LOOKING FOR MR SULU

In yet more evidence of time's relentless tread, George Takei turns 70 this year. When absolutely nothing pertaining to the original Star Trek TV series has escaped its due celebration, from the Klingon language and its strange proximity to Anglo-Saxon to the studio hands who whisked apart the automatic doors aboard the Enterprise, it hardly seems appropriate to accord Takei's character, the young Japanese-American helmsman Hikaru ('Mister') Sulu, the status of an unsung treasure. But for many years, this is precisely what Sulu was.

Already cast as early as the show's second pilot (way ahead of his Russian buddy, Mr Chekov), Sulu's role in the United Nations of which the bridge of the Enterprise was composed was as a living, breathing rapprochement with the enemy of barely more than 20 years before. Like 120,000 other Japanese Americans, Takei was quarantined as a small boy in an internment camp in Arkansas following the Imperial Air Force attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He spent part of his early childhood growing up behind barbed wire, an experience to which he compares more contemporary forms of social repression in the United States.

Takei's background hardly merited such treatment. He may revert to racial type in the odd Trek episode (the frozen image of him stripped to the waist and brandishing a samurai sword was thought resonant enough to be included in the closing credits of the first series), but George was born in Los Angeles, from where he has barely ever strayed, and was named by his father after the newly crowned British king. The Takeis knew which side they were on.

In the late fifties and early sixties, George studied theatre arts at UCLA (as well as Stratford-upon-Avon and Tokyo), before joining the Desilu actors' workshop in Hollywood, which would go on to invent Star Trek. He appeared in minor film roles in the early 1960s, often alongside the seigneurial British likes of Richard Burton and Alec Guinness, at a time when parts for east Asian actors were even thinner on the ground than they are in the allegedly more cosmopolitan present. In PT-109, he is the helmsman who navigates the Japanese destroyer into an attack on the young naval commander John F Kennedy's ship, a brave enough cameo when memories of 1941 were still so raw. (Having survived the cinematic naval guns, Kennedy would be felled by a sniper's bullet in Dallas the very year of the film's release.)

It was within the ecumenical crew of the USS Enterprise, however, that Takei would find the role that made him globally famous, a stroke of career luck that he has never felt the need to repudiate. When Sulu was eventually joined by Chekov, the incubus of the American past was juxtaposed to one that was very much painfully present. If we could make friends with the Japs, hey, we could even envisage a world in which we might be pals with the godless Commie Russkies.

Those whose memories of Star Trek revolve around the peerless emoting of William Shatner's Kirk, the arch impassiveness of Leonard Nimoy's Spock or the cornpone hokesiness of DeForest Kelley's Dr McCoy may be surprised to be reminded that Mr Sulu was rather more than a mere extra. He has a pivotal role in many of the storylines, a trajectory that began with the opening sequence of 'Return of the Archons' (1966), in which we see him got up like John Mills in Great Expectations, urgently radioing the ship to beam up him and a fellow member of a scouting party. Cowled monk-like figures with sinister sticks are closing in on them. His crewmate panics and runs, despite Sulu's insistence that they need to stay put while the transporter locks on to them. He is the one who gets it wrong though, getting zapped just before he is spirited away. By the time he is beamed aboard, he has been transmuted into a loved-up zombie gasping about 'Paradise'. Sinking to the steps of the transporter room, he looks like a boy in a nineties nightclub coming up on ecstasy, sure enough trigger for an exchange of nervous glances among his colleagues.

There is a permanent slight air of the boyish ingénu about Sulu (Takei was then thirtyish going on 23). He is grown-up enough to be able to fly an intergalactic spacecraft, and yet wears the startled expression of the innocent abroad whenever things turn nasty. He gives the lie, gloriously, to the racist postulate that east Asian people lack facial expressiveness, as he can do erotic joy as easily as tremulous horror. Indeed, there is something utterly compelling about his face, which combines an almost Chinese roundness with the heavy eyebrows, strong nose and sculpted cheekbones of the young Japanese. The Oriental eyes of Western perception have the head start of always looking infinitely knowing, offset in Sulu's case by the regulation side-parted college boy's haircut with its one fugitive strand that never quite joins the rest across his forehead. Not the least of Takei's blessings is his vocal tone, which the decades haven't dimmed, an unusually deep, rich instrument that one of his MySpace friends has breathlessly hailed as 'possibly the greatest voice ever'.