George Takei

This is a little bit tangential to your conversation, but I'm curious about your opinion.

I went to reasonably good high school and college, studied American history, and frankly, until the karate kid and some of the writings of George Takai, Japanese internment wasn't something I really learned.

Yet I was lucky enough to travel to London and I see statues of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, what is it in the American DNA that we don't acknowledge, in your opinion, our past mistakes? Why can't we just own up that this was a horrific thing that we did, and why can't we take steps to not do it

again? Well, the incarceration, the wartime period, has become a really well-known piece of history, partly because in the 60s, I guess, community leaders and family members, third generation Japanese Americans, began really publicizing what had happened.

But during World War II, after Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans who were Buddhists were doubly suspicious in the eyes of the American government.

Thousands were rounded up, not just in the internment camps that you might have heard about in school, not just in what you might have read in George Takei's work or someone else, but people on all of the islands of Hawaii, people in the dead of night, and many, well, let me back up, the first people arrested were Buddhist leaders.

Here was the idea, if you're Buddhist, You can't be American.

Now, I want you to think about that because I know most of you listening have friends who practice mindfulness, meditation.

they could do like a dr basheer on the holodeck box set of adventures

I can't believe George Takei's not showing up in a big finish at some point it seems like exactly the sort of thing that he'd be up for

yeah I would have thought like if there's one if there's one group of people who are going to make a Captain Sulu series a reality for him

which has been

Nicola Bryant is the guest.

New Voyages has Walter Koenig appear in it.

Continues as George Takei.

Like, they pay for all these guys and they get these...

We know Spock.

Not only that, half of the actors, I think there's only three original actors left, Shatner, Walter Koenig and George Takei, just saw him at Hall H not too long ago.

They're the only ones left alive from the original series, the ones that turned 60.

The next generation, we still have some, but Sir Patrick Stewart, he's getting up there.

So i- I, I imagine it would, it was pretty mind-blowing to see Shatner and the, every, all the actors yucking it up, basically, and it was like, really? The Spock smiling, joking? So y- so yeah, I m- I can imagine what it was like seeing that for the first time.

So, and remember, at these first early conventions, really the only stars who showed up were Nichelle Nichols, um- James Doohan, George Takei, and, um, Walter Koenig, they showed up at the first couple.

In 1975, the committee split, and this fellow named Al Schuster went off and started- took the name of the International Star Trek Convention and paid real money for Shatner to come out, and that was where the ground shifted.

Suddenly, it went from being just this kind of fan operation, which everybody did out of love, to a transactional thing, and that was the groundwork for what would follow for the next four decades.

Sulu wasn't gay.

George Take- Even George Takei-

Yeah

... said he wasn't gay.