Monthly Archives: June 2008

Honoring Japanese American veterans for the 4th of July

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The Japanese American National Museum is sponsoring a conference in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend, called “Whose America? Who’s American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice.”

Erin and I are helping out the conference, and one of Erin’s main projects has been contacting and inviting Colorado Japanese American veterans to the conference’s Welcome Ceremony on July 4, during which the vets will be honored for their service. Many of them are elderly veterans of the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, who fought in Europe during WWII even though many of them had family members living behind barbed wire in U.S. concentration camps.

These men, as well as their lesser-known Pacific campaign counterparts, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) who fought in the Pacific, for the country that imprisoned them at the start of the war just to prove their patriotism, remain today the most highly-decorated combat unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. In one celebrated battle, the men of the 442nd, whose motto was “Go for Broke!,” suffered over 800 casualties to save 211 men of a Texas “Lost Battalion” in the Vosges mountains of France towards the end of the war.

It should be a moving tribute to these men, and the veterans will include both Hawai’i Sen. Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm as a member of the 442nd, and former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who served in the Army during the 1950s.

They’ll join over two dozen Colorado veterans as well as JA veterans from all over the country who are attending the conference. Continue reading →

Are newspapers finally embracing the Web?

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Leave it to a former rockcrit — and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) — to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet.

Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn’t think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins.

He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:

We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary.

So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.

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Hollywood’s continuing fascination with yellowface

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Growing up, I didn’t think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it’s amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans — almost always as “bad guys.”

Seeing these movies today, you could tell they’re not ethnic actors, and could almost see the smudges from the makeup smeared over their faces and hands. It wasn’t any more sophisticated than the blackface makeup white actors wore to play African American roles in silent movies or the early talkies, wide-eyed, shiny black visages like masks, singing about “mammy.” You don’t see that any more, at least, not with blacks and Latinos.

Hollywood also has a long and tiresome tradition of “yellowface” — having Caucasian actors portray ethnic Asian roles. And, unfortunately, you can still see that on the big screen today.

The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies.

Even the great Katharine Hepburn, one of my favorite actresses, put on yellowface, to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie “Dragon Seed.” Continue reading →

More on the ‘model minority’ myth and CU’s racist column

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The Boulder Daily Camera today ran a front-page story about the recent study about Asian Americans and the model minority myth.

The study found that because Asians are not all high-achieving academic wiz-kids, and that the diversity of the Asian communities (we’re not just Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but also Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and so on) and the range of generations from first-generation immigrants with poor English skills to fourth, fifth or sixth generations of Americans, leads to a reality that’s less modeled and more uneven. Not all Asian Americans go into the top Ivy-League schools, either: a growing number is opting to go to community colleges instead of major universities.

The article quotes CU professor Daryl Maeda, an assistant professor of ethnic studies:

Another part of the “model minority myth” — that Asian-American students should perform well in science, technology, engineering and math fields — also can be unfair to students, Maeda said.

“Some are great at music or English,” Maeda said. “And if they don’t live up to the model minority myth it puts an extra pressure on them, giving them the idea that they somehow aren’t good enough in their endeavors.”

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A “non-beauty” pageant for Asian American women in Colorado

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It’s been a couple of weeks, but congratulations are in order for Amanda Igaki, the winner of the “Miss Asian American Colorado” pageant held in Denver May 31.

Now, before you recoil at the thought of a beauty pageant, rest assured that this pageant, organized by a crew of young people led by the energetic and entrepreneurial Annie Guo, whose family publishes Asian Avenue Magazine, was not a traditional beauty pageant. The most obvious proof that this wasn’t a typical pageant was the lack of a swimsuit competition.

In fact, although Igaki was crowned “Miss Asian American Colorado” at the end of the four-hour event (which felt much shorter because it was so interesting), it didn’t feel like a competition between the 26 contestants at all. These women had become close friends, like a small, tight sorority.
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