STAGE TUBE: ALLEGIANCE's George Takei Talks of Life Inside a Japanese Internment Camp

Actor and activist George Takei was five years old when his father told him the family was going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas.

"It was an adventure. I thought everyone took vacations by leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers, at both ends of the car."

If the young boy wasn't quite grasping the true meaning of what was going on during the three years his family was imprisoned in the country where they were born for the offense of being of Japanese descent, the senior Takei wants to make sure this dark chapter of America's past is not forgotten. This fall he makes his Broadway debut in Allegiance, a new musical drama inspired by his experiences during World War II and its aftermath.

In this video for Democracy Now!, Takei talks of his memories being a Japanese-American boy during the early 1940s and how he regards America now because of it.

"When I was a teenager my father told me that our democracy was very fragile, but it was a true people's democracy. Both as strong and as great as a people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are."

Inspired by George Takei's true-life experience, Allegiance follows one family's experience amid 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to U.S. internment camps during World War II. A mysterious envelope leads Sam Kimura (played by Takei) back 60 years to a time when he (played as a young man by Leung) and his sister Kei (Tony Award-winner Salonga) strive to save their family from the wrongful imprisonment. Sam enlists in the army to prove the Kimuras' loyalty, but Kei joins draft resisters fighting for the rights of their people. Their paths take them from the lush farmlands of California to the wastelands of Wyoming to the battlefields of Europe, and their divided loyalties threaten to tear them apart forever. But as long-lost memories are unlocked, Sam finds that it is never too late to forgive and to recognize the redemptive power of love.