You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks audio.

This talk features actor and activist George Takai recorded live at TEDx Kyoto 2014.

We're featuring this talk today as part of a special selection themed around journeys.

I'm a veteran of the Starship Enterprise. I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship

with a crew made up of people from all over this world.

Many different races, many different cultures, many different heritages, all working together.

And our mission was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Well, I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who came to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities.

My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Francisco. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan. And overnight, the world was plunged into a world war.

America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.

Japanese Americans, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred,

simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.

And the hysteria grew and grew until on February 1942, the President of the

United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast of America

to be summarily rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process.

Due process is the core pillar of our justice system. That all disappeared.

We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in ten barbed wire prison camps in some of the most desolate places in America,

the blistering hot desert of Arizona, the sultry swamps of Arkansas,

the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and two of the most desolate places in California.

On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday.

And just a few weeks after my birthday, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister, and me up very early one morning,

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