George Takei, Star Trek‘s Mr. Sulu, recently visited the site of the internment camp he and his family were in during the second World War.
I joined a pilgrimage to a former U.S. internment camp where my family and I, together with 18,000 other Japanese Americans, were imprisoned during World War II. The camp is in northern California, almost at the Oregon border. It has an almost mockingly poetic name, Camp Tule Lake. It was there in a barbed wire camp built on a wind-swept dry lake bed that I spent two and a half years of my boyhood after a year and a half in another internment camp in Arkansas. (via MeFei)
It’s funny that we forget how Takei was probably one of the first positive Asian-American actors (and characters) on American television. Sure, some of the characters from M*A*S*H had some weight on that show – but Star Trek‘s vision of an integrated future was pretty much a trailblazer for network TV.
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