George Takei : Mr. Sulu and a lot more....

Blog-buddy Vanilla Rose last week asked whether I'd posted anything on George Takei, whose 75th birthday had occurred on 20 April. I have to admit that the name didn't ring a bell for me. A quick search told me why: I didn't ever watch Star Trek, even though I'm generally a fan of all sci-fi, the series didn't appeal.

So then, now I'm up to scratch - George Takei played Star Trek's Mr. Sulu, starting from the second pilot episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before. He played a mathematician. The series took off and he became helmsman and a part of the bridge crew.

Mr.Takei was born in Los Angeles, lived there until the the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he and his family with 120,000 other Japanese Americans were re-located to spend the war years behind barbed-wire enclosures of United States internment camps. He spent most of his childhood at Camp Rohwer in Arkansas and at Camp Tule Lake in northern California.

Mr. Takei's initial aim, during college days, was to become an architect, but he decided to change his major to Theater Arts. By the dawn of the 21st century Mr. Takei's acting career had spanned more than five decades with more than 40 feature films and hundreds of television guest-starring roles to his credit in addition to his long run playing Mr Sulu in Star Trek.

As well as acting George Takei has many other strings to his bow. In 1979 he co-wrote with Robert Asprin a science-fiction novel, Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe. He wrote his autobiography, To the Stars, it was published in 1994.

His very distinctive voice has put him in much demand as a narrator and voice-over artist. He's a long distance runner, has completed five 26 mile marathons and carried the Olympic Flame in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Torch Relay. He has often been actively involved in politics and civic affairs. In 1972 he was a California representative in the Democratic National Convention, and in the fall of 1973 ran (unsuccessfully) for Mayor of Los Angeles. Mr. Takei was appointed by President Clinton to the board of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, where he served two terms.

A member of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender political organization, Mr. Takei was a spokesman for HRC's Coming Out Project. In April 2006, he embarked on a speaking tour, Equality Trek in which he talked about his life as a gay Japanese American. He has been in a committed relationship with his partner, Brad Altman, since 1987.

In October 2007, an asteroid, 5 miles in diameter, located between Mars and Jupiter, was named in honor of George Takei. The asteroid's official, scientific name is 7307 Takei.

Currently George Takei and Lea Salonga are developing a new musical: Allegiance, a story set during the Japanese American internment. Also Mr Takei has a huge following on Facebook (around a million and a half according to Forbes).
Yet again our paths have not crossed - didn't do Star Trek, don't do Facebook......Maybe there's something in the astrology?



First - I'm not surprised to find that Mr Takei has a splash-type chart - that's a chart where planets are scattered around the zodiac signs. My software categorises his chart as "splash", but, for me it's not classic splash because though planets are well-scattered, there are no planet in an Air sign. Be that as it may, planets are dispersed throughout most of the chart sufficiently for its bearer to be versatile with many talents and interests.....that certainly fits!

It's nice to see Sun conjunct Uranus planet of all that's futuristic, in the chart of a guy who made his name in a futuristic TV series. That Uranus placement too would link to his political and civic activism. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that Mr. Takei has Aquarius rising - but there's no indication of his time of birth at online sources. The chart above is set for 12 noon.

Unless he was born before 1:00 AM Moon would certainly have been in Virgo and likely to have been close to Neptune, planet of creativity. Neptune links, in what astrologers call a Grand Trine, with Jupiter in Capricorn and Mercury in Taurus, a configuration connecting planets in the 3 Earth signs. I have something similar in my own chart, and think it provides a kind of three-pronged anchor to assist stability - keep the feet on planet Earth. In Mr Takei's case, with no planets in Air signs it's possibly even more of a stabilising element, but with Neptune involved, is never going to lead to bo-o-oring!

Boring isn't a word anyone could attach to Mr Takei or his natal chart. My software, often over-eager to find planet patterns, indicates that theres a very rare pattern among those to be found here - a Grand Hexagon, sometimes called Grand Sextile or Star of David pattern. I'm not confident that in this case it's tight enough to be acceptable, but anyway still interesting to think about. The diagram on the right shows the chain of sextiles in Mr Takei's chart and consequent oppositions. The diagram, left, shows two Grand Trines which will also always be present in such a chart (from whence the name Star of David arises). There's a good description of such a configuration at Lunar Living
but in a nutshell it's the result of an evenly splashed splash chart, where planets relate to one another, being in roughly similar degrees of relevant signs. It signifies, again, great versatility but carries the danger of scattering one's energies to widely.

Mr Takei's Hexagon planets fall, in all but one case, in "passive" or "feminine" signs. Mars is the only planet in a masculine/positive sign but fairly near a cusp, so with a generous orb has been included in the sextile chain. Interpretation at the link above explains.