But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.
Radio dramas have disappeared. What we do have now is books on tape, which I find wonderful. I’ve done some of those. Otherwise, radio acting is now gone.
I’m most comfortable with my computer. Yes, I have an iPhone, but I’ve reached that point now where to read e-mails on my phone, I need my reading glasses. I’m most comfortable with the big-screen computer.
I discovered that funny animal pictures – memes – would get a lot of likes and shares.
Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.
You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru – a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South – in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana – refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.
I think being optimistic is ensuring your success. If you start out saying ‘I’ve got this problem,’ or ‘I’m angry at that,’ you will not succeed.
I’m proud of my relationship with ‘Star Trek’! ‘Star Trek’ is a show that I am philosophically compatible with.
Plays close, movies wrap and TV series eventually get cancelled, and we were cancelled in three season.
I’m optimistic, and I have a lot of goals. And I obey the laws of nature: I eat, exercise, and rest properly. But mostly it’s about keeping the mind engaged. My grandmother lived to 104, and she had all of her faculties. I’m physically active and devout – just not as Buddhistic as she was.
‘Star Trek’ fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across ‘Star Trek’ fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different – the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.
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 was pursuing my acting career, but I was silent on the LGBT issue, the issue that was closest to me. I knew if I came out then, I’d have had to change careers.
Dramatic shows are the ones that I am attracted to.
Those Tea Party people are crazy. I mean, they’re lunatics. They close down the government, throw people out of their jobs – hundreds of thousands of people – and they say that they’re doing it ultimately in the interest of creating jobs.
We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term ‘Japanese internment camp’ is both grammatically and factually incorrect.
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