LOS ANGELES (CNS) – Actor and activist George Takei will introduce an interactive digital storytelling experience Thursday at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, allowing visitors to engage with him and other survivors of World War II incarceration.
The presentation at the museum’s Democracy Lab will showcase the StoryFile technology, which uses artificial intelligence and pre-recorded interviews to simulate conversations with participants, according to museum officials.
Each participant answered hundreds of questions over several days, creating a database of responses. Visitors to the digital displays ask questions into a microphone, and AI technology finds and returns an appropriate answer directly from the hours of prerecorded video, museum officials said.
Takei, who was incarcerated with his family as a child, is among several individuals featured in the project. Other StoryFiles include camp survivor June Aochi Berk, draft resister Takashi Hoshizaki and survivor Mary Murakami.
“First-person storytelling has always been an important part of JANM’s mission to share the lessons of history forward, and to connect past and present,” JANM President and CEO Ann Burroughs said in a statement. “We are so grateful to these individuals and their families who have devoted countless hours of their time and energy to ensure that their stories are preserved for generations to come.”
The technology is designed to preserve firsthand accounts of Japanese Americans who were held in U.S. incarceration camps, often referred to as internment camps, during World War II.
The 88-year-old Takei — best known as “Star Trek’s” Hikaru Sulu, the helmsman of the USS Enterprise — wrote about his childhood incarceration in his 2019 memoir “They Called Us Enemy,” describing how his family was confined in camps during the war.
During a 2022 appearance at Chapman University in the city of Orange, he reflected on the moment when his family was forced from their Los Angeles home by soldiers.
“They stopped on the front porch and with their fists they banged on the door. My father answered the door and they pointed those bayonets at all of us and told us to leave,” said Takei, who was 5 years old.
When his mother came out of the house, “tears were streaming down her cheeks. The terror of that morning is seared into my memory,” Takei said.
The StoryFile installation is part of the museum’s broader renovation project, with new exhibits and interactive features planned for the reopening of its main Pavilion in late 2026.
A public preview of the StoryFiles is scheduled for Saturday. Tickets are available at janm.org/events.
The Democracy Lab, where the preview will be held, sits on the historic site where Japanese Americans once gathered before being transported to incarceration camps during the war.
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