Michael Lamont
George Takei as Sam Kimura in the Los Angeles premiere of Allegiancestarring George Takei at the Aratani Theatre, co-produced by East West Players and JapaneseAmerican Cultural & Community Center.
George Takei’s string of credits stretches back to 1950s television series including Perry Mason and Hawaiian Eye. But, of course, he is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu, the helmsman of the USS Enterprise on the classic show Star Trek. The sci-fi series, with its multi-culti crew, took viewers to where no TV audiences had gone before: the uncharted universe of (relatively) integrated casts.
Takei, who has been a Human Rights Campaign spokesman, has continued to be noted for activism. In 2005 he publicly announced he was gay (after then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed that state’s same-sex marriage bill), and three years later when same sex marriage was legalized in California, he wed his longtime partner Brad Altman.
Now eighty years old, Takei continues to act on the big and small screens as well as on stage. He is currently appearing in Allegiance, a musical inspired by his own wartime experience of being among the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—many of them American citizens—imprisoned in U.S. internment camps after Imperial Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack.
I spoke with Takei by telephone in Los Angeles about racism, Facebook, the #MeToo movement, and his luncheon meeting with Donald Trump.
Q: How autobiographical is Allegiance?
George Takei: It pretty much traces the kind of decisions my parents made. I was five years old at the time. The part that’s not autobiographical is we were city people, we were here in Los Angeles; the [play’s] family is a farm family in Salinas. My grandparents on my mother’s side were farmers in the Sacramento Delta. And my mother was born in Penryn, a small town which is now a suburb of Sacramento.
My father was born in Japan but he lost his mother when he was a very young child, sort of like the Kimura family in the drama. My paternal grandfather, a widower, came with his two young boys to San Francisco. So my father was educated here, and felt like an American. He spoke English fluently, as well as Japanese.
My parents were both “No-Nos” on the “loyalty questionnaire,” which had to be responded to by everyone [in the camps] over the age of seventeen. Question 27 asked, essentially, “Will you bear arms to defend the USA?” My parents attitude was, “They took everything from us and imprisoned us and now they want loyalty?” Particularly, for my mother, who was in her mid-twenties with three young children, one an infant—she was supposed to bear arms to defend a nation that was imprisoning and impoverishing her family? It was preposterous.
Question 28 was one sentence with two conflicting ideas. It essentially asked, “Will you swear your loyalty to the United States and forswear your loyalty to the emperor of Japan?”
We were Americans! We hadn’t even thought of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Those who answered “Yes,” meaning “I swear my loyalty to the U.S.,” were essentially confessing that they had been loyal to the emperor and were now prepared to forswear it and re-pledge loyalty to the United States.
My parents said, “This is not only stupid, but insulting.” And both answered “no.”
[They were among] thousands of people who answered “no,” and so were categorized as “disloyal” and sent to the Tule Camp in northern California. Like the family in the musical, our family was sent from the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, back to California to the Tule Lake Camp.
Q: Was your family really confined in the Santa Anita Racetrack stables?
Takei: Exactly. The camps were still under construction when we were rounded up. The Santa Anita Racetrack [in Los Angeles County] was designated as an assembly center. We were picked up from our home and herded over to the stable. Each family of comparable size to ours was assigned to a stall still pungent with the scent of horse manure. My reaction as a five-year-old was, “It’s gonna be kinda fun to sleep where the horseys sleep.” So my real memories are quite different from those of my parents’.
Q: All that was seventy-five years ago. What would you tell someone who said this is all ancient history and no longer relevant?
Takei: [Laughs.] I don’t think too many people who come to see Allegiance have that reaction. It’s very relevant to our times. One of the first executive orders Donald Trump signed was the Muslim travel ban, and it was an echo of Roosevelt’s broad brush categorizing of Japanese Americans as potential spies, saboteurs, fifth columnists. With his broad bush Donald Trump categorized all Muslims as potential terrorists—which is crazy. It was as stupid and cruel as Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
The same kind of ignorant and cruel policy is reflected by Donald Trump. To characterize immigrants coming from south of the border as potential rapists, murderers, and drug dealers is equally cruel and vacuous.
However, there is a dramatic difference between what happened to us and what’s happening today. When Donald Trump signed that Muslim travel ban, thousands of young Americans throughout the country rushed to the airports to protest that executive order. And the Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates refused to defend that executive order. So this nation has progressed—except for one person, the President of the United States.
This is a time of great turbulence because of this irrational, incompetent, and stupid presidency.
Q: What are the most important things you think need doing today to push back against the racial and ethnic vilification of specific groups?
Takei: Well, it’s happening right now, this resistance movement. Now, another great minority—women—are starting to assert themselves. This is a time of great turbulence because of this irrational, incompetent, and stupid presidency.
Q: People say social media is a young person’s game, but you are very successful at it. What do you think about social media in general?
Takei: I must say that initially I was absolutely fascinated and enthralled by the prospect of social media: The classic statement about social media being the public square, where people can gather and freely share thoughts and opinions. But now we’re discovering the chilling other side of social media, where anonymous people can attack fragile psyches, particularly teenagers, and bully them into doing drastic things to themselves. Some teenagers have committed suicide because of the bullying they get on social media.
That’s been expanded to a larger degree with the use of anonymity to now internationally affect nation’s politics. Our very elections, our voting, can be subverted by social media. We’re going through a painful and serious reexamination of the potential damage that can be done by social media.
Q: You have a HUGE Facebook following. Knowing what we do now about the role of Facebook in influencing our political landscape, how do you feel about it?
Takei: Well, I still use it. But I think, first of all, that this anonymity thing needs to be eliminated. The town square was not anonymous. Before, people knew who was saying intimidating or stupid things; now, we don’t know. If Facebook can’t rise to managing its operation, I think we’re going to have to have government regulation.
Q: You recently tweeted: “The NRA sells guns to Americans, then when those guns get used for the purpose for which they were designed, the NRA sells Americans ways to fortify against the effects of those guns. Quite a racket they have going.” That ruffled some feathers. What do you think of the idea of arming school teachers?
Takei: That’s what Donald Trump is talking about. Say 20 percent of school teachers are allowed to arm themselves. That means something like a million more guns are sold. Think of how our security has to respond to that. When a SWAT team goes into a school, the first thing they have to do is shoot down an armed person. If a person is carrying that gun to protect students, she or he is going to be the first one shot down. It is the most irrational and dangerous kind of thought being proposed by Donald Trump. It is typical of that vacuous thinking.
Q: What is the state of LGBTQ rights now?
Takei: Well again, it all comes back to President Trump. He was someone opposed to marriage equality. As a matter of fact, I know Donald Trump. I did his show Celebrity Apprentice. I was fired [laughs]. But when we were doing a press conference to promote the show, near the end I thought I’d put Donald Trump on record. He’d said privately he was opposed to marriage equality.
So I said to him, “Mr. Trump, I’d like to invite you to have lunch with me at one of your fine restaurants to discuss marriage equality. I think there are aspects that would be beneficial to you that you don’t know about with your opposition to marriage equality.” That was when New York State did not have marriage equality. I thought he would demur and I’d have him on the record as taking an anti-marriage equality position. But he surprised me and said, “George, maybe I can learn something. Yeah, we’re on.”
It took some time to arrange that lunch but we finally did, after four or five months. At the lunch I said to him, “You’re a businessman. You own hotels and restaurants and have a great vested interest in the health of New York’s economy. If New York had marriage equality, gay people, lesbian people, would love to get married in an exciting city like New York. They’d come to New York, stay in your hotels, eat in your restaurants, maybe get married at your hotels. Business in New York would increase considerably with marriage equality. It would be a great benefit to you as a businessman.”
He said, “Yes, I agree with all that, but I believe in traditional marriage.”
Q: He believes in it so much he did it many times.
Takei: Exactly. That’s what set me back. [Laughs.]
Q: What do you think of the #MeToo movement, especially its role in the world of media and culture?
Takei: It’s a cultural revolution and a social revolution that’s going on. And it’s high time. However, it has to be looked at with much more incisive eyes.
I was accused last November by a person who claims that I molested him [in 1981]. He lives in Portland now but used to live in L.A. and used to go to a gay bar called Greg’s Blue Dot, which I, too, went to. That’s the only thing that’s truthful. He has my autobiography To the Stars, that’s autographed and addressed to him. I’ve signed tens of thousands, millions of my autobiography, so that’s no evidence. He talks about a piece of furniture in my home, which is not true. And the [accusation] that I molested him is all fabrication by some delusionary fan.
I denied it but I don’t want to engage in a “he said/he said,” because I have great respect for the #MeToo movement. It’s a powerful and legitimate movement. Powerful men have been able to harass women without consequences. And women have been cowed into silence and that needs to change. That is as unjust as the internment of Japanese Americans, or trying to pass an executive order banning people of a certain faith.
Q: Do you think these accusations may be politically motivated to undermine your role as a prominent spokesman?
Takei: Oh yes, it was. Because when those charges were made against me, they were picked up by the Russian bots. We have evidence of that. That’s what’s wrong with social media—it’s anonymous. Robots can repeat and repeat and repeat the same charge and it’s picked up by innocent people and shared with their circle. It’s a very dangerous side of social media.
Q: What are you working on next?
My husband and I have given ourselves an opportunity to smell the flowers. We’re going on a European vacation after Allegiance’s Los Angeles run.
Allegiance was produced on Broadway and is now being presented through April 1 at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center’s spacious Aratani Theatre in the Little Tokyo section of Downtown Los Angeles.