STAR Trek's George Takei has hailed California’s “long overdue” apology for incarcerating him and other Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
Soldiers forced him out of his family's Los Angeles home at the age of five, to be imprisoned in a "smelly horse stall" at one of ten internment camps.
He was detained at a temporary assembly center for more than 18,000 people at Santa Anita Park horse racetrack in Arcadia, California.
Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the then 5-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942 and imprisoned.
The United States had entered World War Two after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor some three months earlier.
Because on unfounded fears that Japanese-Americans were enemy sympathizers, Takei and about 120,000 others were held across 10 camps in the state's remote desert.
Another internee, Les Ouchida, told Associated Press that their "only fault was that we had the wrong last names and wrong faces".
On Thursday, California’s Legislature is expected to officially apologize to Ouchida, Takei and other internment victims.
Lawmakers will say they're sorry for the state’s role in aiding the then US government’s policy, and condemn actions that helped aggravate anti-Japanese discrimination at that time.
George Takei applauded the news on Twitter, saying that the apology was "welcome, yet long overdue".
His childhood incarceration was the result of a decision by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order establishing the camps in February 1942.
Suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them.
George Takei
Known for his work as the character Hikaru Sulu on the television and film series Star Trek, Takei uses his star-power to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, and racial justice.
He told last year that he was interned for three years, until the age of eight.
Takei recalled the "harrowing" day he was taken away: “I’d just turned five years old; a few weeks after that, my parents got me up very early one morning.”
As he and his siblings were looking out of the window, “suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them.”
The soldiers “pounded on the door with their fists” and “literally at gunpoint we were ordered out of our house”.
With tears “streaming” down his mum’s cheeks during their "terrifying morning", the family was forcefully removed to Santa Anita Race Track.
"We were herded over with other Japanese-American families to the stable area and assigned a horse stall for us all to sleep in.
“It was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience, to take three children into that smelly horse stall," the star added.
Barracks were built there, and the family adopted a dog during their incarceration - which would hide in a crawlspace whenever it heard gunfire.
He wrote of their horrific experience in his book, They Called Us Enemy, which explains how "every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up".
They were taken to one of ten "relocation centers, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard."
Takei's book sets out his time "behind barbed wire", watched by guard towers and sentries with rifles manning them and, later, the "terrors of growing up under legalized racism".
Before the 'prisoners' were eventually released several years later, they had to swear a loyalty oath to the US to regain their freedom.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to grant reparations to surviving internees.
They received $20,000 and an apology.
Associated Press says that while California’s Legislature is expected to apologise to camp survivors, its resolution doesn’t include any compensation.
It targets the actions of its predecessor at the time for supporting the internments.
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