He remembers the fear that shook him and his younger brother, the cries of his baby sister. The soldiers marching up the driveway, their rifles armed with bayonets; the house that seemed to shake as the ir fists pounded the door. He remembers being marched outside with his brother, holding what few small packages they could carry. Their father carried two small suitcases, the maximum allowed per person.

“We followed him out onto the driveway and waited until my mother could come out,” Takei said. “And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm and a huge, heavy duffel bag on the other, and tears were streaming down her face. That memory is seared into my brain.”

Takei’s comments underscore a somewhat complicated aspect of the series. At a time when Asian-Americans are finally getting some authentic on-screen representation — more “Fresh Off the Boat” than Mickey Rooney — a truthful depiction of internment on this scale seems overdue. And yet it also resurrects a very painful story that many who lived through it were anxious to forget.

“A lot of that generation didn’t talk about it — it was a shameful period in their life,” said Derek Mio, who plays Chester, an American -born college student from Terminal Island, near Long Beach, Calif., who is forced into a camp with his family and pregnant girlfriend. Mio ’s connection to the story was personal, his own grandfather and great-grandfather having lived on Terminal Island when the war began. They, too, had been hauled away to a camp.

“Growing up, I had just kind of heard here and there that our family had some history with the internment camps, but it wasn’t like they were needing to sit down and spill everything about it,” Mio said. “You’re treated inhumanely, and you’re crowded in these tight corners. You have to share the latrine, and it’s just … it’s not something you brag about.”