George Takei’s memoir of his childhood in a World War II incarceration camp is to be released in 2019, reports IDW Publishing. The graphic novel, titled They Called Us Enemy, is a reminder of the horrors of past U.S. policies of segregation, especially timely with the current news surrounding the separation and detention of immigrant families.
Takei’s life was changed forever when his family had to give up everything and relocate in 1942 due to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The order forced approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into incarceration camps as a part of alleged wartime “security measures.”
“It has always been my mission in life to raise the awareness of the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans in barbed-wire prison camps during World War II,” Takei told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I had no idea how chillingly relevant that dark chapter of American history would be to our times today.”
SDCC 2018: George Takei’s Graphic Memoir ‘They Called Us Enemy’ From Top Shelf & IDW In 2019 https://t.co/GOE6ATD2F1 pic.twitter.com/5ZAlvhIVab
— Comicon (@TheComicon) July 22, 2018
IDW Publishing describes the memoir:
“They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.”
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