{"id":1909,"date":"2005-10-27T21:11:01","date_gmt":"2005-10-28T04:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/10\/27\/a-childhood-in-the-internment-camps\/"},"modified":"2005-10-27T21:11:01","modified_gmt":"2005-10-28T04:11:01","slug":"a-childhood-in-the-internment-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1909","title":{"rendered":"A Childhood in the Internment Camps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Jasper (thanks, Josh!) sent me a link to this interview with George Takei<\/a> (most famous for playing Lt. Sulu on the original “Star Trek”). Takei has recently came out of the closet – to the press, at least (I take it he’s been open about his sexuality among his friends and family for many years). The interviewer asked Takei, who is Japanese-American, why he decided to come out of the closet. This, part of Takei’s answer, was for me the most interesting bit of the interview:\n

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young. My memories of camp…I was four years old to eight years old…they’re fond memories. We were first sent to a camp in Arkansas. I remember catching pollywogs and seeing them sprout legs, and then it snowed one winter in Arkansas, and for a Southern California kid, to discover snow was magical. Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp. We had to line up three times a day, and take our meal in a noisy mess hall…normal for me to go to school in a black tarpaper barracks, and I used to begin school every morning pledging allegiance to the flag, and I could see the barbed-wire fence out there, and the guard towers, saying, “With liberty and justice for all,”\u009d without being aware of the irony of those words. But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/pracut>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Josh Jasper (thanks, Josh!) sent me a link to this interview with George Takei (most famous for playing Lt. Sulu on the original “Star Trek”). Takei has recently came out of the closet – to the press, at least (I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}