And I couldn't quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment.”
“We have an alienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “I read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy - all men are created equal,” he said in the TED Talk. And during Takei’s teen years, he started wondering about his experience. They earned enough to get a three-bedroom home. Let's go back home,’ because behind barbed wires was for us home.”īut the family’s grit and determination won out. Our first home was on Skid Row in the lowest part of our city, living with derelicts, drunkards and crazy people.My baby sister said, ‘Mama. Everything had been taken from us and the hostility was intense. “Los Angeles was not a welcoming place,” Takei recalled in a 2014 TED Talk. “My mother and father’s only crime was refusing, out of principle, to sign a loyalty pledge promulgated by the government.” “I was 7 years old when we were transferred to another camp for ‘disloyals,’” he wrote in The New York Times in 2017. After two years there, they were on the move again. His family was forced onto a train across the country to Rohwer, Arkansas, where 16,000 of the estimated 110,000 to 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were locked up. Of course, imprisoned life behind barbed wires - sometimes three layers thick - was anything but fun, looking back with an adult lens. "We get to sleep where the horses slept! Fun!” he told NPR. Through his childhood lens, it felt like an adventure. "For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience to take their three children into that smelly horse stall, still pungent. “We were herded over with other Japanese American families to the stable area and assigned a horse stall for us to sleep in - from my two-bedroom home with a front yard and backyard on Garnet street in L.A., to a horse stall," Takei explained. My father came out and answered the door and, literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our house.”Īlong with his younger brother, baby sister and parents, they were first sent to the Santa Anita Race Track while the camps were being built. The way I remember it, the whole house seemed to tremble.
“They stomped up the porch and with their fists began pounding on the door. “We saw two soldiers, marching up our driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them,” he recalled on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “So they called them ‘relocation centers,’ but they were America's version of concentration camps.” Takei’s family of five was forced to sleep in a horse stallīorn in Los Angeles on April 20, 1937, Takei was only four years old during Pearl Harbor - and had just turned 5 when he remembers the harrowing knock on the door. “Uncle Sam and we Americans like to use euphemistic words or invent words if we think certain other words are too harsh,” Morita told the Television Academy. He was there for a year and a half with his family before they were forcibly moved to another internment camp near the border of California and Oregon called Tule Lake. “I cried for four days I was so homesick for the doctors and nurses,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. Taken to the site by the Gila River, Morita was overcome by the new environment.
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