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George Takei Survived Japanese Internment Camp Thanks to Parents' Love

By Ted Cox | September 1, 2017 8:10am
 George Takei tells his own tale of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II in conjunction with the Alphawood Gallery exhibit
George Takei tells his own tale of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II in conjunction with the Alphawood Gallery exhibit "Then They Came for Me."
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Alphawood Gallery

LAKEVIEW — Although best known as the helmsman Sulu in the futuristic, post-racial sci-fi TV and film franchise "Star Trek," actor George Takei has found himself drawn time and again into the United States' prejudiced past — which makes him uniquely qualified to talk about its present.

Takei speaks in Chicago Thursday in conjunction with the ongoing Alphawood Gallery exhibit, "Then They Came for Me," about Japanese-American incarceration in internment camps during World War II. "An Evening With George Takei" is set for 7 p.m. at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave., with tickets already sold out.

Born in Los Angeles in 1937, Takei experienced internment himself as a boy from the age of 5 to 8½, incarcerated along with his family for almost the entirety of U.S. involvement in World War II.

 George Takei's Sulu (right) was one of the original
George Takei's Sulu (right) was one of the original "Star Trek" crew members, including Walter Koening's Chekhov, Nichelle Nichols' Uhura and James Doohan's Scotty.
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Wikimedia Commons

In a phone interview this week, he granted that it was "traumatic," but quickly added, "The amazing thing about children, though, is we're amazingly adaptable — as long as you have parents who love you."

Takei said the memory of being held captive behind barbed wire, with guards armed with machine guns, was indelible. "That became part of the landscape," he said, "and the regimentation and routine of the internment camp just became part of my adorable life."

He first experienced snow at a camp in Arkansas, and his father tried to preserve a sense of normalcy. Having established himself as a camp manager, the father once arranged to borrow a Jeep for a family joyride through the surrounding countryside.

"Those were my real memories," Takei said, "and it wasn't until we were out of the camps that I started to realize how hated we were.

"For my parents, it was an invasive, degrading thing," he added, and it didn't end with the conclusion of the war.

Released internees were given $25 and a one-way train ticket to the destination of their choice. Many left for Chicago or other eastern cities rather than return to the West Coast, but Takei's family returned to Los Angeles, first settling by necessity in Skid Row — "a harrowing experience," he said — then in East L.A.

"We were the only Asian-American family," he said. "But that was a more welcoming, hopeful community." He recalled that his mother was soon making the best enchiladas around.

Takei said he became a student of history as a teenager in the '50s, studying "the shiny ideals of our democracy," but he was also haunted by the prejudice he and his family experienced in the camps. He was blessed, he said, in that his father was unusual in that he proved willing to discuss it openly.

"It was such a painful, humiliating and, to some, guilty feeling that they had," he said of Japanese-Americans of that generation. "So they didn't talk about it. Part of the problem is the silence in the Japanese-American community."

Another, he added, was the lack of any acknowledgement of it in the education system, which "left a void" in the nation's history.

His father, however, spoke of the experience, and also laid out how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while a great man, was "a fallible human being ... who made a horrible mistake" in signing the internement order in the months immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor sending the nation into World War II.

"I've been an activist ever since," Takei said.

He took positions against the Vietnam War in the '60s, and of course later became an eloquent spokesman for gay rights after formally coming out in the 2000s, although he'd made little effort to hide his sexual orientation since the '70s.

But through it all he kept circling back to Japanese-American internment. He channeled that sense of guilt into a more stereotypical story when he first played the son of a Japanese traitor in "The Twilight Zone."

He later took a prominent position with the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and is now its chairman emeritus. And most prominently he did a 2015 Broadway musical, "Allegiance," about his family's experiences in the camps.

"That's been my mission in life, to raise the awareness of this dark chapter of American history," Takei said.

While some scoffed at the notion of turning incarceration into a musical, Takei defended it. The Japanese American National Museum and the Alphawood Gallery's "Then They Came for Me," he said, are "still about reaching people intellectually."

"You reach more people more profoundly through the heart," he said.

"Allegiance," he said, set out to "find beauty in hard circumstances and find joy," most notably in vignettes involving a dance and a baseball game.

"It's my parents' experiences that we're dramatizing," he said of the production.

His father, however, died in 1979, before the musical got to Broadway, and before President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for Japanese-American internment in 1988.

"I just wish that he could've been there,"  the actor said.

Takei was interviewed for a documentary released earlier this year, "And Then They Came for Us," which runs daily at 2 p.m. as part of the exhibit at the Alphawood Gallery, 2401 N. Halsted St. He hasn't seen the actual exhibit yet, but is looking forward to touring it Thursday ahead of his appearance at the Athenaeum Theatre.

He said that shameful episode in U.S. history is often overlooked.

"I'm always shocked by people, particularly in the Midwest and the East Coast," Takei said. "They profess absolute ignorance that such a thing happened."

That, he said, has contributed to the current harsh treatment being considered for undocumented immigrants and Muslims, adding, "It's the same thing that's happening again this time, 75 years later."