Star Trek Star Spent Time In An Arkansas Internment Camp

The man who played Mr. Sulu on Star Treck is pondering the time he spend in an Arkansas interment camp during World War Two. George Takei was four years old when his Japanese-American family was forced from their Los Angeles home to a camp in southeast Arkansas near Rohwer. Takei -- now 64-years-old -- recently visited the site again for the first time in about six decades. He and his family lived at Rohwer with about 85-hundred other detainees before they were moved to another camp in California. Takei returned in part to bring awareness to an effort to preserve the history of the Arkansas camps by the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the Japanese-American National Museum. Takei is chairman of the museum board. Takei says he was a teenager before he began questioning how his family was treated during World War Two. He recalls saying the Pledge of Allegiance while looking out on a barbed-wire fence. ----- More than 120-thousand Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps at the beginning of the war. Eight camps were in the West; two southeast Arkansas sites at Rohwer and Jerome were the only ones in the South. Together, the Arkansas sites housed more than 16-thousand detainees. Posted By Mike Hellgren