Some years ago now, maybe thirty, pressures from my job at Keio University in Japan had reached a boiling point and I decided what I needed to clear my head and free my spirit was to drive across the U.S. I had done it twice before and it had worked wonders. So one summer day in the early 90s I headed out from my U.S. home in Berkeley, California to visit my family and the place I grew up in Connecticut. Two of my students from my work home in Japan asked if they could come with me. I decided the trek would be better with their company than heading out by my lonesome, so I said yes.
Not long after starting out, still in California, we found ourselves driving through Manzanar, one of the ten forced relocation camps set up to house Americans of Japanese ancestry between March 1942 and November 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, acting on a phantom fear that Japanese immigrants somehow posed more of a wartime threat than other immigrants from around the world, including my German-born mother and the many Italian-American friends I grew up with in the post-war 1940s and 50s. Both boys were familiar with the name and insisted we stop.
Since our visit, Manzanar has become a monument and a museum to injustice. But when the three of us got out of the car, the first thing that struck us was that the place had been swept clean of all traces of its historical significance. There was nothing to see but sand and dust and a bit of desert vegetation. Nothing to indicate it had once housed ten thousand men, women and children whose only justification for their interment was their race. Most spoke only English and had never known any home but their Sacramento, Los Angeles or other West-Coast cities and towns.
The boys were outraged at the conspicuous effort to sanitize this ugly chapter in American history, and I felt a deep sense of shame over this obvious backslide in the American effort to form an ever more perfect democracy.
I am married to a Japanese. He is also an American citizen, which makes him, at least technically, an issei (first generation Japanese immigrant), and we live in large part in a Japanese-American cultural space. So when George Takei's second graphic novel, It Rhymes with Takei, came out this year, Taku ordered a copy and I devoured it in two sittings in two days. That led me to turn to his first graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy, published in 2020, which I had not gotten around to reading - and finished it off in another day.
George Takei is best known as the actor who played Helmsman Hikaru Sulu in the original version of Star Trek. He lived as a closeted gay man till the age of 68, fearing that revealing that he was gay would lead to the end of his acting career. In It Rhymes with Takei, he makes up for lost time by narrating his personal coming out story. In time, he marries his lifelong partner, Brad Altman, who then takes the Takei family name. George and Brad Takei have since dedicated their lives to the two causes of gay liberation and raising the awareness of the injustice of Executive Order 9066.
I live in constant awareness of the debt I owe to the lesbians and gay men who paved the way for me to live my life as an openly gay man. When Taku and I got married at San Francisco City Hall in 2013 we not only got to use the rotunda but were thrilled to learn that the ceremony would take place right by the bust of Harvey Milk. And we saw as icing on the cake the fact that the mother of the woman marrying us had sworn Harvey Milk in when he became San Francisco Supervisor.
I still use the word "husband" self-consciously when I identify my life partner. But I use it freely, aware that I get to do so by standing on the shoulders of heroes to the gay liberation movement such as Harvey Milk and Bayard Rustin, the organizer of Martin Luther King's March on Washington. Since San Francisco is known world-wide as a center - some even call it the capital - of the gay liberation movement, it has been hard not to get jaded with the coming out stories I've listened to and nodded in sympathy with. I've heard many voices suggesting it's time to stop reducing gay liberation to the moment of coming out and simply enjoy the freedom to be openly gay without repercussion. So were it not for the fact that George Takei also portrays his life as a struggle to process the indignity of Executive Order 9066, I might have put his coming out on the back burner. Instead, reading his two books back to back has caused me to focus on the dark side of American history, now, right at the time when I've been trying to avoid the relentless 24/7 news of the ways American democracy is being systematically dismantled.
My political orientation is on the progressive side of the spectrum, so I share the view that patriotism is both a worthy sentiment and that it involves recognition of the fact that the democracy project involves occasional steps backwards. I get impatient with the folks on the right whose familiarity with the global refugee problem is out of date. But even back in the times when we were among the more sought after destinations for asylum seekers, America's inclination to pat itself on the back was unworthy. And leftists today angry at the Trump administration for scooping innocents off the street and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador, sabotaging its relations with it neighbors Canada and Mexico and with its friends in Europe and around the world, need to remember the genocide of the American Indians and the long years of slavery and segregation. But also the shameful fact that the uprooting of loyal Japanese-American immigrants on the West Coast was due to a racist inability to see them the same way as we saw German or Italian immigrants on the East Coast, as people who had left their homelands behind and taken on an American identity. There are ways to determine whether an immigrant is loyal. Race is not one of them.
Fully comfortable in my skin as a "good-as-the-next-guy" American despite my gay (and can I add German-American Japan-resident) identities, I feel a yawn coming on when faced with coming-out stories. So very "been-there-done-that." But as I was reading George Takei's books I found my mind wandering. A good book can take you up and away from preoccupation with the here-and-now. It can set you down in a place where you wouldn't otherwise choose to go to. I found myself seeing the familiar in a new way and focusing on the many whose lives go unnoticed.
It's easy to become despondent over the efforts of the JD Vances and Stephen Millers of the world to dismantle American democracy. And easy to overlook somebody like Alan Turing, whose work in breaking the Nazi codes contributed directly to the defeat of Hitler. Or Oliver Sipple, who grabbed the arm of President Ford's would-be assassin in 1975 and saved his life. Sipple was then outed as a gay man and his career went into the toilet. Turing's fate was even more harsh. He was driven to suicide after exposure of his secret. Reading It Rhymes with Takei brought me not only back in time to my own coming-out youth; it brought me back to the life of Alan Turing. George Takei has had the benefit of the years of positive social change that his predecessors lacked, but it still took him sixty-eight years to come out nonetheless. It Rhymes with Takei and They Called Us Enemy are valuable pieces of the historical record of what men and women, heroic and non-heroic, go through to shake off social prejudice.
One final comment - about Takei's decision to tell his stories in manga (graphic novel) form.* My years in Japan were crucial to my way of making sense of the world and my years as a teacher put me in a learning environment where education is regularly defined as "leading one out of" ignorance and stale assumptions. As I picked up Takei's graphic novels, I remembered a conversation with one of my students who heard me sneer at the ubiquitous manga in the hands of fellow train companions during my long commutes in Japan. "Nobody reads anymore!" I complained.
"You need to broaden your perspective," my student suggested. "You place too much stress on the written word; you're missing the many ways people today take in information." He was right. A picture is still worth a thousand words, and a graphic depiction of an event, if done right, can be a powerful means of conveying a story.
I believe that Japanese-American George Takei knew what he was doing when he chose to share his life in manga form.
*"Manga" is the way the first two syllables of the word "magazine" are pronounced in the Tokyo (and standard) dialect of Japanese. Japanese tends to adopt only the first two syllables of multi-syllabic English loan words.
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