Star Trek's George Takei opens up about 'detention during World War II'

Star Trek actor George Takei has revealed that back in 1942, when he was just five years old, he and his family was among the 110,000 Japanese sent to relocation centres by the Americans during World War II.

In an interview with CBS News, the 'Star Trek' actor said that they were put in prison camps because they looked like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.

He asserted that they were ordered out of our home at gunpoint, and their new "home" at Rohwer was a small, single room in a tar paper barrack.

Takei said that he went to school and began every school-day morning with the pledge of allegiance of the flag.

In 1946, a year after the war ended, his family was released, but Takei apparently couldn't escape the racism of the day.

He revealed that he started school in Los Angeles and the teacher continually called him 'the little Jap boy, which stung.

He said that his big break, which came in 1965 after his agent got him an audition in front of Gene Roddenberry, broke the stereotypes and he was a "regular, visible, talking, walking, fencing presence."

Takei married his longtime partner, Brad Altman, in 2008 when a California marriage equality bill was vetoed in 2005.