Actor, author and activist George Takei spoke about his childhood in an isolated camp and on his role as Hikaru Sulu in the television series “Star Trek” Jan. 21 in the Texas Southmost College Performing Arts Center.
Takei concluded the 15th season of the UTRGV Distinguished Speakers Series.
“There is another reason why I wanted to come down here very much, because of the humanitarian outrages that’s going on at the border,” he said. “Over the past few days what I’ve been hearing is an echo from my own childhood because I went through a very ugly chapter of American history.”
On Dec. 7, 1941, the lives of Takei, his family and other Japanese-Americans in the U.S. changed forever when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
“Overnight, people started looking at us with suspicion and fear and outright hatred, simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor,” Takei said.
Two months later, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, which ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be imprisoned with no charges in 10 barbed-wire prison camps.
“What would have been grotesquely abnormal, became my normality behind those barbed-wire fences,” he said. “It became normal for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall.”
Once the war ended, Japanese-Americans held at the prison camps were free and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States and $25,
Takei said.
“My parents decided to go back to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place,” Takei said. “It was still extremely hostile.”
More than four decades later, President Ronald Reagan apologized for the injustice and signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which pledged $20,000 compensation for each internee.
“To me, this was the sign of the bigness of America,” Takei said. “Forty years later, it was the confidence of America to recognize a past mistake and apologize for it.”
Graphic design junior Manuel Gamez said the event was beautiful and inspirational.
“Some of the things that he said from the past were very relevant to the present day,” Gamez said. “I think it was really eye-opening to see some of the things he went through and how it’s mirrored in today’s society.”
After the presentation, Takei answered some previously submitted questions from students and talked more about his personal life.
“As I grew older and I started pursuing an acting career, I discovered that there were others who felt like me and they introduced me to a gay bar and there, I, for the first time, felt comfortable.”
Asked about “Star Trek,” Takei shared with the audience how his character name, Hikaru Sulu, came about.
“As a helmsman, there was an Asian guy, played by me, but [show creator] Gene Roddenberry had a problem with the name for that Asian character … How [to] find a name that suggested all Asia? So, he had a map of Asia pinned on his house wall and he was staring at it, trying to see what inspiration we can get from that map. He found off the coast of the Philippines a sea called the Sulu Sea, and he thought the waters of the sea touched all shores and that’s how my character came to have the name Sulu. I’m named after a sea.”
To end the evening, Takei held his hand up and showed the Star Trek Vulcan salute that is well-known among fans of the series, along with a popular quote from the show: “And with that I say to you, live long and prosper.”
