midnightinchicagoI had the benefit of meeting George Takei one day a few years back.
I bought his autobiography “To the Stars” and went to a book signing to ask him to autograph it. The signed book was to be a gift for my father.
At the bookstore in a suburb of Chicago , I finally met him. Takei was a very charming and polite man with a warm and rich voice. He spoke for a short while and then he was shunted to a desk by the store’s owner so the signing could begin.
I don’t know how many of you have read the book, but the part I was impressed with the most was how he and his family were put in the internment camps during World War II shortly after Pearl Harbor.
His family had done nothing wrong of course. Like the majority of all Japanese people in the country at that time, they had absolutely nothing to do with Pearl Harbor . Most Japanese people in the US , I am told, thought the attack was an atrocity.
Yet they were rounded up and put in camps. While these interned people were certainly well-fed, received medical care et al they were always regarded with suspicion, and there were armed patrols around the perimeter of the camps. The fact that many of the Japanese could not speak English only added to the prejudice people had against them.
Takei talks at length about how his mother and many of the other people in the camp tried to make the barracks they stayed in homey by adding little niceties wherever they could. Soon the world they found themselves in was made to resemble something more in keeping with their own personalities. They had made their own little world within a much larger one that continually mistreated them.
For Takei to have come out of such an experience to become this charming and polite man with a warm and rich voice impressed me greatly. I must say that he would have been just as impressive to me had he never become the famous Mr. Sulu.
I thought about these things as he signed the book I had gotten for my father, spoke a few words with him (I disremember what they were now), and moved on so the next person could have their turn.
I think we might all do well to have a care for those folks who are still interned in various camps, be they real internment camps, or personal internment camps of their own making.
Another thing to think about: Autistics are sometimes thought to be in their own little worlds and some autistics are, ironically enough, institutionalized for that reason.
My point: George Takei showed me that this group of Japanese individuals, many of which could not speak English, created their own little world within a world to keep their dignity. Maybe that is why many autistics live in a world of their own. And should that be held against them? Should we intern them for that?
Thomas D. Taylor
Co-Creator
MIDNIGHT IN CHICAGO
