‘Star Trek’ actor determined to keep telling his Japanese American story

TOKYO (AP) – The incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including children, labelled enemies during World War II is an historical experience that has traumatised, and galvanised, the Japanese American community over the decades. For George Takei, who portrayed Hikaru Sulu aboard the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek franchise, it’s a story he is determined to keep telling every opportunity he has. “I consider it my mission in life to educate Americans on this chapter of American history,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press .

He fears the lesson about the failure of US democracy hasn’t really been learned, even today, including among Japanese Americans. “The shame of internment is the government’s. They’re the ones that did something unjust, cruel and inhuman.

But so often the victims of the government actions take on the shame themselves,” he said. Takei, 87, has a new picture book out for children ages six to nine and their parents, called My Lost Freedom . It’s illustrated in soft watercolours by Michelle Lee.

Takei was four years old when President Franklin D Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, declaring anyone of Japanese descent an enemy of the United States and forcibly removing them from their West Coast homes. Takei spent the next three years behind barbed wires, guarded by soldiers with guns, in three camps: the Santa Anita racetrack, which stun.