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October, 2000, LOS ANGELES - I was en route to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., on my way home from my commission meeting when it happened. But I didn't learn of it until I landed back at LAX, in Los Angeles. Brad Altman, my business manager, informed me that my mother, Fumiko Emily Takei, had been rushed to the hospital and undergone emergency surgery.
I raced directly to the hospital. I was told that she had just come out of the operating room and was now in the intensive care ward. They said I was allowed to see her. I went in expecting the worst but I was still shaken when I saw Mama. My mother had tubes coming out of every part of her body - from her nose, through her mouth, from her stomach and so many from her thin, shriveled arms. Her half lidded eyes were dim and unseeing. It was devastating to see Mama like that.
The doctor told me that she had a perforation in her stomach through which gastric acid and blood were pouring into her abdomen causing her excruciating pain. If she hadn't been brought to the hospital in time, he said, it could have been fatal. I asked for her prognosis but he would not venture anything -- only that they would monitor the situation and go in 24-hour increments. That weekend at the hospital was to be the most harrowing of my life. Finally, on Monday, they told me that she had survived the surgery and that there was guarded expectation of a slow recovery.
We had such happy plans for her. The following week, on September 29, she was to have turned 88 years old and we had a gala birthday party scheduled for her at the Japanese American National Museum. Forty of her friends and relatives were to have gathered from near and as far away as Toronto, Canada, to help her celebrate this special birthday. All that now had to be postponed. Mama turned 88 in a hospital room with masses of life-sustaining tubes connected to her small body. But she did have a bevy of flowers and lots of get well cards surrounding her.
Mama has been living with me for the past two years. I moved her from the house in which she had been living for almost fifty years, the house she had shared with my father for thirty years until his death in 1979, the house in which I grew up. It was a house so filled with life memories. But she had to be moved from there into my house because she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. She was forgetting to take her medication, the cause of her first hospitalization. At my house, her care would be better monitored. I have a caregiver and my trusted business manager and friend, Brad, to help me out. At first, Mama thrived in my home.
But I began to sense some strange behaviors from Mama. She complained constantly of dust in the house. I was puzzled. My housekeeper keeps my home immaculate. I'd run my finger over the furniture to show her that there was no dust. Still, she complained. She habitually placed paper napkins over exposed food in the house, saying it's to protect them from the dust. Some mornings, she said that she'd wake up with a coat of dust on her face. So, I went into her room the next morning and woke her up by running my hand over her face. "See Mama," I pointed out to her. "There's no dust on your face." Yet, she would not stop. Her dust complaints were ceaseless and it was getting irritating. Then it dawned on me. When we were in the internment camp at Tule Lake during the war, I remembered dust everywhere. The cold wind blew the hard, gritty dust in through the spaces in the floorboard and through the knotholes into our flimsy barrack rooms. The mess hall where we took our meals always covered exposed food to protect them from the dust. Dust was a constant, relentless problem in camp. Mama, I realized, was reverting back to our days of incarceration in that World War II internment camp. It was heartbreaking.
But there were also times of joy and sharing. I used to take my mother on daily walks around the neighborhood. I'd point out the new flowers that had bloomed or the billowy white clouds up in the sky. And she would point out a great, old pine tree and tell me that it was a giant "bonsai." Once she told me of the time when I was a toddler and she used to take me out for walks. My favorite ways of teasing her, she said, was my running away from her and, when she tried to chase after me, I would run farther away giggling with great glee. These experiences from only a month ago before her hospitalization now seem like stories out of some distant past.
Mama came back from the hospital last Wednesday. Her scar from the surgery is healing steadily. But the trauma of the operation had dramatically altered her mental condition. It seems as though there is a new person inhabiting my Mama every twelve hours. At times, she adamantly refuses to talk - only a nod or a shake of the head, only a demanding point to things she wants. Then there are times when she is as charming as a coquettish little girl followed by other times when she is as feisty and combative as a bad drunk.
I savor the small joys when and where I can find them -- like this morning at breakfast. She was looking sleepy so I put my brightly smiling face right in front of her. She promptly mimicked my beaming face. Then I put on an expression of surprise and she immediately put on an exaggerated look of astonishment. When I frowned, she frowned. We spent breakfast time mugging and laughing. She is truly the mother of an actor.
I'm hoping that her return from the hospital to known surroundings and familiar patterns will help slow down the inevitable and relentless process of her disease. But I also know that I'm saying many good-byes every day to the Mama that I had.
December, 2004, LOS ANGELES - I hope you all enjoyed a happy holiday season. We celebrated Christmas with family and friends up in my cabin on a ridge overlooking the pine forest of the White Mountains of Arizona. On the day after Christmas, as we were relaxing after the day of merry making, news reports of a huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia flashed on the television screen. The initial announcement was that it was an 8.9 tremor. We Californians immediately recognized that as a giant quake. Thankfully, we were in Arizona, where earthquakes hardly ever occur. The damages and fatalities in Indonesia must be horrible, we all speculated. Then, the toll of lives lost was reported to be in the thousands. It sounded terrible. Soon, more pictures appeared on the screen. We saw scenes that seemed like something out of a science fiction movie. Vacationers on the beach calmly watching in fascination as the waters strangely ebbed out to sea revealing boulders and rocks as an enormous wall of water loomed up in the distance. Then, the odd phenomenon growing and growing more ominously as it approached closer and closer to the beach. Then the monstrous mountain of water crashing down in a gigantic cataclysm engulfing everything in its path - people, boats, houses, buildings. Everything. Anything in its path was swept up, mangled up, and washed away. It was devastation on a scale beyond belief. This was what is called a tsunami - a Japanese word for massive killer waves produced by great undersea disturbances. The earthquake off Indonesia had produced deadly tsunamis that ravaged all the South Asian nations along the Indian Ocean and as far away as the east coast of Africa.
The Richter scale number has now been revised up to an incredible 9.0. The death toll numbers have also continued to climb - tens of thousands at first, then fifty thousand, then a staggering seventy-five thousand. The enormity of the number of human lives lost became inconceivable. As I write this column, the number of fatalities is at 155,000 dead and countless more are missing.
Now, the challenge is to help the survivors. The lack of food, water, medicine and the danger of disease spreading have become the great perils. This is a human calamity of inconceivable proportions.
We must do all we can to help in this global catastrophe. I immediately connected with the American Red Cross and made a financial contribution to the International Response Fund. I urge you all to pitch in and support the many proven humanitarian organizations that are working to help the devastated people of South Asia. Please know the history of the group to which you make your contribution. Make sure that they are experienced and established aid organizations. This is the time of year when we celebrate by sharing our blessings. We are so blessed and the survivors of the tsunami are so overwhelmed. I hope our compassion can swell to tsunami proportions to help these desperate survivors. Please send money to aid them. From what I have learned, money is the most effective way of sending aid. Donated clothing, blankets, and canned foods, as generous as they may be, require the additional cost of transportation and the logistics of distribution. Contributions of money can cut through all that. It will buy the most needed aid in the regions of need and cost-effectively deliver them to the survivors. The compassion from our heart should be expressed with the good sense of our minds.
When we witness random horrors like that of the tsunami, we have to be so grateful for the blessing that we enjoyed during a safe holiday season. I thought of the blessing of my December spree in London preceding the holidays. I appreciate so much more now the familiar sight of the giant Christmas tree dominating Trafalgar Square - always there, always sparkling, always welcoming me to a Dickensian holiday in London. I love and savor so much more now, the holiday hubbub in the London air; the delight on the faces of the people in the galleries at the National Gallery, where the admission is always free to see some of the greatest works of art in the world. As I take that bracing walk across Waterloo Bridge over the Thames, I enjoy more deeply now the spectacular vista of the London skyline from St. Paul's Cathedral spanning all the way over to Big Ben and the Parliament Building. Even as I approach the ugliest building in London, the National Theater on the South Bank, I'm comforted by the thought that the best theater in the English language is housed in that hideously menacing concrete fortress. And, as wonderful a theater town as London is, it can also palm off some of the worst productions that I have ever seen - on this trip - of all plays - "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare! I also saw the most theatrically imaginative production of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeny Todd." At the curtain call, I found myself leaping up and enthusiastically joining in shouting, "Bravo, bravo, bravo!"
A special blessing I squeezed into this London trip was a quick excursion to Paris by Eurostar. The three-hour train dash through the chunnel never fails to impress me. To cross the English Channel by a manmade underwater tunnel, the impossible dream of many centuries, always thrills me.
Paris is to me the greatest urban achievement of humankind. I love the grand boulevards as well as the narrow cobbled alleyways. I love the regal orderliness of the Tuilleries Garden as well as the tiny courtyard gardens. I thrill at the grandeur of the Beaux Art palaces as well as the charm of ancient buildings that seem to lean over from the weight of centuries.
Most of all, the great pleasure of Paris - dining - whether at premiere gastronomic temples like Ledoyen or small family-run brasseries on I'lle St. Louis, is always unsurpassed. It seems impossible to get a bad meal in Paris.
We are so blessed. We share our blessings with loving family and friends during this holiday season. It is heartbreaking that there are so many people in South Asia who have lost so much - they even lost their family and their friends. Let us share our blessings with our larger human family. Let us give generously. The need is so great.
November, 2004, LOS ANGELES - It came with no advance notice. The phone rang. I picked up the receiver. It was the Vice Consul of Japan in Los Angeles, Yuko Kaifu, calling to inform me that I was to be honored by the Government of Japan. I was to be granted the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette at an audience with His Majesty, Emperor Akihito, at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. I was stunned! Out of the clear blue sky, with no forewarning, I, an American, was not only going to be given an international recognition by the Government of Japan, but granted an audience with the Emperor! I must have stammered some clumsy words of appreciation and hung up. I was so shocked I can't clearly remember what I said.
It still seemed like a dream as I flew over the white cotton clouds of the Pacific on my way to Tokyo. The letter from the Consul General of Japan's office that followed the phone call said the decoration was for my years of promoting U.S.-Japan relations. It said that my service with the Japanese American Citizens' League, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission as President Bill Clinton's appointee, the Japan-U.S Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, and my work with the Japanese American National Museum were appreciated, recognized, and honored by the Government of Japan. All those activities could surely be considered altruistic public service but they also integrated my pride in my Japanese ancestry with my American nationality. Most of all, I enjoyed being engaged with and contributing to all of those activities. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would be flying to Tokyo to be granted a decoration by the Emperor of Japan in the Imperial Palace for activities I enjoyed and found personally engaging.
The street alongside the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace is the favorite running route for runners in central Tokyo. It's the longest stretch without a cross street. I have run it often when I've been in Tokyo. On this occasion, however, I was going across the bridge over the moat onto the Palace grounds. There were dignitaries from many other countries who were also being honored. I chatted briefly with honorees from Canada, Australia, Brazil, Pakistan, and Mexico among many others who were gathered on the palace grounds. Three of us were Americans, one from St. Louis and two from Los Angeles. Staff from the Imperial Household, wearing somewhat Napoleonic looking coats with double rows of gold buttons down the front, were everywhere answering questions, giving directions, and organizing us.
We were lined up in formation and escorted up the grand staircase to the Imperial Audience Hall. If Japanese minimalism could be described as grandly elegant, this room had to be it. Two sides of the vast room were horizontal shoji screens. Both end walls were entirely covered by woven tapestry with only a pale hint of pastel clouds in the design. About a half-dozen crystal chandeliers of contemporary design hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room was a low, carpeted platform. There was no other furnishing. A man in a gold-buttoned coat announced the Grand Chamberlain and an extraordinarily tall, slim, imperious-looking man stepped forward. He wore a formal swallowtail coat. He instructed, in softly commanding tones, the procedure that was to be followed in the ceremony. Gold-buttoned staffers quietly sidled up to those who did not understand Japanese to whisper translations into their ears.
We were told when the Emperor would make his entrance, how we were to bow, when we were to bow, how often and how long we were to hold our bows. Then he stepped away and grandly announced the entrance of His Majesty, the Emperor. Silently, seemingly automatically, the shoji screen slid open. It revealed a magnificent garden with a placid lake. I could see the Emperor walking down the veranda as he approached the opened shoji screen. We all bowed in unison as instructed. We rose when he entered the audience hall. He too was dressed formally in a swallowtail coat. There were a few more bows as he stepped up onto the low dais. We bowed again before he began to speak. In contrast to the Grand Chamberlain, the Emperor's voice was warm, affable, and somewhat high pitched.
He maintained a gracious smile throughout. He thanked all of us for the services we had rendered in promoting friendship between our nations and Japan and wished us good fortune in our future endeavors. With those simple congratulatory words, he stepped down and smilingly passed in review before us. The opposite shoji screens noiselessly slid open. The Emperor turned at the opened screens, smiled and nodded back to us. We again bowed down in unison. When we rose up, we could see him regally walking away down the veranda.
That evening and for another day after, friends and relatives in Japan celebrated this extraordinary honor for me with every meal. They wanted to see and touch the splendid medal that I had received. One very busy friend could join me only for a late night drink after work. As he toasted me in the rooftop lounge of the Imperial Hotel overlooking Tokyo, the lights of the city seemed to be sparkling in happy celebration with us. If only my parents could have lived to share these moments with me, I thought. How complete this honor would have been.
I had to cut my stay in Tokyo short because I had a professional engagement scheduled in Honolulu, Hawaii. The location was as if it had been perfectly pre-planned - half way back from Tokyo to Los Angeles. I had been engaged to narrate Aaron Copeland's "Lincoln Portrait" with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra on Veterans' Day Weekend at the Blaisdell Concert Hall. The concert itself seemed as if it had been perfectly pre-arranged for this Japanese American - an American note to follow a decoration from the Government of Japan. This Veterans' Day concert in Honolulu was celebrating a great American President and honoring all those throughout history who had fought for our democracy.
The singularly American music of a groundbreaking American composer with the immortal words of a great American President, Abraham Lincoln - and I had the honor of speaking them. It was one honor following another - one Japanese and this one, American. The concert with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra was a great popular success and I received laudatory reviews. Of course, there were the Star Trek fans who crowded around the dressing room door for autographs after the concert. The flight back to Los Angeles felt like floating on the proverbial cloud nine.
My stay back in Los Angeles, however, had to be abbreviated. Two nights in my own bed and I was off again to another hotel bed - this time in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the opening of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center and Park. This is the official name of the President Bill Clinton Library. I was off to help celebrate this exciting and historic occasion.
I remembered the excitement of my flight to Bill Clinton's first inauguration back in January of 1993. We arrived in Washington D.C. to a gray, overcast sky. But, on the morning of the inauguration, the sum broke through and gave the new President from Arkansas a crisp, bright, golden inauguration. I called it, "the luck of Clinton." There was the sense of a new beginning with new ideas and new energy. There was optimism in the crisp inaugural air for the future of America.
Indeed, Bill Clinton's two-term presidency was filled with extraordinary achievements. The fresh initiatives and reforms he brought to government transformed the nation. Despite all the turbulence during his tenure, he left the nation with a surplus. Mindful of his human weaknesses, I am still a Bill Clinton admirer. He gave me the opportunity to serve on the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, an independent Federal agency. He invited me to my first State Dinner at the White House. Bill Clinton was the President who corrected a grievous oversight of over a half-century by honoring 19 Japanese American veterans of Word War II with the highest military recognition the nation can grant, the Medal of Honor. Among those 19 veterans is the U.S. Senator from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm on a bloody battlefield in Italy.
The Clinton Presidential Center is the repository, museum, and library of the records of his presidency. I am a part of the content of the Center and had contributed financially to the building as well. I feel I am a part of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center.
I arrived in Little Rock excited as well as with a sense of history. The sky was gray and overcast - again, just as it was on his first inauguration. I assured everybody, "Don't worry. There's the luck of Clinton."
The morning of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center was still gray and overcast. But I could see a patch of blue in the sky far to the south. Pointing it out to the people gathered for the opening, I reassured them, "Look over there. There's the luck of Clinton approaching." Alas, the tiny blue patch of sky drifted off in the opposite direction chased away by the ominously black rain clouds. Even before the program began, it started to rain. It was cold, icy rain. We were not only wet when the program began but visibly shivering under our ponchos. Then the rocker, Bono, began to sing. We didn't need to hear him howl out at us, "When the rain came, when the rain came." We knew. We were sitting in the pouring rain, wet and freezing. It got so cold we thought we were in danger of hypothermia. The four Presidents, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were yet to be introduced. It would be an extraordinary moment - four presidents all in the same place at the same time. But, we couldn't take the cold any longer. We fled back to the hotel to watch them introduced on television. The four presidents smiled bravely but we knew how uncomfortable they must have been. They were good soldiers. They all showed themselves to be extraordinary people. Their collective grace, humor, warmth, and eloquent mutual respect made us all feel proud to be Americans. The four men truly are presidential. We applauded all four U.S. Presidents from the warmth and cozy comfort of our hotel.
The gala reception the night before in the Presidential Center that preceded the opening, however, was a glittering affair. The new building glowed in celebratory lights. Fireworks exploded like exotic flowers in the darkened Arkansas sky. There were political luminaries everywhere. I spotted Leon Panetta, Joe Lockhart, and Paul Begala from the Clinton administration; George Stephanopoulos and Geraldo Rivera from the media; Howard Dean from the presidential primaries; and Jessie Jackson, former California governor, Gray Davis, and the former Mayor of Detroit, Dennis Archer were among the celebrants. It was rumored that Brad Pitt and Barbra Streisand were also there but I didn't see them. I really didn't need to see Bono to have him sing to us the coming of the rain. It was a dazzling and rainless opening reception.
The Presidential Center is a magnificent museum overlooking the Arkansas River on one side and a sensitively restored historic structure, the Old Choctaw Railroad Station, which is now the Clinton School of Public Service, on the opposite side. It also contains the library for researchers as well as the repository of the papers from the Clinton years. The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center is a new landmark of Little Rock and a proud center of learning and inspiration to build a better future for America.
September, 2004, LOS ANGELES - In this age of jet travel, time is shortened, work is intensified, and we cover many bases. We dash from one place to another on varying missions in a very full month. And as usual, September had me on quick trips to New York for a meeting and to Emeryville, California, for a voice-over job. But travel can also transport in time as well as to a place. Last month, I went back to my boyhood.
I traveled to a place called Rohwer in southeast Arkansas where I spent a part of my childhood years. It is a place of memories for me - memories that glow with a golden haze. I remember the lush bayous filled with strange sounds and creepy, crawly creatures. I remember catching pollywogs in a ditch and watching them miraculously sprout legs and eventually turn into frogs. I remember waking up one magical winter morning and discovering everything covered in white - cold, soft snow. I also remember the barbed wire fence that kept me confined in that camp. I traveled back to a time of innocence, a time when I was quite unaware of the devastation that had befallen my parents and 120,000 other Japanese Americans. It was World War II and our crime was that we just happened to "look like the enemy."
A child is incredibly adaptable to the most abnormal of conditions. To me, the tall guard towers and the barbed wire fence that incarcerated my family and me became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality. It became normal for me to line up three times a day to eat in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with Daddy to a communal shower and bathe with many men. It became normal for me to go to school in a black, tarpaper-covered barrack. I learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag within sight of armed sentries watching over us. I was too young to appreciate the irony as I recited the words, "with liberty and justice for all."
The return to Arkansas was undeniably filled with many emotions - but this time with deeper understanding and an overpowering sense of uplift. The pilgrimage to Rohwer was on the final day of a richly enlightening week in Little Rock, Arkansas. A week-long series of programs called "Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas" was being capped with a long bus caravan that rolled past mile after mile of ripening cotton fields to Camp Rohwer as well as to a second internment camp in Arkansas called Camp Jerome.
The week was awe-inspiring. Over 1,300 people, many of them former internees with their children and grandchildren, had gathered in Little Rock from all over the nation. There were lawyers, educators, historians, politicians, and others from all walks of life. The Japanese American National Museum, working in partnership with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock opened eight exhibits in four different venues located throughout the city. The principal exhibits; "America's Concentration Camp" and "Against Their Will: The Japanese American Experience in WWII Arkansas" are in the Statehouse Convention Center. The stirring story of young Japanese Americans who went from unjust incarceration behind barbed wire fences to fight heroically for the United States are told by three deeply moving exhibits in the Douglas MacArthur Museum of Military History. A handsome and affecting art exhibit of the paintings of Henry Sugimoto, who was incarcerated in both of the two Arkansas camps, can be viewed at the Cox Arts Center and two exhibits on the arts and crafts in the internment camps are at the Fine Arts Building of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Saturday was a one-day symposium composed of twenty-seven sessions with discussions that ranged from democracy to civil rights to military service to historic preservation. For me, the most daunting part of the day's program was the luncheon. President Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, was on the printed program as our luncheon keynote speaker. As we all knew by that time, his emergency heart surgery in New York had sidelined him from all public activities. I was asked to substitute for him - substitute for the silver tongued former President of the United States! The challenge was as awesome as the honor. I had to rise to the honor.
I began by sharing the heartwarming joy I felt on meeting people I had not seen in decades and of people who remembered me as a little boy but that I - try as I might - could not. I talked of my fond memories of a boyhood in Rohwer. I talked of the stinging irony I felt on seeing the crumbling old monument in the cemetery at Rohwer - a memorial to Japanese American soldiers who went from internment camps to perish in a war fighting for democracy and are now buried at the site of their incarceration. I talked of an invitation I received in the year 2000 from President Clinton to the White House to witness the granting of nineteen medals of honor, the highest military recognition of the nation, to nineteen Japanese American veterans of World War II. Fifty-five years before, at the end of the war, these men had been recognized with the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest military honor, for their heroic deeds. However, after a review mandated by order of Congress in 1996, it was found that their acts of valor eminently merited the highest honor. Only wartime prejudice had reduced their tribute. Among these extraordinary members of the Greatest Generation receiving the Medal of Honor was the senior U.S. Senator from Hawaii, Senator Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm on a bloody battlefield in Italy. These men and all the Japanese American veterans of World War II had transformed this nation. They made my America today a reality.
I talked of the challenges of our democratic ideals. It takes courageous, principled people to struggle to fulfill those ideals. Throughout the history of our nation, injustices were battled by the disenfranchised. African Americans struggled against slavery, then Jim Crow laws, and other discrimination to transform this nation. Women, who were denied any role in leadership, struggled to gain equality and justice and helped to transform this nation. In the history of the American southwest, Latinos had endured a host of injustices but still they struggled to fulfill the ideals of our nation. I talked that day in Little Rock about our democracy as a dynamic work-in-progress. All of us, the great diversity of this land, working in concert as Americans carry out the promise of our American ideals. When I finished, the audience rose up in a standing ovation. That week in Little Rock, Arkansas will forever be an unforgettable benchmark in my life.
The "Life Interrupted" programs that examine a dark chapter of American history were themselves history making. We have profoundly important lessons for our times today to be learned from the exhibits, the symposium, and the pilgrimage. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation whose generous support made it possible for us to bring history so relevantly alive.
A great bonus of the trip to Little Rock was a preview peek at the dazzling new William Jefferson Clinton Library and Presidential Center set to open on November 18th. The hard-hat tour of the Clinton library, museum, and school of public service was wonderfully tantalizing. The modern steel and glass building is a sleek symbol of the "bridge to the 21st century" that President Clinton so often spoke about. The sensitively restored old Choctaw Railway Station in a landscaped park, which will house the Clinton School of Public Service, is the very symbol of history brought back into the current of contemporary life. I toured the work-in-progress with a few students working hard on the Grand Opening and Dedication of this newest of Presidential Centers, Mike Eady and Sara Beth Crow. I promised Mike and Sara Beth that I would return to Little Rock for that history-making day in November. I told them I have my own roots in Arkansas.