NEW YORK, NY.- I was born April 20 of 1937. Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. I had turned 5 by the time a morning arrived that I can never forget. Two months after Pearl Harbor, in February 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, decreeing that all Japanese Americans — 125,000 of us by the latest count — on the West Coast were to be imprisoned with no charge, no trial and no due process, only because of how we looked.
A few months after the order was issued, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway in Los Angeles carrying rifles and shiny bayonets. They banged on our door with their fists and one said, “Get your family out of this house.”
At the time Henry was 4, I was 5 and my baby sister was not yet 1. My father had had the foresight to prepare a box of underwear tied with twine for each of us. He had two heavy suitcases ready. We followed him out and stood in the driveway while our mother came out escorted by another soldier, my baby sister in one arm, and carrying a duffel bag. That terrifying morning, burned into my memory, is what led to me becoming an activist.
Before we were interned, my father had a successful dry-cleaning business on Wilshire Boulevard, right by Bullocks Wilshire, the most fashionable department store in Los Angeles. By the time the war ended, we had nothing. Given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States and $25 to start over from scratch, we returned to Los Angeles, where my father’s first job was as a dishwasher in Chinatown. Only other Asians would hire us.
I wanted to be an actor — it was my passion. I enrolled at UCLA, and while I was there, a casting director plucked me out and put me in my first feature film, “Ice Palace,” with Richard Burton and Robert Ryan. From there I did “Hawaiian Eye” and “My Three Sons,” and I became this unlikely success, an Asian American doing movies and TV. Then I was cast in “Star Trek,” which gave me a platform very few people are given. And I continue to use it. Last year began with a five-month stay in London, where we took a musical I’d begun developing about the internment years earlier.
My father suffered terribly in the camps, yet he continued to believe deeply in democracy. He was an unusual Japanese American of his generation in that most of the interned parents were too pained by the experience to talk about it openly. My father continued to discuss it and loved quoting Lincoln’s lines from the Gettysburg Address about this being a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
That’s what inspires me. It’s the people that make a democracy work, and, sadly, most people are not equipped anymore to take on the responsibility of being American citizens.
Current and upcoming projects: Appeared in 103 performances of the British production of “George Takei’s Allegiance” at Charing Cross Theater; voiced the character of Seki in the Netflix animated series “Blue Eye Samurai.” A new picture book, “My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story,” was released April 16, and he will appear as Koh the Face Stealer in the Netflix series “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
