2012 was a good year for Denver’s Japanese and Japanese American community

Campai at Emperor's Birthday Reception in Denver

Kimiko Side, recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun award from the Emperor of Japan, toasts “campai” during the Emperor’s Birthday reception Dec. 3, with Consul General Ikuhiko Ono at the left of the photo and Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock behind her.

This was a good year for Japanese and Japanese Americans in Colorado. A lot of the credit goes to Ikuhiko Ono, the Consul General who came to Denver late last year, and has made a concerted effort to reach out to the local JA community.

Previous Consul Generals have invited local JA leaders to the official residence for private dinners and to special receptions and events, including an annual reception at a downtown Denver hotel to mark the birthday of Emperor Akihito, celebrated Dec. 23 as a national holiday in Japan on his actual birthday.

The birthday reception is a lively annual reunion for the local Japanese and JA community. We end up seeing a lot of people only at this event, and get to catch up with each other.

But Consul General Ono and his staff do much more than just hold a birthday party every December. During the past year he’s interacted with the community in lots of other ways. Partly, that’s because of the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan. Ono arrived in Colorado in the wake of a number of fundraising efforts for disaster relief, including events and donation drives by the Japanese community.
Continue reading

Canadian teenage girl rages against South Asians in her town

Last year it was Alexandra Wallace, a UCLA student, who posted an amazingly racist rant on YouTube about all the Asians at her school. The video went viral, led to a bunch of satires by Asian Americans, and she got blasted for her insensitivity. She subsequently apologized for the video, then dropped out of school.

Now, the 2012 sequel to Alexandra Wallace’s video is by a 16-year-old secondary school student in Brampton, Ontario, Canada.

This video is outrageously racist. She goes off on the South Asians in her town and at her school, and equates them all with terrorists, calling them “turbanators.” She complains that walking down the hall at school, all she can smell is curry, and ends the rant by urging anyone who’s “brown” watching the video to “go back to your own country. I’m getting really tired of you guys taking over my city.”

The video is so over-the-top, I had to wonder if she was mentally stable. At one point, the 16-year-old spells out her name and invites other white people to connect with her on Twitter and Facebook (I’m not going to use her name here).

Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man posted a full text transcript of the video (some of the audio is hard to understand):
Continue reading