O - The Badlands Newsletter - Maquis Forces International

PAGE 36
Takei Treks Back to WWII Internment Camp
BADLANDS
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." The Takeis
spent a year at the Arkansas camp. They were later sent to a higher security camp at Tule
Lake, California.
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. 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 September 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.