Why were George his family and other Japanese-Americans looked upon with fear suspicion and hatred?

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Many people around the world fondly remember George Takei as the iconic Sulu on the television series Star Trek. The show depicted space pioneers from diverse backgrounds working together "to boldly go where no man has gone before." It was an optimistic vision of an enlightened future.

Off set, Takei is just as courageous. He's a longtime political activist, fearlessly advocating for causes he believes in. Here in 2020, he sees the confluence of three major issues: the coronavirus pandemic, systemic racial injustice, and climate change. But, at age 83, Takei is still fighting the good fight and is determined to improve the lives of those around him through activism. He speaks to the ideals of democracy and equality for every person.

After Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that forced the Takeis and about 120,000 other Japanese Americans to relocate to internment camps. They were sent away with no trials, due process or civil rights.

Takei was 5 years old when soldiers forced him and his family to abandon their California home at gunpoint. Troops herded them to a racetrack that was converted to a processing center. Their crime? "Looking like the people who attacked," Takei says. He was born in the United States. So was his mother. His father was born in Japan, but he emigrated to San Francisco as a child and went to college there. George recalls that, overnight, he and his family were looked at with fear, suspicion, and outright hatred.

From the processing center, the Takeis were moved to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas and then to the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California, where, altogether, they spent about three years of their lives. Takei says the camps were "prisons" where the inmates were constantly watched by military guards and surrounded by barbed-wire fences and surveillance towers. Looking back, he can still remember soldiers pointing machine guns at him when he went to the latrine.

While the Takeis were at their first camp, the internees were required to take a "loyalty questionnaire." Most of the questions were fairly innocuous, but Takei says two stood out because they were worded in a way that, no matter how internees answered, they would be in trouble. One asked if they were willing to serve on combat duty wherever ordered. Answering "yes" would have meant that Takei's parents must abandon their three young children and bear arms to defend a nation that was imprisoning their family. The other asked if they would forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Takei says his family had never thought about obedience to a foreign power because they were Americans. His parents felt the questionnaire was "degrading," so they answered "no" to both questions. That led to their relocation to the second, harsher camp for those categorized as "disloyal."

Drawing inspiration from his father

Despite extreme adversity in the camps, Takei says he was able to survive his ordeal thanks to his parents. He describes his father as an extraordinary man who not only maintained a sense of order and humanity, but helped other families settle in the camps. Even after they were freed, the Takeis continued to struggle; they lived impoverished lives in a low-income neighborhood in LA. Takei says it was so "horrific" that his 4-year-old sister begged her mother to go back "home" behind the fences.

Takei's father was determined to improve his family's living conditions and provide a promising future for his children. He started out as a dishwasher before opening his own dry-cleaning shop, and eventually, with a shrewd sense of timing, built a real estate business.

Finding passion in activism

As a teenager, Takei's passion for activism grew. His father's life experiences inspired him to fight for justice and equality for all. According to the elder Takei, the US government was able to successfully implement the internment program because Japanese Americans didn't have leaders active in politics and society outside their community. To prevent another tragedy from happening again, his father said, "People have to participate in this participatory democracy. We have to support the good candidates or the good issues. And we not only give them our vote, but we give them our time and volunteer to support them."

During the civil rights movement, Takei marched with Martin Luther King Jr.—he fondly remembers shaking his hand, which he describes as a "thrill." And when the US got involved in the Vietnam War, Takei, along with likeminded actors such as Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, opposed the war and worked to drive home a message of peace.

Takei's activism today

Takei finds the current political climate troubling and has been deeply disturbed by President Donald Trump's divisive actions—for example, calling the coronavirus the "China virus," the executive order often referred to as the "Muslim travel ban," and the separation of migrant families at the US southern border. He says the injustices remind him of his childhood during a "dark time in history."

But he's not giving up his fight for social justice. He uses his gigantic platform on social media for advocacy. A whopping 9 million people follow him on Facebook, 3 million on Twitter and more than a million on Instagram. Before the presidential election, Takei actively urged his followers to vote, trying to impart his father's hard-earned wisdom: Changes are possible when people participate in our participatory democracy. He remains resolute and is inspiring people to join "the larger family of enlightened people."

There is dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. They were discussing the notion of a national Muslim registry, a controversial part of the Trump administration’s national security plans, when Higbie dropped a bombshell: “We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will,” he said. Was he really citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn’t saying we should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, “There is precedent for it.”

Stop and consider these words. The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a “precedent” or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that occurred.

I was just a child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall. It was a devastating blow to my parents, who had worked so hard to buy a house and raise a family in Los Angeles. After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said. We disembarked in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was a prison: Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.

Filmmaker Frank Chi captures young Muslim Americans reading letters written by Japanese Americans during their time held in internment camps. (Video: Frank Chi/ Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center)

My parents did their best to make life seem normal. As a child, I very readily accepted our new circumstance and adjusted to it. As far as I was concerned, it was normal to line up to use the common latrine, or to eat wretched grub in a common mess hall, prisoners in our own country. It was normal for us to share a single small barrack with no privacy whatsoever. And it was normal to stand each day in our makeshift classroom, reciting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, “With liberty and justice for all,” as I looked past the U.S. flag out the window, the barbed wire of the camp just visible behind it.

Not until I was older did I understand the irony of those words and the injustice that had been visited on so many of us. As I studied civics and government in school, I came to see the internment as an assault not only upon an entire group of Americans, but upon the Constitution itself — how its guarantees of due process and equal protection had been decimated by forces of fear and prejudice unleashed by unscrupulous politicians. It had been a Democratic administration at the time, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, that had ordered us to the camps, proving that demagoguery and race-baiting knows no party.

It took decades for the United States to own up to what it had done and officially apologize for the internment, offering symbolic monetary reparations to the survivors. I donated my own check to the Japanese American National Museum, whose mission, like mine, has been to help ensure the mistakes of the past are never repeated. That is why these words by Higbie, which ominously are representative of much of the current thinking in the incoming administration, have reopened very old and very deep wounds.

This was not the first time the Trump camp had raised the internment. When he did so before, it wasn’t as the historical warning it should be, but as a precedent for what might yet come. In late 2015, during the presidential primary, Trump actually went on the record with Time magazine stating that he did not know whether he would have supported or opposed the internment. “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he said. He argued that FDR was “one of the most highly respected presidents,” and that what he was suggesting was “no different from FDR.”  Trump hedged his response with a nod to the horror of the camps, but tellingly did not disavow them: “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”

Questions over the idea of creating a database of Muslim immigrants are coming up as President-elect Donald Trump forms his new administration. (Video: The Washington Post)

Higbie similarly has kept open the specter of the camps, in one breath stating that he does not favor the idea, but in the very next noting, “We have to protect America first.” Indeed, in a follow-up interview with the New York Times, Higbie doubled down on the unthinkable: “There is historical, factual precedent to do things [that] are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.”

Let us all be clear: “National security” must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.

Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security. During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community necessitates draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security.

It begins with profiling and with registries, but as Trump and Higbie have made clear, once the safety of the country is at stake, all safeguards are off. In their world, national security justifies actions that are “sometimes not right,” and no one really can guarantee where it will end.

We cannot permit this invidious thinking, discredited by history at the cost of so much misery and suffering by innocents, to take root once again in America, let alone in the White House. The stigmatization, separation and labeling of our fellow humans based on race or religion has never led to a more secure world. But it has too often led to one where the most vulnerable pay the highest price.

The Constitution and the government exist in large measure to protect against the excesses of democracies. This is particularly salient when, in an atmosphere of fear or mistrust, one group is singled out and vilified, as Japanese Americans were during World War II and as Muslim Americans are today. How terrible it is to contemplate, once again, that the government itself might once more be the very instrument of terror and division. That cannot happen again. We cannot allow it.