And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.
And my first feature film, which I got while still a student at UCLA, I was seen in a student production by a casting director from Warner Brothers and plunked into this movie, starred Richard Burton, who was an idol of mine.
And so, I've been enormously lucky and certainly the capper on the string of luck was meeting Gene Roddenberry and to be cast in the role of Sulu, which was a breakthrough role for an Asian American actor.
As you know, when Star Trek was canceled after the second season, it was the activism of the fans that revived it for a third season.
Burton and I were a perfect fit, because here's this star-struck, stage-struck young actor, full of questions, and here's this legendary figure who loved to talk about himself.
But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.
Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.
I love the show, and I'm proud of my association with the show, and certainly the character is one that is very much a part of me.
I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.
I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.
I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it.
I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.
I'm also serving as a commissioner on the Japan-U.S. Commission, appointed by President Clinton, which will be taking me to Tokyo in June.
I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.
I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!
My memories of camp - I was four years old to eight years old - they're fond memories.
Plays close, movies wrap and TV series eventually get cancelled, and we were cancelled in three season.
So I've been a political activist all my life and I think in a large measure it's because of the internment that we experienced 50 years ago.
So the history of Star Trek is one directed, guided and determined by the Star Trek fans, and here they are again, asserting themselves.
STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.
Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.
This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.
To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.
We were first sent to a camp in Arkansas. I remember catching pollywogs and seeing them sprout legs, and then it snowed one winter in Arkansas, and for a Southern California kid, to discover snow was magical.
Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.
Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand.
Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.
You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.
Takei has been with his partner, Brad Altman, since 1988
From January to February 1991, George appeared in the Philip Kan Gotanda play The Wash at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California, USA.
In the early 1990's, George provided the voice of "Captain Hikaru Sulu" for several audio adventures based upon the adventures of the USS Excelsior.
In the late 60s-early 70s George worked for 3 years as producer-host of Expression: East/West, a public affairs show on KNBC, Los Angeles.
George has been a jogger for many years, and runs marathons frequently.
George initially objected to the scene in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) where the big Starfleet guard calls him "tiny." When the scene was screened for audiences, the audiences cheered Sulu (Takei) when he defeated the big guard, and George later apologized to writer
George initially declined to appear in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), but William Shatner personally called him and persuaded him to star in the film.
George is a graduate of UCLA.
George is 5' 8" (1.73 m) tall.
In October 2005, in an issue of Frontiers Magazine, Takei revealed that he is gay Though his status in gay and lesbian organizations was not a secret, this was the first public announcement that he has made.
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