-You were just in Pittsburgh for Steel City Con.
How does it feel --
Much has been written about the fact that, you know,
Star Trek was not anywhere near as popular
when it was airing as it is now.
Is it still surreal to you
that fans are so deeply connected to that show?
-It's 53 years old.
We went on the air in 1966, canceled in 1969,
exactly 50 years ago, and here we are, 53 years later,
with another new Star Trek spin-off with Patrick Stewart
and another movie being talked about by -- with Tarentino.
I mean, it's an amazing phenomenon.
-And people must still be so happy to see you
when they go to something like Steel City Con?
-I greet my fans like this. [ Laughter ]
-You know how to please them. So...
-We have lived much longer than we expected
and prospered in so many wondrous ways,
like all these fans.
-That's fantastic.
This show, "Terror: Infamy" --
this is much more serious subject matter, and, uh,
it's based on the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Uh, there's a supernatural element to it,
but this is a very real issue for you --
not just being a Japanese-American,
but you were interned as a child from the ages five to eight.
Is that right? -I'd just turned five years old.
A few weeks after that,
my parents got me up very early one morning,
dressed us hurriedly up -- my brother a year younger
and my baby sister still a baby, an infant --
and, uh, my father said to my brother and me,
"Wait here in the living room
while we do some last-minute packing."
So the two of us were just looking out the --
gazing out the front window,
and suddenly we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway
carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them.
They stomped up the porch
and, with their fists, began pounding on the door.
I -- the way I remember it,
the whole house seemed to tremble.
And my father came out and answered the door,
and, literally at gunpoint,
we were ordered out of our house.
And so my father gave my brother and me little packages to carry.
He hefted two heavy suitcases,
and we followed him out onto the driveway
and waited for our mother to come out.
When she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm
a heavy duffel bag in the other,
and tears were streaming down her cheeks.
It is a picture that's burnt into my memory.
-What did you think was happening
when being that young in a situation like that?
What were your memories at the time of what this was
and why it was happening?
-That morning was a terrifying morning,
but then we were taken --
you know, the camps were just being built,
so they took us to Santa Anita Race Track,
a nearby race track.
We were herded over with other Japanese-American families
to the stable area and assigned a horse stall
for us to sleep in.
From a two-bedroom home, front yard, backyard,
on Garnet Street in LA,
to a horse stall.
For my parents,
it was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience
to take their three children into that smelly horse stall,
still pungent with the --
and I still remember that smell, but, for me,
I thought it was fun to sleep where the horsies sleep.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-You know, horsies slept here. -Sure.
-I can smell them.
-Now, how surreal was it for you to return to a set
that was built to evoke this time
and having such specific memories of it?
I mean, obviously, you're coming back
in a much better perspective on it,
having the control of telling this story,
but was it hard for you to walk onto a set
and see those camps again?
-Remember, I was a five-year-old kid,
and they built on a 6.5-acre plot of land
an exact replica of the internment camps.
The barracks were exactly the way I remembered it.
There was a little crawlspace down below,
and I recognized that because we adopted a black dog,
cute little dog.
We named him Blackie.
And whenever something scared him --
you know, when gunfire was going off --
he got scared, and he would crawl under the crawlspace,
and we crawled in after him,
so, you know, I remembered the details.
The -- The set designers did tremendous research.
The strips of wood that held the tar paper on
were exactly the same dimensions,
so it was, to me, a kind of a nostalgic return
because of my childhood experience, but, as a teenager,
I learned a lot more about the reality --
the harrowing experience that it was for my parents, and so, uh,
with both the adult knowledge and the memory of a child,
it was eerie, kind of, the feeling.