Silent Bob
11-29-2003, 07:59 PM
Trek's Takei Recalls Internment
Star Trek actor George Takei (Sulu) returned on Nov. 9 for the first time since he left to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where he and more than 8,500 other Japanese-Americans lived as internees during World War II, the Associated Press reported. Takei, 64, returned to Rohwer in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum, of which Takei is chairman, the wire service reported.
Takei was four when he, his parents and two younger siblings were ordered from their Los Angeles home and taken by railroad under armed guard to Arkansas after Pearl Harbor, the AP reported. The Takeis spent a year at the Arkansas camp and were later sent to a higher-security camp at Tule Lake, Calif. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps during the war.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the actor drew on his history and celebrity to fight discrimination against Arab-Americans by helping organize a candlelight vigil at the museum and a public radio forum, the AP reported.
http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-tv.html?200...-11/13/10.00.tv (http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-tv.html?2003-11/13/10.00.tv)
Star Trek Actor Returns to WWII Internment Camp
By Melissa Nelson
Associated Press
posted: 10:00 am ET
12 November 2003
ROHWER, Ark. (AP) -- A cypress root harvested from an Arkansas swamp 60 years ago is one of the few mementoes Star Trek actor George Takei has from his childhood at a World War II internment camp.
The gnarled knee reminds him of a part of his past he had revisited only in his mind -- until this week.
As he traveled Sunday through this remote stretch of southeast Arkansas farmland, where he and more than 8,500 other Japanese-Americans lived during the war, Takei spoke of finding resilience in beauty.
"What (the root) symbolizes for me is that my parents were able to survive by finding and creating things that were beautiful," said Takei, who keeps the memento on his desk in his Los Angeles home.
Takei, who portrayed Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek series and in six Star Trek movies, was four when he, his parents and two younger siblings were ordered from their Los Angeles home and taken by railroad under armed guard to Arkansas after Pearl Harbor.
Six decades later, Takei drove alongside the same railroad tracks to visit the former Rohwer Relocation Center.
"My mother said the scariest part about that trip was the uncertainty," Takei said, glancing out of a car window at the abandoned rail tracks that once led to the camp. "I remember my father telling us we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas."
Takei, 64, returned in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum. Takei is chairman of the museum board.
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps. Eight camps were in the West; two Arkansas sites were the only ones in the South.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the actor drew on his history and celebrity to fight discrimination against Arab-Americans by helping organize a candlelight vigil at the museum and a public radio forum.
"There were chilling echoes of World War II," he said.
But he praised leaders for working quickly to address the discrimination issue following the Sept. 11 attacks - something that didn't happen six decades ago in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
"It wasn't until I was a teenager that I started realizing what my family went through (in World War II), and I began to ask questions. When I was 15 or 16, I had a conversation with my father that I would always regret. I asked him 'Why did you go into that camp like sheep?'," he said.
"He said 'Maybe you are right,' and left the room and closed the door."
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps at the beginning of the war. Eight camps were in the West; two southeast Arkansas sites at Rohwer and Jerome were the only ones in the South. Together, the Arkansas sites housed more than 16,000 detainees.
Other well-known former internees include U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, artist Henry Sugimoto and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii.
The Takeis spent only a year in Arkansas. They were later sent to a higher security camp at Tule Lake, Calif., for detainees who, on loyalty questionnaires, said they would not take up arms in defense of the United States.
Takei recalled that his father later told him that he and his wife responded "No" to that and to one that asked them to "forswear loyalty to the emperor of Japan." Takei said his father was insulted by the assumption that his family was loyal to the emperor in the first place and "didn't want to grovel and give them his dignity."
"My memories of Rohwer were innocent childhood memories," Takei said, recalling the first time he saw snow, his search for tadpoles in creeks and his first encounter with a hog. "I had never seen anything so monstrous, so smelly and so grotesque," he said.
His Tule Lake memories are different.
"At Tule Lake, we woke up in the mornings to radicals who said they would rise up when the Japanese army won and who were working to make their bodies strong for the fight," he said.
Also at Tule Lake, Takei's mother learned that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, where her parents had returned to from the United States before the war.
His mother's sister and her infant child were killed in the blast. His grandparents survived, but it was months before the family learned their fate.
"My mother was torn with anxiety. I remember my father telling her that we had to assume they were all dead," Takei said.
Takei recalled starting kindergarten at Rohwer and memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance while looking out on a barbed-wire fence.
"Now, I think about the irony of saying that line 'liberty and justice for all'," he said.
After the war, Takei's father rebuilt the family's laundry business and later became successful in real estate. Takei went to UCLA and studied theater. His younger sister became a teacher and his brother a doctor.
He credits his parents for putting aside bitterness and allowing their children to overcome their turbulent childhood experiences during the war.
After the family returned to Los Angeles from Tule Lake, his father took him to a vaudeville production at the Orpheum Theater.
Even though the family didn't have money for luxuries, "he wanted to contribute to my passion for acting," said Takei, who appeared in several movies and had guests roles on shows including "Perry Mason" and "My Three Sons" before joining Star Trek in 1966.
"For Asian-Americans, Star Trek was a wonderful breakthrough because Sulu wasn't a villain or a servant," said Takei, who held a variety of ranks in the fictional space fleet. And he said the Starship Enterprise was intended to show the ideals of democracy, which he learned from his father during his childhood in the camps.
"My father really believed in the ideals of a people's democracy and he understood that people are fallible," Takei said.
"He also understood that the democratic system has the ability to correct and heal old wounds," Takei said. He noted war reparations approved by Congress in 1988 for Japanese-Americans and a decision by former President Clinton to recognize some Japanese-American war veterans with the Congressional Medal of Honor decades after the war.
http://dev.space.com/entertainment/takei_a...sas_031112.html (http://dev.space.com/entertainment/takei_arkansas_031112.html)
There are photos here of the trip
See also : http://modelminority.com/printout593.html
Star Trek actor George Takei (Sulu) returned on Nov. 9 for the first time since he left to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where he and more than 8,500 other Japanese-Americans lived as internees during World War II, the Associated Press reported. Takei, 64, returned to Rohwer in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum, of which Takei is chairman, the wire service reported.
Takei was four when he, his parents and two younger siblings were ordered from their Los Angeles home and taken by railroad under armed guard to Arkansas after Pearl Harbor, the AP reported. The Takeis spent a year at the Arkansas camp and were later sent to a higher-security camp at Tule Lake, Calif. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps during the war.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the actor drew on his history and celebrity to fight discrimination against Arab-Americans by helping organize a candlelight vigil at the museum and a public radio forum, the AP reported.
http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-tv.html?200...-11/13/10.00.tv (http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-tv.html?2003-11/13/10.00.tv)
Star Trek Actor Returns to WWII Internment Camp
By Melissa Nelson
Associated Press
posted: 10:00 am ET
12 November 2003
ROHWER, Ark. (AP) -- A cypress root harvested from an Arkansas swamp 60 years ago is one of the few mementoes Star Trek actor George Takei has from his childhood at a World War II internment camp.
The gnarled knee reminds him of a part of his past he had revisited only in his mind -- until this week.
As he traveled Sunday through this remote stretch of southeast Arkansas farmland, where he and more than 8,500 other Japanese-Americans lived during the war, Takei spoke of finding resilience in beauty.
"What (the root) symbolizes for me is that my parents were able to survive by finding and creating things that were beautiful," said Takei, who keeps the memento on his desk in his Los Angeles home.
Takei, who portrayed Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek series and in six Star Trek movies, was four when he, his parents and two younger siblings were ordered from their Los Angeles home and taken by railroad under armed guard to Arkansas after Pearl Harbor.
Six decades later, Takei drove alongside the same railroad tracks to visit the former Rohwer Relocation Center.
"My mother said the scariest part about that trip was the uncertainty," Takei said, glancing out of a car window at the abandoned rail tracks that once led to the camp. "I remember my father telling us we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas."
Takei, 64, returned in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum. Takei is chairman of the museum board.
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps. Eight camps were in the West; two Arkansas sites were the only ones in the South.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the actor drew on his history and celebrity to fight discrimination against Arab-Americans by helping organize a candlelight vigil at the museum and a public radio forum.
"There were chilling echoes of World War II," he said.
But he praised leaders for working quickly to address the discrimination issue following the Sept. 11 attacks - something that didn't happen six decades ago in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
"It wasn't until I was a teenager that I started realizing what my family went through (in World War II), and I began to ask questions. When I was 15 or 16, I had a conversation with my father that I would always regret. I asked him 'Why did you go into that camp like sheep?'," he said.
"He said 'Maybe you are right,' and left the room and closed the door."
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps at the beginning of the war. Eight camps were in the West; two southeast Arkansas sites at Rohwer and Jerome were the only ones in the South. Together, the Arkansas sites housed more than 16,000 detainees.
Other well-known former internees include U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, artist Henry Sugimoto and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii.
The Takeis spent only a year in Arkansas. They were later sent to a higher security camp at Tule Lake, Calif., for detainees who, on loyalty questionnaires, said they would not take up arms in defense of the United States.
Takei recalled that his father later told him that he and his wife responded "No" to that and to one that asked them to "forswear loyalty to the emperor of Japan." Takei said his father was insulted by the assumption that his family was loyal to the emperor in the first place and "didn't want to grovel and give them his dignity."
"My memories of Rohwer were innocent childhood memories," Takei said, recalling the first time he saw snow, his search for tadpoles in creeks and his first encounter with a hog. "I had never seen anything so monstrous, so smelly and so grotesque," he said.
His Tule Lake memories are different.
"At Tule Lake, we woke up in the mornings to radicals who said they would rise up when the Japanese army won and who were working to make their bodies strong for the fight," he said.
Also at Tule Lake, Takei's mother learned that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, where her parents had returned to from the United States before the war.
His mother's sister and her infant child were killed in the blast. His grandparents survived, but it was months before the family learned their fate.
"My mother was torn with anxiety. I remember my father telling her that we had to assume they were all dead," Takei said.
Takei recalled starting kindergarten at Rohwer and memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance while looking out on a barbed-wire fence.
"Now, I think about the irony of saying that line 'liberty and justice for all'," he said.
After the war, Takei's father rebuilt the family's laundry business and later became successful in real estate. Takei went to UCLA and studied theater. His younger sister became a teacher and his brother a doctor.
He credits his parents for putting aside bitterness and allowing their children to overcome their turbulent childhood experiences during the war.
After the family returned to Los Angeles from Tule Lake, his father took him to a vaudeville production at the Orpheum Theater.
Even though the family didn't have money for luxuries, "he wanted to contribute to my passion for acting," said Takei, who appeared in several movies and had guests roles on shows including "Perry Mason" and "My Three Sons" before joining Star Trek in 1966.
"For Asian-Americans, Star Trek was a wonderful breakthrough because Sulu wasn't a villain or a servant," said Takei, who held a variety of ranks in the fictional space fleet. And he said the Starship Enterprise was intended to show the ideals of democracy, which he learned from his father during his childhood in the camps.
"My father really believed in the ideals of a people's democracy and he understood that people are fallible," Takei said.
"He also understood that the democratic system has the ability to correct and heal old wounds," Takei said. He noted war reparations approved by Congress in 1988 for Japanese-Americans and a decision by former President Clinton to recognize some Japanese-American war veterans with the Congressional Medal of Honor decades after the war.
http://dev.space.com/entertainment/takei_a...sas_031112.html (http://dev.space.com/entertainment/takei_arkansas_031112.html)
There are photos here of the trip
See also : http://modelminority.com/printout593.html