November, 2004, LOS ANGELES - It came with no advance notice. The phone rang. I picked up the receiver. It was the Vice Consul of Japan in Los Angeles, Yuko Kaifu, calling to inform me that I was to be honored by the Government of Japan. I was to be granted the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette at an audience with His Majesty, Emperor Akihito, at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. I was stunned! Out of the clear blue sky, with no forewarning, I, an American, was not only going to be given an international recognition by the Government of Japan, but granted an audience with the Emperor! I must have stammered some clumsy words of appreciation and hung up. I was so shocked I can't clearly remember what I said.
It still seemed like a dream as I flew over the white cotton clouds of the Pacific on my way to Tokyo. The letter from the Consul General of Japan's office that followed the phone call said the decoration was for my years of promoting U.S.-Japan relations. It said that my service with the Japanese American Citizens' League, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission as President Bill Clinton's appointee, the Japan-U.S Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, and my work with the Japanese American National Museum were appreciated, recognized, and honored by the Government of Japan. All those activities could surely be considered altruistic public service but they also integrated my pride in my Japanese ancestry with my American nationality. Most of all, I enjoyed being engaged with and contributing to all of those activities. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would be flying to Tokyo to be granted a decoration by the Emperor of Japan in the Imperial Palace for activities I enjoyed and found personally engaging.
The street alongside the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace is the favorite running route for runners in central Tokyo. It's the longest stretch without a cross street. I have run it often when I've been in Tokyo. On this occasion, however, I was going across the bridge over the moat onto the Palace grounds. There were dignitaries from many other countries who were also being honored. I chatted briefly with honorees from Canada, Australia, Brazil, Pakistan, and Mexico among many others who were gathered on the palace grounds. Three of us were Americans, one from St. Louis and two from Los Angeles. Staff from the Imperial Household, wearing somewhat Napoleonic looking coats with double rows of gold buttons down the front, were everywhere answering questions, giving directions, and organizing us.
We were lined up in formation and escorted up the grand staircase to the Imperial Audience Hall. If Japanese minimalism could be described as grandly elegant, this room had to be it. Two sides of the vast room were horizontal shoji screens. Both end walls were entirely covered by woven tapestry with only a pale hint of pastel clouds in the design. About a half-dozen crystal chandeliers of contemporary design hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room was a low, carpeted platform. There was no other furnishing. A man in a gold-buttoned coat announced the Grand Chamberlain and an extraordinarily tall, slim, imperious-looking man stepped forward. He wore a formal swallowtail coat. He instructed, in softly commanding tones, the procedure that was to be followed in the ceremony. Gold-buttoned staffers quietly sidled up to those who did not understand Japanese to whisper translations into their ears.
We were told when the Emperor would make his entrance, how we were to bow, when we were to bow, how often and how long we were to hold our bows. Then he stepped away and grandly announced the entrance of His Majesty, the Emperor. Silently, seemingly automatically, the shoji screen slid open. It revealed a magnificent garden with a placid lake. I could see the Emperor walking down the veranda as he approached the opened shoji screen. We all bowed in unison as instructed. We rose when he entered the audience hall. He too was dressed formally in a swallowtail coat. There were a few more bows as he stepped up onto the low dais. We bowed again before he began to speak. In contrast to the Grand Chamberlain, the Emperor's voice was warm, affable, and somewhat high pitched.
He maintained a gracious smile throughout. He thanked all of us for the services we had rendered in promoting friendship between our nations and Japan and wished us good fortune in our future endeavors. With those simple congratulatory words, he stepped down and smilingly passed in review before us. The opposite shoji screens noiselessly slid open. The Emperor turned at the opened screens, smiled and nodded back to us. We again bowed down in unison. When we rose up, we could see him regally walking away down the veranda.
That evening and for another day after, friends and relatives in Japan celebrated this extraordinary honor for me with every meal. They wanted to see and touch the splendid medal that I had received. One very busy friend could join me only for a late night drink after work. As he toasted me in the rooftop lounge of the Imperial Hotel overlooking Tokyo, the lights of the city seemed to be sparkling in happy celebration with us. If only my parents could have lived to share these moments with me, I thought. How complete this honor would have been.
I had to cut my stay in Tokyo short because I had a professional engagement scheduled in Honolulu, Hawaii. The location was as if it had been perfectly pre-planned - half way back from Tokyo to Los Angeles. I had been engaged to narrate Aaron Copeland's "Lincoln Portrait" with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra on Veterans' Day Weekend at the Blaisdell Concert Hall. The concert itself seemed as if it had been perfectly pre-arranged for this Japanese American - an American note to follow a decoration from the Government of Japan. This Veterans' Day concert in Honolulu was celebrating a great American President and honoring all those throughout history who had fought for our democracy.
The singularly American music of a groundbreaking American composer with the immortal words of a great American President, Abraham Lincoln - and I had the honor of speaking them. It was one honor following another - one Japanese and this one, American. The concert with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra was a great popular success and I received laudatory reviews. Of course, there were the Star Trek fans who crowded around the dressing room door for autographs after the concert. The flight back to Los Angeles felt like floating on the proverbial cloud nine.
My stay back in Los Angeles, however, had to be abbreviated. Two nights in my own bed and I was off again to another hotel bed - this time in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the opening of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center and Park. This is the official name of the President Bill Clinton Library. I was off to help celebrate this exciting and historic occasion.
I remembered the excitement of my flight to Bill Clinton's first inauguration back in January of 1993. We arrived in Washington D.C. to a gray, overcast sky. But, on the morning of the inauguration, the sum broke through and gave the new President from Arkansas a crisp, bright, golden inauguration. I called it, "the luck of Clinton." There was the sense of a new beginning with new ideas and new energy. There was optimism in the crisp inaugural air for the future of America.
Indeed, Bill Clinton's two-term presidency was filled with extraordinary achievements. The fresh initiatives and reforms he brought to government transformed the nation. Despite all the turbulence during his tenure, he left the nation with a surplus. Mindful of his human weaknesses, I am still a Bill Clinton admirer. He gave me the opportunity to serve on the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, an independent Federal agency. He invited me to my first State Dinner at the White House. Bill Clinton was the President who corrected a grievous oversight of over a half-century by honoring 19 Japanese American veterans of Word War II with the highest military recognition the nation can grant, the Medal of Honor. Among those 19 veterans is the U.S. Senator from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm on a bloody battlefield in Italy.
The Clinton Presidential Center is the repository, museum, and library of the records of his presidency. I am a part of the content of the Center and had contributed financially to the building as well. I feel I am a part of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center.
I arrived in Little Rock excited as well as with a sense of history. The sky was gray and overcast - again, just as it was on his first inauguration. I assured everybody, "Don't worry. There's the luck of Clinton."
The morning of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center was still gray and overcast. But I could see a patch of blue in the sky far to the south. Pointing it out to the people gathered for the opening, I reassured them, "Look over there. There's the luck of Clinton approaching." Alas, the tiny blue patch of sky drifted off in the opposite direction chased away by the ominously black rain clouds. Even before the program began, it started to rain. It was cold, icy rain. We were not only wet when the program began but visibly shivering under our ponchos. Then the rocker, Bono, began to sing. We didn't need to hear him howl out at us, "When the rain came, when the rain came." We knew. We were sitting in the pouring rain, wet and freezing. It got so cold we thought we were in danger of hypothermia. The four Presidents, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were yet to be introduced. It would be an extraordinary moment - four presidents all in the same place at the same time. But, we couldn't take the cold any longer. We fled back to the hotel to watch them introduced on television. The four presidents smiled bravely but we knew how uncomfortable they must have been. They were good soldiers. They all showed themselves to be extraordinary people. Their collective grace, humor, warmth, and eloquent mutual respect made us all feel proud to be Americans. The four men truly are presidential. We applauded all four U.S. Presidents from the warmth and cozy comfort of our hotel.
The gala reception the night before in the Presidential Center that preceded the opening, however, was a glittering affair. The new building glowed in celebratory lights. Fireworks exploded like exotic flowers in the darkened Arkansas sky. There were political luminaries everywhere. I spotted Leon Panetta, Joe Lockhart, and Paul Begala from the Clinton administration; George Stephanopoulos and Geraldo Rivera from the media; Howard Dean from the presidential primaries; and Jessie Jackson, former California governor, Gray Davis, and the former Mayor of Detroit, Dennis Archer were among the celebrants. It was rumored that Brad Pitt and Barbra Streisand were also there but I didn't see them. I really didn't need to see Bono to have him sing to us the coming of the rain. It was a dazzling and rainless opening reception.
The Presidential Center is a magnificent museum overlooking the Arkansas River on one side and a sensitively restored historic structure, the Old Choctaw Railroad Station, which is now the Clinton School of Public Service, on the opposite side. It also contains the library for researchers as well as the repository of the papers from the Clinton years. The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center is a new landmark of Little Rock and a proud center of learning and inspiration to build a better future for America.
September, 2004, LOS ANGELES - In this age of jet travel, time is shortened, work is intensified, and we cover many bases. We dash from one place to another on varying missions in a very full month. And as usual, September had me on quick trips to New York for a meeting and to Emeryville, California, for a voice-over job. But travel can also transport in time as well as to a place. Last month, I went back to my boyhood.
I traveled to a place called Rohwer in southeast Arkansas where I spent a part of my childhood years. It is a place of memories for me - memories that glow with a golden haze. I remember the lush bayous filled with strange sounds and creepy, crawly creatures. I remember catching pollywogs in a ditch and watching them miraculously sprout legs and eventually turn into frogs. I remember waking up one magical winter morning and discovering everything covered in white - cold, soft snow. I also remember the barbed wire fence that kept me confined in that camp. I traveled back to a time of innocence, a time when I was quite unaware of the devastation that had befallen my parents and 120,000 other Japanese Americans. It was World War II and our crime was that we just happened to "look like the enemy."
A child is incredibly adaptable to the most abnormal of conditions. To me, the tall guard towers and the barbed wire fence that incarcerated my family and me became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality. It became normal for me to line up three times a day to eat in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with Daddy to a communal shower and bathe with many men. It became normal for me to go to school in a black, tarpaper-covered barrack. I learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag within sight of armed sentries watching over us. I was too young to appreciate the irony as I recited the words, "with liberty and justice for all."
The return to Arkansas was undeniably filled with many emotions - but this time with deeper understanding and an overpowering sense of uplift. The pilgrimage to Rohwer was on the final day of a richly enlightening week in Little Rock, Arkansas. A week-long series of programs called "Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas" was being capped with a long bus caravan that rolled past mile after mile of ripening cotton fields to Camp Rohwer as well as to a second internment camp in Arkansas called Camp Jerome.
The week was awe-inspiring. Over 1,300 people, many of them former internees with their children and grandchildren, had gathered in Little Rock from all over the nation. There were lawyers, educators, historians, politicians, and others from all walks of life. The Japanese American National Museum, working in partnership with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock opened eight exhibits in four different venues located throughout the city. The principal exhibits; "America's Concentration Camp" and "Against Their Will: The Japanese American Experience in WWII Arkansas" are in the Statehouse Convention Center. The stirring story of young Japanese Americans who went from unjust incarceration behind barbed wire fences to fight heroically for the United States are told by three deeply moving exhibits in the Douglas MacArthur Museum of Military History. A handsome and affecting art exhibit of the paintings of Henry Sugimoto, who was incarcerated in both of the two Arkansas camps, can be viewed at the Cox Arts Center and two exhibits on the arts and crafts in the internment camps are at the Fine Arts Building of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Saturday was a one-day symposium composed of twenty-seven sessions with discussions that ranged from democracy to civil rights to military service to historic preservation. For me, the most daunting part of the day's program was the luncheon. President Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, was on the printed program as our luncheon keynote speaker. As we all knew by that time, his emergency heart surgery in New York had sidelined him from all public activities. I was asked to substitute for him - substitute for the silver tongued former President of the United States! The challenge was as awesome as the honor. I had to rise to the honor.
I began by sharing the heartwarming joy I felt on meeting people I had not seen in decades and of people who remembered me as a little boy but that I - try as I might - could not. I talked of my fond memories of a boyhood in Rohwer. I talked of the stinging irony I felt on seeing the crumbling old monument in the cemetery at Rohwer - a memorial to Japanese American soldiers who went from internment camps to perish in a war fighting for democracy and are now buried at the site of their incarceration. I talked of an invitation I received in the year 2000 from President Clinton to the White House to witness the granting of nineteen medals of honor, the highest military recognition of the nation, to nineteen Japanese American veterans of World War II. Fifty-five years before, at the end of the war, these men had been recognized with the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest military honor, for their heroic deeds. However, after a review mandated by order of Congress in 1996, it was found that their acts of valor eminently merited the highest honor. Only wartime prejudice had reduced their tribute. Among these extraordinary members of the Greatest Generation receiving the Medal of Honor was the senior U.S. Senator from Hawaii, Senator Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm on a bloody battlefield in Italy. These men and all the Japanese American veterans of World War II had transformed this nation. They made my America today a reality.
I talked of the challenges of our democratic ideals. It takes courageous, principled people to struggle to fulfill those ideals. Throughout the history of our nation, injustices were battled by the disenfranchised. African Americans struggled against slavery, then Jim Crow laws, and other discrimination to transform this nation. Women, who were denied any role in leadership, struggled to gain equality and justice and helped to transform this nation. In the history of the American southwest, Latinos had endured a host of injustices but still they struggled to fulfill the ideals of our nation. I talked that day in Little Rock about our democracy as a dynamic work-in-progress. All of us, the great diversity of this land, working in concert as Americans carry out the promise of our American ideals. When I finished, the audience rose up in a standing ovation. That week in Little Rock, Arkansas will forever be an unforgettable benchmark in my life.
The "Life Interrupted" programs that examine a dark chapter of American history were themselves history making. We have profoundly important lessons for our times today to be learned from the exhibits, the symposium, and the pilgrimage. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation whose generous support made it possible for us to bring history so relevantly alive.
A great bonus of the trip to Little Rock was a preview peek at the dazzling new William Jefferson Clinton Library and Presidential Center set to open on November 18th. The hard-hat tour of the Clinton library, museum, and school of public service was wonderfully tantalizing. The modern steel and glass building is a sleek symbol of the "bridge to the 21st century" that President Clinton so often spoke about. The sensitively restored old Choctaw Railway Station in a landscaped park, which will house the Clinton School of Public Service, is the very symbol of history brought back into the current of contemporary life. I toured the work-in-progress with a few students working hard on the Grand Opening and Dedication of this newest of Presidential Centers, Mike Eady and Sara Beth Crow. I promised Mike and Sara Beth that I would return to Little Rock for that history-making day in November. I told them I have my own roots in Arkansas.
July, 2004, LOS ANGELES - My travel schedule in July had me covering about a quarter of this planet from Tokyo, Japan, to the east coast cities of Washington DC, New York, and Boston and finishing up the month at a Star Trek convention in a blazingly hot Las Vegas, Nevada.
The most personally affecting journey, however, was my first trip of the month during the Fourth of July weekend. On that holiday weekend when we Americans celebrate our liberty and freedom, I joined a pilgrimage to a former U.S. internment camp where my family and I, together with 18,000 other Japanese Americans, were imprisoned during World War II.
The camp is in northern California, almost at the Oregon border. It has an almost mockingly poetic name, Camp Tule Lake. It was there in a barbed wire camp built on a wind-swept dry lake bed that I spent two and a half years of my boyhood after a year and a half in another internment camp in Arkansas.
The pilgrimage was made up of bus caravans that came from Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and Berkeley, California. We, from Los Angeles, joined the one from Sacramento. On the buses were survivors of the internment, most of them elderly now, young Japanese Americans intent on understanding the experience of their grandparents and parents, scholars of the internment, both white and Asian, a few filmmakers and one or two African Americans. It was a good spectrum of the nation on a journey back to a dark chapter of American history. This was my second pilgrimage to Tule Lake. Eight years ago, in 1996, I made my first journey back since our family was released from that camp exactly fifty years before. That pilgrimage was also on a Fourth of July weekend. The symbolism was irresistible.
The tar paper barracks that we lived in are all gone now - long removed or destroyed by time. With the guidance of an authority, I retraced a dirt road to an area where our barrack once must have been. I recognized the view of Abalone Mountain and Castle Rock from that barren site. This must have been where my home was, so long ago. The mountains were the only landmark I was able to remember. One of the few remaining structures from the camp was the concrete stockade, a jail within an internment camp. These pilgrimages back to a little remembered time in our history help enlarge my appreciation of the preciousness of our American liberty and my awareness of its fragility. They also deepen my understanding of the painful human price paid by such failures of our democracy.
The most poignant part of the pilgrimage was the memorial service held at the old cemetery site for those who died during their incarceration. Tribute was paid to those who passed in all 10 internment camps with candles lit by representatives from each of the camps. I was honored to represent Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, where my family and I were held before being brought to Camp Tule Lake. As we paid our respects to those who passed in these camps during World War II, my thoughts were also with those Arab Americans today who are being detained without the due process to which we are all entitled. I resolved as an American to work to ensure that the fundamental ideals of this nation shall prevail over today's challenges of terrorism.
The most joyous part of the pilgrimage was a cultural program held in the newly restored Art Deco movie theater in the nearby town of Klamath Falls, Oregon. The performers were former internees and their descendants. The audience was made up of those on the pilgrimage and the people of the town of Klamath Falls. I served as the master of ceremony as well as a reader of a poem written by a former internee/poet. There were musical acts, dramatic readings, and dance performances. About a thousand people - former internees and those on the pilgrimage shared a happy evening of cultural performances with the town folks of a rural southern Oregon community. The applause after each act was loud and appreciative. It was, to me, the sweet sound of a healed nation and the true spirit of America.
The trip to Tokyo was to promote the fall release in Japan of the DVD version of the original Star Trek television series. The promotional campaign involved back-to-back series of print, television, and radio interviews culminating in a massive public event in a chamber hall of the central Tokyo Railway Station. Fans from throughout Japan gathered, many in Starfleet uniforms, others in USS Excelsior T-shirts, to celebrate a unique Star Trek event. The master of ceremonies was a hyper-animated Japanese comedian in Starfleet uniform accompanied by a bevy of lovely young girls dressed as Starfleet yeomen. The applause when I was introduced was thunderous. It was an extraordinary sensation to be talking in Japanese about a television series on which I had worked almost forty years ago in Hollywood to young fans in Japan, many of whom had not yet been born at the time.
The enthusiasm, the devotion, and the love I felt from them were as real and as palpable as that from fans in North America, South America or Europe. What made this so special was the fact that this event was in the country from which my grandparents came to America about one hundred years ago. Never in their wildest imagination could they have dreamed that their grandson would be so affectionately received as an actor in this, my ancestral land. What an amazing world we live in! And what an astonishing global phenomenon Star Trek has become.
The trips to the East Coast cities were a combination of business and pleasure. Washington DC was for a meeting of a task force on which I have been asked to serve. New York is always my destination for great theater and excitement as well as the nerve center of work and business. After the business part of my mission was completed, it was theater every evening. The most impressive drama I caught was Arthur Miller's "After The Fall" starring Peter Krause from the television series, "Six Feet Under." Krause was fine but the most striking performance in the play was that of Carla Gugino in the role inspired by Marilyn Monroe. Her characterization of an insecure woman, initially charming and poignantly eager to please, who, with power, grows into a terrifying monster, was commanding.
The most stirring musical was award winning playwright, Tony Kushner's "Caroline, or Change." I'm amazed by this artist who blew me away with "Angels in America" and now transported me musically to his native Louisiana in the 50's with a heartrending story of the relationship of a black housekeeper and a young Jewish boy, the son of her employer. Tonya Pinkins' performance as Caroline was soulfully moving. Other shows I caught were "Wonderful Town," "Sly Fox" with Richard Dreyfus and gifted Rene' Auberjonois in a hilariously delightful characterization, and "Frogs," starring Nathan Lane. I always leave New York feeling so enriched.
Changing to my political hat, I flew to Boston for the Democratic National Convention. I was not a delegate this year, but I served as the master of ceremony for one of the after parties. I thought it was a terrific convention. The speeches were stirring, former President Bill Clinton was masterful, and Senator John Kerry gave the best speech I had heard him make. We need a strong leader who can truly lead in a complex and diverse world; one who can address the historic deficit that this nation has been plunged into and create genuine jobs for working Americans. As you might guess, I am a Democrat and I have great feelings in my bones that we will elect a new president in November - President John Kerry.
The final trip of the month was to Las Vegas and a Star Trek convention. How comfortable these conventions have become! After all the hurly burly of the many trips, even with a slight jet-lag fog, I can still function easily surrounded by understanding and loving fans. I can get the names of familiar faces mixed up and still get a forgiving hug. I can growl out that old coal miners' song, "Sixteen Tons" and still get standing ovations. What terrific people fans are! I love the fans and I love these conventions that are like massive family reunions. July was a full, hectic and enriching month and how wonderful it is to recover and relax with fans at a Star Trek convention.