Why I Love The Country That Once Betrayed Me” By George Takai And Answer Questions

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Please read the attached article and answer the questions in complete sentences. This is an article written by actor George Takai that reveals his feelings for the United States in spite of the treatment he and his familiy recieved during World War II.

  1.  In what ways was Takei’s grandparents’ journey to the United States similar to the journey made by the Starship Enterprise alluded to in the opening of the speech? How did both groups “boldly go where no one has gone before?”
  2. What function does Takei’s citing of the Declaration of Independence have on his argument for “why he [loves] a country that once betrayed [him]?” In what ways does his thesis gain support from the tenets of the Declaration? Use evidence from the text to support your answers.
  3. Identify Takei’s claim regarding heroism. Evaluate Takei’s depiction of the heroic soldiers fighting the Germans at the Gothic Line. What is the importance of this story to Takei’s claim? How is it effective in illustrating the allegiance the Japanese- Americans had to a country that was suspicious of them?

    Name: Class:

    “George Takei” by Bart is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

    Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me By George Takei

    2014

    George Takei is an American actor, director, author, and activist of Japanese descent. Takei is well-known for his role on Star Trek, a science fiction television and movie series. In this TED Talk, Takei discusses his experiences being interned during WWII and how he feels about America today. As you read, take notes on what Takei values about America.

    I’m a veteran of the starship Enterprise.1 I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship with a crew made up of people from all over this world, many different races, many different cultures, many different heritages, all working together, and our mission was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

    Well — (Applause) — I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

    I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.2

    Japanese-Americans, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. And the hysteria grew and grew until in February 1942, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all Japanese- Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily3 rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process.4 Due process, this is a core pillar of our justice system. That all disappeared. We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps in some of the most desolate5

    places in America: the blistering hot desert of Arizona, the sultry6 swamps of Arkansas, the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and two of the most desolate places in California.

    [1]

    1. the spacecraft from Star Trek, a science fiction television and movie series 2. Hysteria (noun): exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion 3. in a prompt or direct manner 4. the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person 5. Desolate (adjective): deserted of people; in a state of bleak emptiness 6. hot and humid

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    On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday, and just a few weeks after my birthday, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister and me up very early one morning, and they dressed us hurriedly. My brother and I were in the living room looking out the front window, and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. They carried bayonets7 on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch and banged on the door. My father answered it, and the soldiers ordered us out of our home. My father gave my brother and me small luggages to carry, and we walked out and stood on the driveway waiting for our mother to come out, and when my mother finally came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that scene. It is burned into my memory.

    We were taken from our home and loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families. There were guards stationed at both ends of each car, as if we were criminals. We were taken two thirds of the way across the country, rocking on that train for four days and three nights, to the swamps of Arkansas. I still remember the barbed wire fence that confined me. I remember the tall sentry tower8 with the machine guns pointed at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from my barrack9 to the latrine.10 But to five-year-old me, I thought it was kind of nice that they’d lit the way for me to pee. I was a child, too young to understand the circumstances of my being there.

    Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely11 abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality.

    When the war ended, we were released, and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. My parents decided to go back home to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place. We were penniless. Everything had been taken from us, and the hostility was intense. Our first home was on Skid Row12 in the lowest part of our city, living with derelicts,13 drunkards and crazy people, the stench of urine all over, on the street, in the alley, in the hallway. It was a horrible experience, and for us kids, it was terrorizing. I remember once a drunkard came staggering down, fell down right in front of us, and threw up. My baby sister said, “Mama, let’s go back home,” because behind barbed wires was for us home.

    [5]

    7. a blade that is fixed to the open end of a rifle 8. a tower where a soldier is stationed to keep guard of a place 9. a building or group of buildings, usually intended to lodge soldiers

    10. a toilet or outhouse 11. Grotesque (adjective): comically or repulsively ugly or distorted 12. an area in Downtown Los Angeles that contains one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in America 13. a person without a home, a job, or property

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    My parents worked hard to get back on their feet. We had lost everything. They were at the middle of their lives and starting all over. They worked their fingers to the bone, and ultimately they were able to get the capital together to buy a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood. And I was a teenager, and I became very curious about my childhood imprisonment. I had read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy. All men are created equal, we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I couldn’t quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment. I read history books, and I couldn’t find anything about it. And so I engaged my father after dinner in long, sometimes heated conversations. We had many, many conversations like that, and what I got from them was my father’s wisdom. He was the one that suffered the most under those conditions of imprisonment, and yet he understood American democracy. He told me that our democracy is a people’s democracy, and it can be as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible14 as people are. He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work. And he took me to a campaign headquarters — the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency — and introduced me to American electoral politics. And he also told me about young Japanese- Americans during the Second World War.

    When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service, and categorized as enemy non-alien. It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you’re volunteering to fight for your country, but that was compounded with the word “non-alien,” which is a word that means “citizen” in the negative. They even took the word “citizen” away from us, and imprisoned them for a whole year.

    And then the government realized that there’s a wartime manpower shortage, and as suddenly as they’d rounded us up, they opened up the military for service by young Japanese-Americans. It was totally irrational, but the amazing thing, the astounding thing, is that thousands of young Japanese- American men and women again went from behind those barbed-wire fences, put on the same uniform as that of our guards, leaving their families in imprisonment, to fight for this country.

    They said that they were going to fight not only to get their families out from behind those barbed-wire fences, but because they cherished the very ideal of what our government stands for, should stand for, and that was being abrogated15 by what was being done.

    All men are created equal. And they went to fight for this country. They were put into a segregated all Japanese-American unit and sent to the battlefields of Europe, and they threw themselves into it. They fought with amazing, incredible courage and valor.16 They were sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit proportionally.

    [10]

    14. Fallible (adjective): capable of making mistakes 15. to repeal or do away with something 16. Valor (noun): great courage in the face of danger

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    “Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me” from TEDxKyoto by George Takei. Copyright © 2014 by TED. This text is licensed under CC BY- NC-ND 4.0.

    There is one battle that illustrates that. It was a battle for the Gothic Line. The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside, rocky hillside, in impregnable17 caves, and three allied battalions18

    had been pounding away at it for six months, and they were stalemated.19 The 442nd was called in to add to the fight, but the men of the 442nd came up with a unique but dangerous idea: The backside of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff. The Germans thought an attack from the backside would be impossible. The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible. On a dark, moonless night, they began scaling that rock wall, a drop of more than 1,000 feet, in full combat gear. They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff. In the darkness, some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. They all fell silently. Not a single one cried out, so as not to give their position away. The men climbed for eight hours straight, and those who made it to the top stayed there until the first break of light, and as soon as light broke, they attacked. The Germans were surprised, and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line. A six-month stalemate was broken by the 442nd in 32 minutes.

    It was an amazing act, and when the war ended, the 442nd returned to the United States as the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War. They were greeted back on the White House Lawn by President Truman, who said to them, “You fought not only the enemy but prejudice, and you won.”

    They are my heroes. They clung to their belief in the shining ideals of this country, and they proved that being an American is not just for some people, that race is not how we define being an American. They expanded what it means to be an American, including Japanese-Americans that were feared and suspected and hated. They were change agents, and they left for me a legacy. They are my heroes and my father is my hero, who understood democracy and guided me through it. They gave me a legacy, and with that legacy comes a responsibility, and I am dedicated to making my country an even better America, to making our government an even truer democracy, and because of the heroes that I have and the struggles that we’ve gone through, I can stand before you as a gay Japanese-American, but even more than that, I am a proud American.

    Thank you very much. (Applause)

    [15]

    17. unable to be captured or broken into 18. a large body of troops ready for battle 19. a state in which neither side is able to gain an advantage or win

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    Text-Dependent Questions Directions: For the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete sentences.

    1. PART A: Which of the following identifies George Takei’s main claim in the text? A. While America’s democracy is imperfect, the ideals that the country represents

    encourage citizens to continue fighting for it. B. America’s democracy only protects the rights of certain identities, regardless of

    what they contribute to the nation. C. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II proves that the

    government values the safety of some citizens over others. D. The government’s actions against Japanese Americans during World War II

    shows that the United States is not a true democracy.

    2. PART B: Which detail from the text best supports the answer to Part A? A. “the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all

    Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process.” (Paragraph 3)

    B. “All men are created equal, we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I couldn’t quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment.” (Paragraph 8)

    C. “He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work.” (Paragraph 8)

    D. “That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service, and categorized as enemy non-alien. It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you’re volunteering to fight for your country” (Paragraph 9)

    3. PART A: How does Takei’s understanding of his internment develop over time? A. He comes to realize that his internment was relatively easy compared to other

    Japanese Americans. B. He normalizes his experiences at first but eventually understands that his

    internment was not an example of democracy at its best. C. He begins to view his internment as a betrayal by America and loses faith in the

    ideals he once associated with it. D. He appreciates the internment camps as a child and isn’t able to understand the

    injustice of the government’s actions until he is an adult.

    4. PART B: Which quote from the text best supports the answer to Part A? A. “It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Being

    in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality.” (Paragraph 6) B. “My baby sister said, ‘Mama, let’s go back home,’ because behind barbed

    wires was for us home.” (Paragraph 7) C. “My parents worked hard to get back on their feet. We had lost everything. They

    were at the middle of their lives and starting all over.” (Paragraph 8) D. “we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I

    couldn’t quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment.” (Paragraph 8)

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    5. How does Takei’s discussion of the 442nd contribute to the meaning of the text?

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    Discussion Questions Directions: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be prepared to share your original ideas in a class discussion.

    1. In the context of the text, how does a person overcome adversity? How did Japanese Americans challenge the prejudice they experienced during WWII? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other literature, art, or history in your answer.

    2. In the context of the text, what are the effects of prejudice? How does the article explore the various ways in which Japanese Americans were discriminated against during WWII? How did this continue to affect them after they were released from internment? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other literature, art, or history in your answer.

    3. In the context of the text, how has America changed over time? How does the text explore America’s shifting views on democracy? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other literature, art, or history in your answer.

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    • Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed Me
      • By George Takei
      • 2014
      • Text-Dependent Questions
      • Discussion Questions