Democracy Now Dot Org -- George Takei on Arizona’s Anti-Gay Bill, Life in a Japanese Internment Camp & Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu From A daily independent global news hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González (Thursday, February 27, 2014). [Jonathon Singleton: What follows is a highly edited interview transcript focussing on Allegiance: A New American Musical. George Takei talks personally about his childhood experiences...] JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m curious about this other life that you have developed in the digital age, this enormous following that you have on Facebook. Could you talk about—were you surprised by that— GEORGE TAKEI: Yes. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —by how many people want to know what you have to say? GEORGE TAKEI: I was astounded by, first of all, the rapidity of its growth and how large, how massive it can be. I have people responding from Brussels or—Belgium, or Perth, Australia, or from Buenos Aires. It’s global. I mean, this is Gene Roddenberry’s vision, this Starship Earth, coming together. AMY GOODMAN: It’s intergalactic. GEORGE TAKEI: Yes. Why I began social media has another ulterior motive. We—I came across an extraordinarily gifted composer-lyricist in a Broadway theater, of all places. And we talked about the subject of the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. And I told him that I had always planned to write a play on that subject. And he thought it would be a great subject for a musical. And, you know, I’m a musical theater fan, but I never thought of a musical. It was a brilliant idea, because I had been on speaking tours to corporations, universities, governmental agencies, but, you know, it’s intellectual, and to really get people to empathize, you have to hit them emotionally. And music has the extraordinary power to do that. AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of Allegiance: A New American Musical. CHORUS: [singing] Even when all hope seems gone, gaman. SAM KIMURA: [played by George Takei] Remember song I teach you, how mountain can be moved stone by stone, eh? AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Allegiance: A New American Musical. It’s coming to Broadway? GEORGE TAKEI: It’s coming to Broadway. And that’s what gave rise to my activity with social media. Here is a subject that is still too little known, and even less understood, and it’s a rather shameful part of American history. And here we’ve invested so much of ourselves—our talents, our energy, our enthusiasm, our passion and our resources. And are we going to be able to find an audience for it? And so, I thought, well, social media is the way to do it. But my base was essentially sci-fi geeks and nerds... AMY GOODMAN: So, you were born in? GEORGE TAKEI: Los Angeles. AMY GOODMAN: And yet, at the age of eight, you were interned? GEORGE TAKEI: No, at the age of five. AMY GOODMAN: At the age of five. GEORGE TAKEI: We came out when I was eight. AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that. What happened? GEORGE TAKEI: Yes, well, you know, it wasn’t just my birth in the U.S. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They were Northern Californians. And they met in Los Angeles, so I was born in Southern California. But there’s no north-south divide in our family. We’re Americans. We were and are—my parents have passed now, but we were citizens of this country. We had nothing to do with the war. We simply happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. But without charges, without trial, without due process—the fundamental pillar of our justice system—we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps—prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us—in some of the most desolate places in this country: the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, the blistering hot desert of Arizona, of all places, in black tarpaper barracks. And our family was sent two-thirds of the way across the country, the farthest east, in the swamps of Arkansas. And it’s from this experience that, when I was a teenager, my father told me that our democracy is very fragile, but it is a true people’s democracy, both as strong and as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. And that’s why good people have to be actively engaged in the process, sometimes holding democracy’s feet to the fire, in order to make it a better, truer democracy... AMY GOODMAN: Day of Remembrance. February 19th, 1942, the Executive Order 9066 signed requiring internment of all U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. GEORGE TAKEI: By a liberal Democrat president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. AMY GOODMAN: What did you understand at the time as a five-year-old? GEORGE TAKEI: I was a five-year-old. My parents told—my father told us that we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas. It was an adventure. I thought everyone took vacations by leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers at both ends of the car, sitting on wooden benches. And whenever we approached a town, we were forced to draw the curtains, the shade. We were not supposed to be seen by the people out there. We thought that was the way things happened. We saw people crying, you know, and we thought, Well, why are they crying? Daddy said we’re going on a vacation. So we were innocent children. When we arrived at Rohwer, in the swamps of Arkansas, there were these barb wire fences and sentry towers. But children are amazingly adaptable. And so, the barb wire fence became no more intimidating than a chain link fence around a school playground. And the sentry towers were just part of the landscape. We adjusted to lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. And at school, we began every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I could see the barb wire fence and the sentry towers right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words with liberty and justice for all, an innocent child unaware of the irony. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And once your family was released from the internment, what—the process of putting your lives back together, what had happened to your possessions, to your home? And talk about that process, as well. GEORGE TAKEI: We lost everything. We were given a one-way ticket to wherever in the United States we wanted to go to, plus $20. And many people were very embittered about their West Coast experience, and they chose to go to the Midwest, places like Chicago or Milwaukee, or further east to New Jersey, New York, Boston. My parents decided to go back to Los Angeles. We were most familiar there. But we found that it was very difficult. Housing was impossible. They would deny us housing. Jobs were very, very difficult. My father’s first job was as a dishwasher in a Chinatown restaurant. Only other Asians would hire us. And our first home was on skid row, with the stench of urine everywhere and those scary, smelly, ugly people lined up leaning on brick walls. They would stagger around and barf right in front of us. My baby sister, who was now five years old, said, Mama, let’s go back home, meaning behind those barb wire fences. We had adjusted to that. And coming home was a horrific, traumatic experience for us kids. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to George Takei. If you recognize that voice, yes, it is George, it is Sulu, Lieutenant Sulu, helmsman of the Starship Enterprise. So how did you go from that experience to becoming one of the most famous actors in the United States? When I asked you before how long you did Star Trek and you said just three years, I mean, it seems to me it went on for decades. GEORGE TAKEI: It’s the reruns. AMY GOODMAN: Yes. GEORGE TAKEI: And once we were canceled, the syndicators put us on every night, five days a week, so people thought that we had a thousand episodes. But it’s the same episodes from three seasons being rerun over and over again. AMY GOODMAN: So how did you go from that interned child to the actor that you are today? GEORGE TAKEI: Well, I loved acting. I love performance... I was seen in a student production at UCLA and — seen by a casting director from Warner Brothers who was in the audience. And he plucked me out of that, put me in my first feature film, Edna Ferber’s epic novel about Alaska, Ice Palace. And so, breaking into the movies was a piece of cake, actually, by going by my father’s advice. And that same casting director—Hoyt Bowers was his name—put in a word for me later on when Gene Roddenberry was casting for Star Trek. And I wound up with that iconic, legendary now, sci-fi TV series...
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 08:50:40 +0000
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