They Called Us Enemy: Expanded Edition

The New York Times bestselling graphic memoir from actor/author/activist George Takei returns in a deluxe hardcover edition with bonus material! Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

Long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, George Takei woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s—and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” where they would be held for years behind barbed wire.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s impossible choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his extraordinary future.

This expanded edition includes sixteen pages of bonus content: a new afterword plus a behind-the-scenes tour featuring historical documents, scripts, sketches, photos, and more from George Takei and his co-creators.

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? These urgent questions resonate as powerfully today as they did decades ago. A testament to the power of memory, resilience, and speaking truth—this is essential reading for our times.

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