George Takei
Takei’s proudest work is fighting for social justice
has become a wizard of modern tech to champion social justice; he’ll bring his message to Rollins on Thursday.
George Takei is on high alert.
“Hope will keep us going, but we have to deliver action,” said the actor who played Sulu in the original “Star Trek” series and movies. “We have to throw ourselves into the struggle.”
That struggle has been Takei’s lifelong quest for social justice — for Japanese-Americans, for gays and lesbians and for others who seek equality. As a child, Takei’s family was sent to a Japanese-American internment camp. He revealed he was gay in 2005, became a proponent for marriage rights and wed Brad Altman in 2008.
Now the 79-year-old actor who once brought a technology-heavy idea of the future to our TV screens is known as a wizard of modern gizmos — tweeting and posting on other social media to spread his message.
“We’re using what we didn’t have then,” he says of today’s instant mass communication. Takei will speak at Rollins College on Thursday, part of the Winter Park Institute series of cultural programs.
Titled “Where No Story Has Gone Before” — a nod to his “Star Trek” fame — Takei’s program will be in part autobiographical. He will share his story: How in 1943, the Los Angeles native and his parents were forcibly removed from their California home and placed under guard, first in horse stables, then in prison camp.
They were part of the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent initiated by the government during World War II after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
“We had no due process,” Takei said. “The only reason we were rounded up was because of our faces.”
It’s a story that needs to be told again and again, he said, because many Americans — even the youngest generation of Japanese-Americans — don’t know about it.
He feels so passionately about the blemish on American history that he turned his personal account into a Broadway musical. “Allegiance” played in New York for a few months, with Takei in a leading role. The show was filmed; a screening at cinemas across the country set box-office records in December. An encore screening will take place in February.
“I’m always surprised when people are shocked when I tell them about my childhood in prison,” Takei said. “One of my missions in life is to raise awareness of that chapter in American history.”
That’s in part because he does not want to see history repeat itself.
“Oh, we are making this crystal clear,” he said with deliberate emphasis. “It will
be repeated again if we have anything to do with it.”
The talk of a Muslim registry that swirled through the presidential campaign has Takei worried.
“It is chilling to hear from the Trump transition team,” he said. “We know what they mean by a Muslim registry. It’s a sweeping generalized characterization. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American.”
During the run of “Allegiance,” he issued a standing invitation and reserved a seat at each performance for then-candidate (and now president-elect) Donald Trump. He never showed.
“I wanted to teach him something about American history,” Takei said. “That’s why I invited him.”
Through his speaking engagements and extensive social-media network, which includes 9 million Facebook friends and nearly 2 million Twitter followers, Takei urges people to engage their representatives — and hold them accountable. He calls it “responsible citizenship.”
“It’s so important in a people’s democracy to get involved and keep on track,” he said. “We know when we get off track.”
His mind returns to the Japanese-American internment — which, he pointed out, began with a government registry.
In the camps, prisoners were required to complete a written “loyalty oath” to the United States.
“Can you imagine? After they’ve taken everything from you?” said Takei, his voice rising with emotion. “They wanted our dignity, wanted us to grovel before them and answer these insulting questions. We wouldn’t do that.”
Yet, the experience did not sour his family on the nation.
“It was my father, who suffered the most, who explained democracy to me,” Takei said. “He told me it’s still the best form of government. We have a voice, we can control our destiny.”
And incidents such as the internment can provide lessons as valuable as those found in America’s greatest triumphs, he said: “I think we learn more from those chapters where our democracy faltered than from the many glorious chapters we already know about.”
He’s proud that “Allegiance” helped shed a light on those lessons.
“Telling that story via drama, you reach people through their hearts as well as their minds — particularly through music, which can be so moving,” he said.
“Star Trek” gave Takei a good understanding of how social issues can be addressed through entertainment. An introduction on his Facebook page reads “Some know me as Mr. Sulu but I hope all know me as a believer in, and a fighter for, the equality & dignity of all human beings.”
At his “Star Trek” audition in the mid-1960s, Takei remembers asking creator Gene Roddenberry for more details of the show. What he heard only increased his desire to be part of the now legendary sci-fi series.
“I desperately wanted the show because he said the Starship Enterprise is going to be a metaphor for Earth, and its strength is going to be its diversity — people of all races and cultures coming together and working as a team,” Takei said. “The show was ahead of its time.”
The series, which ran for three years but inspired a movie franchise and multiple TV spinoffs, wasn’t afraid to tackle big questions of the day.
“Civil-rights issues, the Vietnam War, the cold war, environmental concerns — there was a lot of fodder for our show,” Takei said. “It was an exciting concept.”
He ruefully ponders that many of those topics — war, civil rights, the environment — are still hotly debated in the nation’s political discourse.
“That’s why ‘Star Trek’ is celebrating its 50th anniversary,” he said. “It’s still relevant . ... I’m sure ‘Star Trek’ will be around the next half century. But hopefully we’re going to be able to incorporate some real advances in society.”