular object wrapped in her beige sweater decorated with pretty flowers made of yarn. The object had weight, I noticed, so it probably wasn’t something to eat. It must be something to play with. She carefully unwrapped her sweater from the mystery thing. It had still another layer of wrapping—my sister’s pink baby blanket. This was the heaviest and biggest thing in Mama’s bag. So I knew this had to be the reason she didn’t let anyone else carry it. This treat had to be the best of all the surprises she had produced from that well-worn carryall. She pulled a corner of the baby blanket off to reveal something metallic. It must be a toy for us, I thought.

The pink cloth slipped off easily to reveal a rectangular, mahogany-colored metal box with a dark blue inset on top with a slot in it. She slipped her fingers into the slot and pulled. Up popped something I had never expected. It was Mama’s portable sewing machine! We were speechless. We stood there looking at it in puzzlement.

“You brought that!” Daddy gaped, dumbfounded.

“I not want to leave it behind,” she said simply. “And children going to be needing new clothes.” There was a long silence.

Finally, Daddy said in a low whisper, “You knew this was forbidden.”

“I know,” she answered. “But children be needing new clothes.”

Daddy stared at the contraband we now had before us. Then suddenly, an astonishing thing happened. Daddy burst out laughing. Laughing out loud. The sound erupted from the bottom of his stomach, rising up through him and shaking his whole body. He shook so much, it looked as if he was trying to throw off some invisible thing that had been clinging onto his body for a long time. He held onto the sewing machine and laughed and laughed. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he choked out to Mama, “And you knew this was forbidden.” Mama, politely covering her mouth, joined in his laughing. We giggled, too, because they looked so funny.

We hadn’t laughed together like that in a long time. I didn’t really understand then the full resonance of all that laughter filling the small, bare room on the first day of our arrival at Rohwer. I do remember, though, that to us kids that sewing machine of Mama’s was the biggest, heaviest, and most crushing disappointment of all the wonderful goodies she pulled out of her old, worn-out bag.

Source: From To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei: Star Trek's Mr. Sulu. Copyright © 1994 by George Takei. Reprinted with permission of Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Evaluating the Evidence

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