Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.

I intend to live life, not just exist.

My grandmother lived to 104 years old, and part of her success was she woke up every morning to a brand new day. She said every morning is a new gift. Her favorite hobby was collecting birthdays.

We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.

I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.

I love people. When you're engaged with society and trying to make it a better society, you're an optimist.

'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.

I'm particularly impressed by the creation of the character of Spock, which really was Leonard Nimoy's singular creation. He used everything he had.

My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I've been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

It kills me to hear Donald Trump talking.

I'm a chairman on the Board of Governors for the East-West Players, the longest-running Asian-American theater company in America.

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the same-sex marriage bill, my blood was boiling. I had been silent, but that night, Brad and I watched the news and saw all these young people pouring out on Santa Monica Boulevard venting their rage, and I said, 'I have to speak out.'

I'm most comfortable with my computer. Yes, I have an iPhone, but I've reached that point now where to read e-mails on my phone, I need my reading glasses. I'm most comfortable with the big-screen computer.

I may not have trekked through the galaxies in reality. But I have trekked all over this planet: Australia, Asia, Latin America, Europe.

Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.

When Brad and I got married in 2008, it got a lot of attention. And all the attention was over the fact that we were two men, but people were hardly conscious of the fact that we were entering into an interracial marriage. That's wonderful, because it was only 50 years ago with Loving v. Virginia that interracial marriages were made legal.

When I was a very young actor, I cruised around in a pretty cool vehicle called the Starship Enterprise.

To characterize all Muslims as terrorists is fear-mongering of the worst kind.

Back in the day, coming out was something very personal. You began by acknowledging the truth, first to yourself, then to close family and friends. Those of us more in the public spotlight, though, also had to 'come out' to the press.

We have to remember that Putin was a member of the KGB. He has already demonstrated that kind of macho, dictatorial attitude. Russia has breached their pledge to uphold the Olympic charter. This is a great opportunity for the IOC to say we cannot, given the situation that exists currently, allow the Olympics to take place in Russia.

I've been an activist since my late teens. I take this very seriously and try to use the gift that's been given to me - access to the media - as positively as I can.

We are living in a science fiction world.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

Social media affords me an opportunity to interact with fans on a daily basis, not just for a few seconds apiece at a science-fiction convention.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

It has a Nazi echo, doesn't it? The Jews had to wear that Star of David, and Donald Trump is saying all Syrians have to carry an ID card and they can, without warrant, go into any Syrian's home or a mosque.

The central pillar of our justice system is due process. You have got to be charged with a crime. Then you can challenge those charges in a court of law with a trial.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.

This political climate today reminds me of what my father must have gone through in 1942, when the winds of war and fires of hate were surrounding him. We have a candidate for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump, using the same rhetoric that my father must have heard from elected officials.

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

What is important is the reliability of my posts being there to greet my fans with a smile or a giggle every morning. That's how we keep on growing.

ISIS itself regularly fuels hatred of gay people and violence towards them. It broadcasts gruesome executions of homosexuals thrown blindfolded from rooftops.

When I heard Donald Trump make that sweeping hysterical statement that all Muslims have to be banned because they are terrorists, I was chilled by that.

We need to get some rationality on the Second Amendment. This is crazy what we allow ourselves.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.

I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

My memories of camp - I was four years old to eight years old - they're fond memories.

But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

As you know, when Star Trek was canceled after the second season, it was the activism of the fans that revived it for a third season.

Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand.

STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.