I'd love to hear from you! Send your comments to me at:
gil@gillers.com

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HOW CAN YOU HELP SPONSOR THE NIKKEI VIEW?

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INDEX

QUICK THOUGHTS ON JAPANESE FAST FOOD
BEAT CRAZY OVER TAIKO
PEARL HARBOR, HIROSHIMA AND THE HATRED OF WAR
FINDING CULTURE WHERE YOU DON'T EXPECT IT
WRESTLING FOR A PLACE IN SPORTS
PRINCESS MONONOKE: A CARTOON FOR ADULTS
THE IMPORTANCE OF STAYING JAPANESE
BASE BEHAVIOR: MEMORIES OF A MILITARY BRAT
THE PAST FOR SALE: ANTIQUES AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
THAI FOOD AND LIFE LESSONS
RACE RELATIONSHIPS: SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS
JAPAN THROUGH VIDEO GAMES: FROM PONG TO POKEMON
THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY FRICTION FICTION
SAYONARA: HOLLYWOOD'S VISIONS OF JAPAN
CROSSING A BRIDGE TO JAPAN: MANJIRO SUMMIT '95
GEISHA CHIC: IT'S HIP TO BE JAPANESE!
MEMORIES OF HIROSHIMA
MY SPLIT PERSONALITY: LIFE AS A BANANA
CELEBRATING SAKURA IN SUMMER
DIMMING DAYLIGHT: THE CLOSING OF A FAVORITE LUNCH SPOT
INDEPENDENCE DAY BLUES
THE DESIGN OF DINING: IT'S ALL IN THE PRESENTATION
SLACKING OFF & SHOPPING ONLINE
GANGSTER'S PARADISE: THE UNTOUCHABLE JOHN WOO
MEMORIAL DAY: PAYING HOMAGE TO HEROES
SCHOOL DAZE: THE SMART ASIAN SYNDROME
REMEMBERING THE SMELLS OF JAPAN
ASIANS MEETING ASIANS
FOOD FOR LIFE: NICE RICE
COLUMBINE AND CONFUCIUS: LESSONS FROM TRAGEDY
SLEEP WELL, COMMISSIONER
ANIME FROM ASTRO BOY TO POKEMON
SCI-FI FROM GODZILLA TO THE MATRIX
JAPANESE ROCK DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS
IMAGES OF JAPAN: SAMURAI AND GEISHA
MEMORIALS AND MEMORY
A TASTE OF JAPAN
BOYHOOD ADVENTURES: COWBOYS AND ... NINJAS
FOOTBALL, BASEBALL AND SUMO: FANS ARE FANS
NAILING DOWN THE AMERICAN IN ME
SLAP THAT JAP -- AGAIN
INTO THE FIRE: THE DEBT I OWE

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December 26, 1999

QUICK THOUGHTS ON JAPANESE FAST FOOD

American-style fast food was only introduced in Japan during the past 30 years -- when I lived there as a child, there were no McDonalds, Pizza Hut or KFC to be found in the alleys and skyscrapers of Tokyo. Those bastions of U.S. culture arrived in the late '60s and during the 1970s, and when they did, they often adapted to Japanese tastes, by featuring custom versions of the familiar Big Macs and Quarter Pounders we know and love. In Japan, for example, you can order a Teriyaki McBurger with fries.

This decidedly un-gourmet American cuisine has had some notable effects on Japanese culture. Over the past several decades, not only has Christmas become a very popular holiday in Japan, the "traditional" Christmas day meal of choice has become... a bucket of KFC chicken. According to a radio news report, no one quite knows how Colonel Saunders' chicken won out over the typical U.S. feasts of turkey or ham, but the management of KFC must be crowing over their good fortune. Can you imagine a Norman Rockwell painting of an all-American family about to have their holiday meal, gathered around a red-and-white-striped paper bucket?

In an already rushed and increasingly faster-paced society, the idea of "fast food" makes sense. In the past, food on the run came from street vendors or noodle shops; but mostly, I don't think of Japanese cuisine as being suited to quick cooking and serving.

At the same time that American junkfood was invading Japan, some Japanese food has made its way into the U.S. dining menu. In the 1970s, a "Japanese fast food" chain called Yoshinoya's Beef Bowl first opened outlets in the Denver area. The restaurants served donburi dishes -- meat and vegetables with sauce over a bowl of rice -- quickly and inexpensively, and did well for a few years. My younger brother Glenn even got a job as assistant manager at the downtown location, and our family is still friends with his boss from back then.

I have great memories of chowing down on beef bowls because they were so hearty and in their own way, pretty authentically Japanese with their thick-sliced marinated meat, onions and that sweet sauce, topped off with red pepper and slivers of red ginger.

I have to admit, though, that there's one reason that American fast food such as burgers and fries is better suited to the car culture that created "fast food" in the first place: It's easier to eat while driving! One night, I was so hungry on my way to visit a friend in Boulder that I stopped at a Beef Bowl location and ate the damn thing while driving on the highway using my knees to steer the car while I balanced the bowl on the steering wheel and shoveled the rice into my mouth with the chopsticks. A Quarter Pounder with cheese is just much easier to handle on the road....

For whatever reason, Yoshinoya's didn't last into the 1990s, at least in Colorado, though I hear they still thrive on the West coast. There are a couple of reminders of the chain here, though: The downtown location where my brother worked is still a Japanese restaurant serving up a variety of items including bowls. And the former Beef Bowl location on S. Colorado Blvd. was immediately converted by a former Yoshinoya's employee who settled in the Denver area, Mareo Torito, as Kokoro, with the same type of men as the Beef Bowls.

Over the years, the hard-working Torito has expanded his restaurant's menu to include other Nihon-shoku (Japanese food) such as tonkatsu, or fried pork cutlets, curry dishes, a small selection of basic sushi and even the somewhat exotic "korokke," or fried potato dumpling. Torito has also expanded his business to include a second location in the northern suburb of Arvada, in a nice bright building that used to house a Boston Market franchise, and started advertising both restaurants with eye-catching billboards scattered throughout the metro area.

Kokoro's newest menu item is tasty, hearty udon noodles, sold with the catchy name of "Splash" for non-Japanese whose curiosity might be sparked by the moniker. Despite its marketing spin, the dish is very traditional: fish cake, fried tofu, seaweed, shiitake mushroom, boiled egg and green onions swimming with thick udon noodles in a familiar broth flavored with soy sauce and a touch of sesame seed oil. It's Japanese comfort food that's perfect for cold weather!

I happened to stop by the Arvada Kokoro location for a quick lunch on Christmas eve, and I was pleased to see that even just before the holiday, the restaurant was busy with diners. Interestingly, the customers were evenly split between Asian and Caucasian faces -- Torito's recipe for success obviously has cross-cultural appeal. Across from me sat a "Leave It to Beaver" family with a young girl, a teenaged boy wearing his baseball cap backwards, and mom and dad looking like something out of a contemporary Norman Rockwell magazine cover, and they didn't seem out of place at all, having a beef bowl for one of their holiday meals.

Such is the power of food to cross cultural borders -- even ones that span vast distances. And, such is the appeal of fast food -- even if it's not a burger with fries.

While I was eating (I ordered the tonkatsu, a personal favorite, with a korokke dumpling), Torito came over and asked me about my cap. I was wearing a baseball cap with a Kanji character on the front, with the definition of "Heart, Spirit and Mind" on the back. Torito was excited by the cap because the Kanji was the character for the word "kokoro," or "heart."

I explained that the cap came from a store in a local mall, but that the manufacturer was based in Boulder, and called Kanji Kaps. I felt embarrassed to admit that I wore the cap because I thought it was a cool looking Kanji but that I didn't know it was the character for "kokoro." At times like this, I feel more American than Japanese.

Over the Christmas weekend, I thought some more about how I mix many traditions into my everyday experiences, including the celebrations of holidays. For instance, Christmas dinner with Glenn and his wife Michelle and their beautiful young daughters and the rest of my family featured traditional Italian food, but after dinner we had traditional Japanese snacks such as osembe (rice crackers) and yokan (sweet bean paste) alongside the fudge and other European desserts.

I didn't have a single bite of KFC chicken all weekend though.

NOTE: The addresses for the Kokoro locations are 2390 S. Colorado Blvd. in Denver (303-692-8752) and 5535 Wadsworth Bypass in Arvada (303-432-0600).

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December 20, 1999

BEAT CRAZY OVER TAIKO

I listen to traditional Japanese music from many types of instruments, from the pretty harp-like scales of the koto and the zen breeze of the shakuhachi flute to the eerily banjo-like shamisen, all used along with many percussion instruments to accompany kabuki and noh theater, and even in Imperial "gagaku" music. But I'll readily admit that much of the traditional music of Japan probably is too foreign to American ears to make much of a commercial impact in the U.S. -- the ancient gagaku style in particular can sound like avant-garde noise. Westerners will recognize both the melody of "Sakura" ("Cherry Blossoms") and the koto that most often plays the tune, but they may not develop a taste for other Japanese musical fare.

One type of traditional music from Japan has made tremendous inroads into the American consciousness, however: Taiko drumming.

The word "taiko" means drum, but it's been applied to the many styles of music played on many types of drums, from small, bell-like ones to the gigantic "odaiko" drums which are played by sticks ("bachi") the size of baseball bats. Taiko music is of course percussive -- historically, it was used to both frighten the enemy during samurai battles and to summon the spirit of the gods upon with the thunderous call. Ancient cultures around the world seized upon drumming as early forms of music, and used the powerful rhythms for rituals and battles. Japanese were no exception, and clay figures still exist from the Haniwa period (about the year 500 of the Common Era) with drums. Taiko drums, which were designed after instruments probably brought to Japan starting in 300 from Korea and China have also been used in religious ceremonies through the centuries.

Most of this music was played by one drummer playing one instrument, however. The sound that we associate today with the exploding popularity of taiko -- the ensemble rumble of a group of musicians playing complex rhythmic arrangements on different types of drums with the texture of the different tones weaving together for an almost hypnotic effect -- is actually a post-WWII phenomenon. The modern taiko style, or "kumi-daiko," was invented by Daihachi Oguchi, a jazz drummer who took a classical taiko arrangement and decided to add extra drums to suit his jazz group background.

The style stuck, and today there are an estimated 4000+ taiko groups beating a powerful pulse in Japan, with a complement of groups formed in the U.S. as well.

For all my appreciation for various traditional Japanese music, I didn't hear taiko when I was a kid in Japan In fact, I can't tell you where I first heard taiko, except that it was sometime after I became fascinated by the drumming and intricate rhythms of African and Latin American musical styles. In the context of "world music," taiko fits right in, which is in large part why the style has caught on with Westerners. Such high profile musicians as Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead and a scholar of world percussion, have helped raise awareness for taiko.

The first taiko group I saw live was Kodo, a remarkable group that tours the U.S. regularly. I had the great fortune to interview a member of the group a few years ago when they made several stops in Colorado. The group's members commit themselves to taiko as if it were a religious cult. They live on an island off the west coast of Japan and live, work and play music in a communal environment. They run miles each day and make physical fitness a part of their musical regimen, make their own drums, practice constantly and leave the island to spread the gospel of taiko to the world. They've become the best-known proponents of taiko music, and if they ever come to your town, I recommend not missing them. (Denverites will have to wait until February of 2001 for Kodo's return.)

Watching Kodo - or any taiko group - is a breathtaking experience, because the musicians don't just beat on drums for an hour and a half. I can only describe the performances as ballet-like because of the physical grace and endurance required to play the drums and also execute the often very complex and intricate choreography that accompanies the drumming. Some of the moves are simple, such as slowly raising your arms in time to the rhythm like a sunrise and then bringing them crashing down for a very loud crash, but the ensemble motion can become dizzying when the players begin pounding two or more drums at once, and then switch off positions with each other or spin to the next drum in a kinetic pantomime that visually echoes the polyrhythmic aural celebration.

It's an exciting and visceral type of music, so it's no wonder it's popular wit American fans (if you like rock music, it's hard not to like taiko).

This week I got to see the fruits of Japanese Americans who love taiko music, and saw the young students of Denver Taiko, an organization based out of the Denver Buddhist Temple, perform a demonstration for its various levels of groups from beginners to advanced drummers. Taiko's become popular enough that a couple of dozen kids now play in Denver Taiko, and there's also an adult group (which didn't play at this brief holiday concert, which was followed by a casual party for kids and parents). It was nice to hear the work of such dedicated students, and to see that taiko has become another way for the Japanese American community to explore its cultural roots.

Taiko music was introduced to California JA communities in the late 1960s, when the first U.S. taiko group was formed in San Francisco. Denver's group was originally formed in 1979, and the 20 years of performing and keeping alive the community spirit through the drumming has made Denver Taiko a vital institution.

Hmmm, I'm a dedicated amateur drummer who constantly beats my dashboard along to music while driving ... I wonder if I'd make the grade if I try out for Denver Taiko?

You can learn more about taiko drumming at an excellent Web site, The Taiko Resource.

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December 13, 1999

PEARL HARBOR, HIROSHIMA AND THE HATRED OF WAR

My father's family lived in Honolulu in the years leading up to World War II, but my grandfather took them to Japan in the summer of 1940. I don't know if my grandfather knew that war was coming in the form of the attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, but he surely was aware of the building tension between Japan and the U.S.

Since my dad and his brothers and sisters weren't directly affected by the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7 has never been a big date in my family's calendar. Growing up, I felt neither patriotism over the deaths of U.S. military personnel, nor embarrassment that the country of my heritage was responsible. As an adult, however, I find myself thinking a lot more about responsibility and consequences of brutal acts of war, not just over Pearl Harbor but also other horrors committed in the heat of battle.

Last week, I dwelled on these thoughts more than usual because of the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. But my musing was also sparked by a message posted to a Japanese American e-mail discussion group I belong to, called "Ties-Talk." The members of the group can openly and freely about issues affecting the Japanese American (and Canadian and Latin American) experience, and last week a flurry of e-mails were sent out in reply to one from Alisa Sanada, a 17-year-old young woman in Dallas who maintains the excellent "RealJapan" Web site.

Alisa was upset by a posting to her message boards, from a publisher promoting a new book by two Marines, General Raymond Davis and Georgia state Judge Dan Winn. Usually, having someone hype a book in our message boards is a minor irritation, but this message was disturbing, considering it was placed on a site celebrating Japan and Japanese American culture.

The book being promoted, "Clear Conscience," tries to justify the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply by considering it payback for the "rape, torture, killing contests, cannibalism, and the unrelenting murder of 30,000,000 civilian men, women, and children by the JAPANESE" during and in the years leading up to the war. This includes the rape of Nanking, and the brutal treatment of prisoners of war during the war. There's no doubt that the Japanese committed atrocities, and were particularly brutal with prisoners (even after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender over the radio, some officers took American POWs out of prison and murdered them with their samurai swords).

But to justify the mass killings of a city full of civilians with one bomb as revenge for atrocities seems so primitive and simple-minded that it's ludicrous. It reflects a fundamental level of hatred that obviously hasn't diminished over the years with this book's co-authors. "Clear Conscience" is a sad commentary on how the flames of hate won't die if you let them flicker in your heart.

Alisa's message to Ties-Talk ignited a vibrant discourse on the bomb and about Pearl Harbor (I've often heard how the A-bomb was appropriate because Japan started the war). Alisa later wrote how she didn't mean to cover old ground with her message, but most of us replied that it's healthy to bring up these topics so that younger people can know what happened five decades ago, and how the side effects of those nuclear explosions still reverberate through our culture. One member wrote that "What Japan did during the War was wrong. And what the US did by dropping the bomb was wrong. It was just one horrible time when many innocent people were killed. Two wrongs don't make a right."

I posted a note reminding the Ties-Talkers that in one night using conventional bombs to spark city-wide fires, a large portion of Tokyo was flattened and 70,000+ people were killed -- a comparable number of victims to the Hiroshima blast. This attack came on the night of March 10, 1945 -- months before the A-bomb was used -- and it was part of a systematic plan by the U.S. to destroy both Japan' ability to wage war and her people's will to fight. Did that night of bombing, during which thousands of people died not from the bombs themselves but from the fires and worse, from suffocation because the flames sucked all the oxygen out of the air, and the bombings of almost every major city in Japan make up for atrocities committed by the country's military?

Then I asked about atrocities committed in the name of war in general, starting with the brutality of the "Holy Wars" waged in the name of religion during the Crusades (not to mention atrocities committed through the ages in the name of many religions). I asked about the murder of the Jews by the Nazis, and whether Germany should have been blasted into oblivion to repay that human debt, or over the indiscriminate rocket bombings of London. The Allies did in fact bomb the city of Dresden into ashes towards the end of the war in Europe.

In the end, it seems to me that as civilized beings who have to share the precious Earth as our home, we need to stop trying to place blame or exact revenge on each other for the past, and plan a future together that's as free from hate as possible. I'm not naive enough to think that all Jews and Arabs will suddenly embrace each other, or that Hutus and Tutsis will live in harmony, or that Serbs and Croats can settle their racial differences, or that skinheads will see that minorities are just like them. Nor do I think that the two poor misguided fools who wrote this "Clear Conscience" will realize how backwards they sound.

I just hope that more people in the world think like me, and not like them.

You can read some archived threads and learn how to sign up for the "Ties-Talk" e-mail discussion group, or check out Alisa Sanada's "RealJapan" Web site.

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December 6, 1999

FINDING CULTURE WHERE YOU DON'T EXPECT IT

Isn't it great when being wrong can lead to enlightenment?

That's what happened to me this weekend. During a brief trip to San Diego, California, I was hoping to find a thriving Asian community and many Japanese Americans -- after all, isn't California the promised land for people from the Pacific Rim?

So imagine my surprise when I found no sign of an Asian community except for the occasional Japanese, Chinese or Thai restaurant, and no signs of a district like San Francisco's Japan Town, Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, or even Denver's one-block Sakura Square. I didn't even see many Asians out and about throughout the city. When I played the "Japanese tourist" and took a guided tour that included Coronado Island, Balboa Park, the Gaslamp District and La Jolla, I was further surprised to find no other Asian visitors -- at least, not on my bus. I asked several tour guides if there were areas of the city that are predominantly Asian, whether Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese or whatever. One driver told me there's a Filipino area, but that otherwise Asians are scattered throughout.

So I had given up my search for Japanese American connections in San Diego by the time I returned to further explore the many museums contained within the beautifully landscaped boundaries of Balboa Park. After spending time wandering through the park's 1200 acres -- its museums were built for a world exposition in 1915, and the temporary buildings have since become a cultural landmark for the city -- I ended the day at the park's Japanese Friendship Garden. It had already closed its gates but the attendant just inside was kind enough to let me pay my $3 and enter anyway. The garden included carefully tended plants, precisely placed rocks and even a Zen rock garden.

I enjoyed the Zen garden from a small meditation room with a picture window that looked out over its raked white rocks, broken by boulders representing islands in Japan's inland sea, as well as a steep valley just below the terraced garden and the dramatic foliage of the rest of Balboa Park beyond.

I stayed there a long time, just enjoying the view but knowing that the park was closing outside. The tatami-covered benches were comfortable and the exquisitely simple design of the Zen garden really helped my mind wander. A tiny bird that looked like it could have leapt right out of a sumi-e brush painting alighted on the outside of the window and sat perfectly still for minutes, almost as if it too was meditating. Finally an elderly man came into the room to shoo me out, or so I thought.

I figured he was a volunteer whose job was to close down the Japanese Friendship Garden every night. He began to explain the display of origami near the entrance to the room, and I groaned in anticipation of a pseudo-lecture I didn't need and wasn't that interested in: "Did you know that you could create all these things with one little square of paper?" Oh, really?

But for some reason, he sensed the origami talk was unnecessary and instead turned his conversation to the Zen garden. He mentioned that the garden and the room were for meditating (oh, really?) and said I was supposed to meditate until I had a satori. Now, this was educational, since I'm a spiritual simpleton. He explained that a satori was a state of enlightenment that could be a flash of understanding or inspiration: an epiphany. People can have daily little satoris, like when you find the car keys that you misplaced, or major satoris, ones that can change the course of your life.

This was getting interesting.

He added that the Japanese gardens at Balboa Park will be expanding into the steep valley below us, and that the current gardens will become a walkway leading down to the expanded gardens. He joked about this not being completed within his lifetime, and when I said I didn't live in the city, asked where I was from. When I said Colorado, he mentioned he'd just been in Durango for a book signing.

This man was revealing more and more interesting details about himself all the time. Little by little, I learned more about this amiable and very knowledgeable garden expert.

His name is Lennox Tierney ("Like the actress Gene," I said, knowing that she was a star of his generation, and he smiled in agreement), and his book is "Wabi Sabi: A New Look at Japanese Design" (Gibbs Smith, 1999). Tierney, who is a spry 87 years old, is the art director of the Japanese Friendship Garden. He spends one week a month in San Diego tending to the garden's upkeep and future plans, and lives the rest of the time in Salt Lake City, were he's professor emeritus of the History of Asian Arts at the University of Utah (he earned a doctorate studying Japanese gardens from Sogetsu Ryu in Tokyo). He's also a consultant to the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park, and the current curator of Japanese Art for the Utah State Museum of Art -- all heavy duty credentials indeed.

In a sentence, he's a world-renowned expert. A garden he designed for the posh and exclusive Golden Door spa north of San Diego almost 30 years ago is so respected that Japanese officials regularly make their way to the spa to admire his work (what better place for Zen meditation than a spa?). He spoke eloquently of his efforts to make the Japanese Friendship Garden as authentic as possible, and admitted he'd lost some battles, pointing to the mixed color of some of the slate tiles surrounding the meditation room, and the somewhat light color of the boulders in another part of the garden.

Tierney's clearly still passionate about and proud of his work -- he's an inspiration to someone like me who's still just midway on my life's path.

As we spoke, I had a satori of my own: I was meant to meet Lennox Tierney. That's why I spent hours at Balboa Park, and ended the day at the Japanese Friendship Garden then dawdled in the meditation room until he found me. I needed to write about him, and to stay in touch with him. To mix spiritual metaphors, it was a karmic rendezvous.

We exchanged contact information after he shared wonderful anecdotes, and he recommended a fine Japanese restaurant for dinner. As he walked out of the garden to his car, he marveled suddenly at the fact that he was as old as Balboa Park, and that he was born during the reign of the Japanese Taisho emperor, who ruled after Meiji, the man who modernized Japan and opened the country to Westerners. "I'm almost a Meiji man," Tierney chuckled. "I've lived for most of the years of this century... this is my century."

Though I'd just met him, I feel honored to have crossed paths with this man of the 20th century. And, I feel humbled to know that after spending several days searching for some sign of Japanese culture within people who look like me, I found the source I was looking for in an octogenarian American like Lennox Tierney.

I know now that the Japanese spirit lives in many places and within many different people.

If you're planning a trip to San Diego, visit the city's Convention and Visitor's Bureau first, via its Web site. You can find a lecture about Japanese Gardens by Lennox Tierney online. It's part of a Web site dedicated to the Japanese Friendship Garden at San Diego's Balboa Park. And, while I'm at it, I want to recommend ContacTours, which does a fine job of offering many different individual and package tours. I took a solo tour of San Diego's city and harbor sites by bus and boat, and met some great folks. Ask for Dave Golston -- he was my funny, knowledgeable guide, and he's a great storyteller who obviously loves his job!

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November 28, 1999

WRESTLING FOR A PLACE IN SPORTS

Is it possible that Japanese Americans were put on Earth to excel at mental exercises, not physical ones? My brother Glenn, his wife Michelle and I were sitting around the other day, trying to name Japanese American professional athletes, and though I admit we’re not experts at this sort of thing, we couldn’t think of more than a couple.

Skater Kristi Yamaguchi and Colorado-based skier-turned-TV-sportscaster Hank Kashiwa came to mind. Who else?

Hmm, it’s not likely that there’ll be a Japanese American National Basketball Association star anytime soon - even if the current generation of JA kids is growing up bigger and stronger than previous ones. Even in hockey, a sport which seems less tied to a player’s size than his or her skills, I can’t think of a Japanese name on the ice. And though we’re seeing Asian Pacific Islander athletes playing now in the National Football League, I have yet to see a Japanese beefy enough to play professional football.

There are some Asians on the pro golf circuit, and people like Michael Chang excel in tennis. But I can’t think of many Japanese American names covered in the sports pages.

OK, OK, there are Major League Baseball players who are Japanese. But they’re not JAs.

In a way, we can take the excellence of Japanese athletes in Western sports as a role model. That quality of player is the result of Japan’s love of baseball and the commitment boys in Japan put to the sport. But Japanese are crazy about other Western sports besides baseball.

Take professional wrestling, for instance. That’s right: pro wrestling, as in Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura and all the other wild, flamboyant entertainers calling themselves “athletes” in the increasingly popular sport.

When we think Japan and wrestling we think of sumo, but during the 1950s, American-style professional wrestling helped revive the national spirit of the defeated Japanese archipelago. The country was still rebuilding its cities and re-creating a peaceful government and society from the ground up using a foreign blueprint (an American-style constitution forced upon Japan during General Douglas MacArthur’s Occupation). Though the population accepted American rule during the late 1940s, by the 1950s, quality of life was miserable for the Japanese and the spectacular defeat still cut to the core of Japan’s psyche.

That’s when western-style professional wrestling caught on. It caught on in such a big way that the sport helped establish the young medium of television in Japan, and caused the sale of early TV sets to skyrocket - just so audiences could watch Japanese wrestlers take on Americans … and often beat them. It was a thrilling form of cultural revenge played out as entertainment on a countrywide scale, and it worked to take viewers’ minds off their past defeats and current poverty and focus on the future.

Robert Whiting’s 1995 "Tokyo Underworld," subtitled "The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan," suggests that the matches between Japanese and American wrestlers were fixed (no, say it ain’t so!) by the post-war “Yakuza” (Japanese gangsters) that booked the events. Although some Japanese such as the former sumo champion Rikidozan were powerful athletes in their own right, the Western wrestlers were happy enough to lose a fight on purpose - if they were paid enough to do so.

The history of “puroresu” (a typically contracted form of the English “professional wrestling”) in Japan goes back much farther than the 1950s. Way back in 1883, a sumo wrestler named Sorakichi Matsuda went to the United States and became the first Japanese pro wrestler. The same year, another sumo star, Shokichi Hamada, known as Sangokuyama in sumo, also became a pro wrestler in the U.S. and a few years later brought 20 American wrestlers to Tokyo for a match. The event sold out because of curiosity, but after initial interest, the Japanese public wasn’t interested. It took until 1952, when Rikidozan retired from sumo and traveled to San Francisco for a match, for wrestling to catch on in Japan.

The first wrestling match broadcast by Japanese networks was in 1954, and the tag-team matches that included Rikidozan, the main event, attracted thousands of bystanders who gathered around publicly-mounted "street television" for people who couldn't afford television sets at home.

Rikidozan eventually was killed in a Yakuza revenge stabbing, but his talent was real: he won the World Heavyweight title from Fred Blassie in 1962 at the Los Angeles Olympic Auditorium and was the first Asian to win a world title belt.

This kind of international acknowledgement has also come from the signing of Japanese players to American baseball teams. And it reflects a national commitment to fitness as an important part of growing up in Japan. There’s even a holiday every October where sports and fitness is celebrated nationwide. It might be a good idea to adopt in the U.S., so we as a society can all applaud the physical accomplishments of all our students (not just JAs).

I wonder if Japanese society’s commitment to sports has been handed down to us through our immigrant roots. There certainly is a history of organized sports within our community. Others who know lots more than I do about JA sports leagues that were started in the early days of our Issei forefathers.

I know there were all-JA minor league baseball teams in places like Hawaii, and scattered throughout the Western U.S, at one point. I know there are all-JA bowling teams and leagues. And of course there’s the wide variety of Asian martial arts from judo and karate to aikido and kung fu that Japanese Americans compete in. The Denver Buddhist Temple has always sponsored all manner of sports for its young members - in fact it’s hard to think of any Japanese American community center that doesn’t have an attached gym for its youth. That’s a relic of the days when Asian faces weren’t welcome on the courts or pools of local YMCAs and health clubs.

So the Japanese American community isn’t lacking for interest in and support for sports - just for athletes in the national spotlight to serve as role models. Just maybe, with the increasing size of every generation of JA athletes, we may still get to see a Mayeda score a hat trick, or a young Asakawa play pro women’s soccer.

Or maybe another Rikidozan will rise up and take over the world of pro wrestling. I’d even tune in the WWF for that!

I knew my lack of professional sports knowledge would betray me on this column! Thanks to all of you who let me know there are already some Japanese American players in the National Hockey League....

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November 21, 1999

PRINCESS MONONOKE: A CARTOON FOR ADULTS

There's a Japanese cultural invasion underway, and a children' cartoon is leading the charge. The Pokemon phenomenon is interesting because the animated series ("anime" in Japanese) uses cute characters and fantastic situations to illustrate situations requiring moral choices and value judgments. Its popularity is surprising given the life lessons it teaches its young viewers -- both with the Saturday morning TV series (dubbed from the Japanese originals) and the new hit movie being shown in multiplexes across the country.

Pokemon is definitely kid stuff, though -- fun to look at, but simply presented, not just in its plots and characters but also in its somewhat static drawing style. That's pretty common in the U.S., where animation means primarily cartoons which are create solely to entertain kids.

Anime as a film genre in Japan isn't just for youngsters, though. In fact, I'd venture to say there's as much or more anime available aimed at adult viewers as for children (many are dubbed here in the U.S., some have English subtitles). Most are science fiction stories or quasi-historical samurai fantasies, and many are very violent and gory, with sexual undertones. There's even an entire sub-genre of sexually explicit adult anime.

So it's not surprising that in Japan, animated feature movies could be popular with adult audiences. That was the case with "Mononoke Hime," a full-length anime released in 1997 which was the highest-grossing movie in the history of Japan's film industry until the Japanese release of "Titanic" knocked it off the top of the charts.

Now, Miramax, the American independent film studio, has decided to bring the film to U.S. audiences as "Princess Mononoke," complete with a carefully translated English script (not just clunky "lip-synching") and the voices of well-known Western actors such as Claire Danes as the Princess Mononoke (who's called "San" throughout the film), the warrior who'd been raised as a wolf; "X-Files" star Gillian Anderson as the voice of Moro the Wolf, Mononoke's adopted mother; Billy Bob Thornton as the scheming priest Jigo; Jada Pinkett Smith as the sassy steelworker Toki and Minnie Driver as the regal Lady Eboshi, a character that walks the blurry line between being a villain and hero.

I think everyone -- Japanese and American -- should see "Princess Mononoke." I saw it with some friends, including two Japanese American teens who were engrossed in the movie and found it both entertaining and powerful. First of all, it's a sterling example of the fine artistic quality that's often achieved in anime. The background art is lush and very realistic -- some of the landscapes seem photographic in their detail and rendering of atmosphere. The characters are drawn in the typical anime style of large eyes, but the costuming and figure drawing accurately evokes an early samurai era. Within minutes, I forgot I was watching a cartoon and fell into the plotline.

The story's not set in a particular time or place, though, which is made plain by all the mystical creatures that populate the film: Hideous monsters, gigantic animal demons, and the cute, immediately likable "Kodama" wood spirits that look like Caspar the Friendly Ghost crossed with an alien. Nicole, one of the teens who saw the movie with me, couldn't help but melt every time the Kodamas made an appearance.

You can tell the story is Japanese from all sorts of cultural signs, both obvious and subtle, from the use of chopsticks and samurai swords to the cuisine of rice and miso soup, not to mention the characters' names. In one scene, Prince Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup) has to cut the top-knot from his hair before leaving his village forever to search for the cure to the curse that is killing him. Cutting the top-knot was a tradition when a man was forced to leave his tribe. Many of these "Japanese-isms" may slip by American audiences, but they're a delight for anyone who's looking for them. Early on, when Ashitaka meets the priest Jigo, they camp out and Jigo heats dinner over a fire, and clearly stirs miso into a bowl of soup.

So what's "Princess Mononoke" about?

In a nutshell, the film is a metaphor for modern civilization's clash against nature, and the horrendous consequences we may be calling upon ourselves by indiscriminate development and industrialization. Director Hayao Miyazaki’s themes are clear from the first scenes. The story is about how indigenous people maintain their way of life in an untamed world, the conflict between industrial progress and the environment, and the power that myths have on our imaginations. The film isn't for kids because it's gory and violent, and because these themes are explored in complex ways. There are no easy answers in Miyazaki's worldview -- even the "bad guys" have a good side (Lady Eboshi may be destroying the forest in order to profit and make steel, but she hires and cares for prostitutes and lepers who are castoffs from society), and the "good guys" can get lost in evil intentions. The plot is straightforward but gives no pat answers to the problems facing our world today -- just a lot of nourishing food for thought.

"Princess Mononoke" makes its audiences THINK, which is the main reason people should see it. But alas, even Miramax understands that a box-office smash in Japan isn't necessarily going to be a stateside hit. "Pokemon" may be rolling through the mall multiplexes, but "Mononoke" is relegated -- at least in Denver -- to one art-house theater, and probably will suffer a short run. My suggestion: If you miss it in the theaters, be sure to watch for it on video. Better yet, try to find the Japanese version (I'm looking for one myself) and practice your Japanese while you're enjoying the movie!

You can learn about "Princess Mononoke," see samples from the film, read about how the American voice actors were chosen and play interactive games online at the film's U.S. home page -- http://princess-mononoke.com.

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November 14, 1999

THE IMPORTANCE OF STAYING JAPANESE

I'm glad when non-Japanese are so interested in Japan that they immerse themselves in the culture and even commit to learning the language. Conversely, it makes me sad when Japanese aren't interested in their own heritage.

I've written in the past about how growing up, I didn't think of myself as very Japanese. But my upbringing at home was full of Japanese culture and traditions, from rice with every meal (except when we had something like spaghetti) to taking off my shoes in the home. I also grew up with my parents speaking a combination of English and Japanese -- my friends marveled at how my mom spoke to me in heavily accented English with a few Japanese words thrown in, and I replied with a hasty "Yeah, okay mom" before running out the door. That's just how it is in a bilingual household.

It was only later that I realized that the mixed-up language I grew up with was a doorway to my roots, along with all the food and household rituals all around me. In recent years, I've come to cherish the Japanese side of my life, and seek out ways to emphasize it and learn more.

As with many immigrant groups -- I know many Italian Americans who don't speak Italian after all -- not every JA feels this way. Nor do I pass judgment on those who aren't deeply connected with their heritage. But because Asians can't just "pass" unnoticed within a primarily Caucasian society, we don't really have the luxury of ignoring who we are and where our ancestors came from. Sooner or later, someone with a racist attitude will remind us that we're not like them. Besides, if I turned my back on all things Japanese, I'd be missing out on a very rich culture, and deny myself a fuller knowledge of myself.

I know one adult sansei, or third generation JA, who until the 1990s had never had sushi and knew more about Mexican food than Japanese food or culture. Like me, he told friends he considered himself Caucasian. He was so militant that his anti-Japanese tendencies seemed forced. I still held on to my love of Japanese things even if I forgot my skin color in my daily life.

I also know many JAs -- even Nisei (second generation) but also Sansei like me, and Yonsei and Gosei (fourth and fifth) -- who aren't interested in traveling to Japan. I must admit that when I first returned to Japan as an adult, I felt nervous because I wondered if I would fit in, or if something about me would scream "AMERICAN!" to Japanese. As it happened, I did stick out as an American, but no one made me feel the lesser for it, and I enjoyed being able to straddle both countries as much there as I do here. Although they're the most Americanized, the younger generations surprisingly enough seem to have more of an interest, borne out of curiosity about their distant roots, in visiting Japan.

The younger JAs and future generations are the key to maintaining a sense of cultural heritage in the Japanese American community. We should all be nurturing an interest in all things Japanese in JA children, and never act as if any aspect of our Asian side is shameful, embarrassing, weird or inappropriate. My brother Glenn and his wife Michelle (who happens to be Caucasian) are very good about keeping their two adorable daughters connected. They use Japanese words as a part of their daily routine, include lots of Japanese food in their diet and even read them Japanese stories and play Japanese children's music recordings. For the past year they've also taken my nieces to Japanese language classes every weekend, even though they have to drive across the Denver metro area for the classes. They think it's important and wouldn't deprive their kids this experience, and I applaud them for making the commitment.

My nieces enjoy the classes but they're young girls still, and probably didn't ask to take them. When an older JA child asks to attend Japanese language class or wants to learn taiko drumming, I say "hooray!" and would urge parents to support these interests whole-heartedly. Jared, the teenaged son of a friend of mine, looks forward to such activities, which he's introduced to via the Denver Buddhist Temple downtown, a true community center for the JA community. And his mom eagerly allows him to explore his roots with these activities along with all the other things teenagers are interested in like sports, which aren't part of his Japanese side.

That's the way it should be. I'm no expert on child psychology, but it doesn't take mental gymnastics to know that giving a kid a sense of his or her own cultural identity, you're giving them a center that can serve as a foundation for the rest of their lives and interests. It's even more important in these times when the nuclear family tree has exploded into fragmented and sometimes brittle branches of former spouses' households. Parents who are lackadaisical about allowing their children to discover and learn about their ancestry, or worse, won't let them explore their roots because it's expensive, or inconvenient, or too far to drive to, are simply robbing their children of a part of their identity.

And that's a crying shame.

By the way, I don't mean to imply that any Japanese American should be fluent in Japanese.

I appreciate Japanese culture a lot more these days than when I was younger, but my language skills are still spotty. When I'm at a Japanese restaurant or the Pacific Mercantile grocery store, I find myself trying earnestly to speak in Japanese but end up mixing up my languages. Like my parents, I throw Japanese and English together in a savory stew of verbiage.

I guess that's all right. My friends from high school wouldn't be surprised.

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November 7, 1999

BASE BEHAVIOR: MEMORIES OF A MILITARY BRAT

I made a wrong turn today, and found myself driving through distant echoes of my childhood.

The images were all as if they were frozen in time -- flat open field of grass, low housing buildings and the stodgy office and school buildings of United States military bases. Only this one is a former base, Lowry Air Force Base east of Denver. One building still featured a proud memento of its earlier incarnation: A shiny air force bomber left as a monument reminds passersby that this is a decommissioned military base currently being redeveloped as a model suburban community.

The symbolism -- a military facility is adapted for peacetime domesticity -- perfectly parallels how suburbs were first developed to accommodate the explosion of families as wartime GIs returned home in the late 1940s. The drive also took me back to my childhood, when I was raised on or near U.S. military bases and attended American schools on those bases.

The issue doesn't seem to be in the Japanese headlines these days, but because of Veterans Day coming up, I have thought about the U.S. military's presence in Japan. I've thought about it because if it weren't for our two countries' continuing -- and from to time, contentious -- military relationship, I wouldn't be here. My father was in the U.S. Army and stationed in Hokkaido during the Korean War, first at a small city called Kushiro, and then in Nemuro, a smaller city that serves as the eastern-most point in Japan (and therefore a popular destination for New Year's Day, because the sun first rises on Nemuro). That's where he met my mother, a schoolgirl who'd been named "Miss Nemuro" when she was 17.

I can only imagine what my dad was like when he was a teenager, or in his early 20s. He was a lean, handsome young man who was quick with a smile and quick to fool around while working. (The Japanese have a great onomatopoetic word, "charra-charra," which describes the nervous energy of goofing around... but I digress.)

But he won my mom over, and went through the mountains of paperwork and various bureaucratic hurdles the U.S. put up to make it difficult for GIs to marry foreign nationals like my mom. After they were married, and the Americanization of my mom began, our family took root on military bases. My earliest memories are of vast, fenced-in expanses of open fields and roads made for marching, bordered by row upon row of barracks-like housing units and administrative buildings trimmed with cannons, tanks, missiles or planes strategically placed as pieces of military sculpture, much like the ghostly remains of Denver's Lowry Air Force Base.

My youngest recollections as an infant include lots of snappy khaki pleats and olive accents, shiny black shoes and always the American flag -- waving, being raised or lowered, the sound of its flapping and the clinking of its rope against the flagpole a daily part of my noontime lullaby. We lived and attended schools in places with names such as "Grant Heights" or "Green Park," and we socialized in places with names such as Tachikawa Air Base or Atsugi, the former Imperial air field where MacArthur's Occupation forces first landed weeks after the surrender.

We also lived for a brief time in southern Japan, in Iwakuni outside of Hiroshima. We lived off-base from the U.S. Marine facility at Iwakuni, but as usual, my American friends and I were bussed into school on-base, where I attended Matthew C. Perry Elementary School. I have fond recollections of having hamburgers at the greasy spoon hut set up outside our school, next to the baseball field, then after school riding bikes around town with Japanese and American friends, stopping for Japanese snacks like frozen pineapple rings while we played in our blissfully mixed-race world. It never occurred to me, for instance, when I visited the Hiroshima Peace Park as a boy, that my father's friends and co-workers are part of the military might that dropped the bomb on such a beautiful city. As a child, those deeper questions were beyond my ken.

My father was never hard-core military like the father in the 1979 film "The Great Santini," but military culture was definitely part of my life until I was 8 years old and about to enter 3rd grade. That's when we moved to the States, so my dad could work in a civilian capacity for the Army Corps of Engineers outside Washington, D.C. Since then, I'm only reminded of my familiarity with the Army life when go on-base somewhere, or find myself driving through a former base like Lowry.

In recent years, American military presence around the world has been questioned and much of our presence has been cut back. For decades, a movement in Japan has protested the concentration of U.S. military installations still in that country, with an emphasis on the bases on Okinawa. Every few years, a headline bursts forth like the ones in the early '90s where GIs were accused of raping a young Japanese girl -- headlines that haven't changed much since the immediate post-war days.

What those headlines don't mention is how much friendship there has been over the decades between and the U.S. and Japan, and how many GIs have been stationed in Japan and left there enriched by the experience in many ways both personal and political. And how many GIs have fallen not in war, but in love while in Japan.

My best memory of all from my childhood on-base is a vivid image of being with my dad at the noncommissioned officer's club at Tachikawa, a dark smoky place with lots of red, and helping him choose Glenn Miller songs for the jukebox. It's easy to forget that in addition to everything else my father was, he was also a veteran -- and that his military service has left its impression me.

Thanks, and happy Veterans Day, dad!

You can "virtually" visit Iwakuni, where I lived briefly, through a wonderful Web site, The Spencers in Iwakuni, created by Donella Spencer, the wife of a U.S. Marine stationed at the USMC base there. She loved the city and being in Japan, even though her family's now   transferred back to the states. You'll find a lot of information about living in, traveling in and visiting Japan and Iwakuni at her site, and lost of links to other sites.

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October 31, 1999

THE PAST FOR SALE: ANTIQUES AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

Shopping for antiques is a popular pastime -- holding onto the past becomes more and more comforting as we hurtle into a future where change is constant and everything new is valued over anything old.

I'm a fan of certain types of antiques -- pop culture junk such as toys from my baby-boomer childhood, for example, always warm my heart. And these days, I'm also interested in Japanese antiques as another way to absorb and appreciate my historical roots. But a recent visit to a dealer of Japanese antiques made me think about the purpose and power of these objects, whether they're 100 years old or just a few decades.

The occasion was the open house for Hanakago Antiques, a new business run by Mark and Anita Meyer of Boulder, Colorado.

The Meyers plan to operate Hanakago out of their home, with showings by appointment to anyone who's interested in Japanese furniture, baskets, textiles and decorative objects from artwork and handcrafted wood boxes to a variety of vases for displaying ikebana, or flower arrangements. The Meyers' home is a spacious contemporary style in a posh neighborhood, and the antiques for sale in the living room add a classy thematic boost to the clean lines of their architecture.

The couple had lived in Japan for over a dozen years and when they moved to Boulder, they realized there wasn't a source for the type of objects and furniture and clothing they had begun collecting. That's when they decided to form Hanakago.

Their taste for antiques is very refined -- at the open house there were many beautiful tansu (dressers), kimonos and obis (the sashes that are worn around the waist) and lots of appealing smaller pieces such as a variety of baskets and containers, including "bento boxes" (lunch boxes) with latches and handles which held smaller containers for rice, vegetables and the other elements of a mobile meal. I almost bought one because it was so exquisitely designed and crafted out of basket weaves. I also almost purchased an ikebana vase (not that I have a lot of ikebana to display) carved out of a burl of dark wood, shaped like a giant ginger root.

All of the items were dated by the Imperial eras -- Meiji, Taisho, Showa -- by which Japanese mark their historical periods. The Meiji emperor ruled from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, and oversaw the Westernization and modernization of Japan after the country was opened up to the world by the U.S. commodore Matthew Perry. Taisho was the brief reign cut short by mental illness; the Taisho emperor's son, crown prince Hirohito, actually ran the country for some of the Taisho era before becoming emperor himself in the late 1920s. The Showa era under Hirohito is the Japan westerners know best because it's the Japan of World War II and the miraculous economic recovery since then (he ruled until 1989).

Because the Meyers are knowledgeable about Japanese history, going to their home to see their collection can be an educational experience. At the same time, though, the open house made me think about what happens when objects that once were part of someone's life are taken out of their original context.

This process of "recycling" old stuff for new enjoyment or other purposes is as inevitable as the passage of time, but in this case, some of the consequences of recycling nagged at my heart. The Meyers and the people who visited their open house certainly appreciated Japanese culture. But I felt a little bit protective of some of the objects being sold, because appreciation doesn't necessarily mean understanding or sensitivity. I saw a gorgeous and striking obi sash that featured Kanji, or Chinese calligraphic characters, woven black-on-black, which was handled by a buyer as if it were a bath towel on sale at a discount store. Because an obi is an important part of traditional dress and there's a ritualized and respectful way of handling them, and my friends and I felt somehow saddened seeing this beautiful piece treated not as part of a traditional ensemble but as a perfect decorative touch for atop a dresser.

This is the process of all antiques, since collectors have differing levels of background knowledge for the things they buy. I even found myself thinking of much of the collection merely as decorative items, which made me feel a bit shallow about my roots. Would owning some old Japanese objects really make me more connected to my own past?

In Denver, a store called East-West Designs sells some of the same types of objects and furniture as the Meyers, though the emphasis isn't quite so "high-end" and there isn't as much focus on pieces from the Meiji era or older (in fact the tags at East-West Designs don't note the age at all). Perhaps because the prices are somewhat less expensive (though there are things that are pricey), and because the sales person is Japanese and because a Japanese customer wandered in while I was there, I felt less worried about cultural dislocation -- I felt the items in the store were grounded in their context.

Is that unfair? I'm not sure... I'm still thinking about how I feel about it. In the end, anyone who likes Japanese antiques has the right collect it, no matter whether they're Japanese or not. Antiques deserve to go to a good home where they'll be pampered, and perhaps that's the best we could hope for -- that way the object lives on even if its original owner's spirit is no longer part of its soul.

Note: Hanakago Antiques is located at 1177 Cascade Ave. in Boulder, and is open by appointment; call 303-938-8989. East-West Designs is at 303 Josephine St., Denver, 303-316-9520.

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October 25, 1999

THAI FOOD AND LIFE LESSONS

I write often about Japanese restaurants, but I love any kind of food, and this week I'd like to tell you about my friendship with a man who has opened a handful of great Thai eateries along the Colorado Front Range in a little over the decade that I've known him.

I first met Paul Santanachote in the mid-1980s, when he ran Tommy's Oriental Kitchen (now called Tommy's Thai), a tiny restaurant on East Colfax Avenue. An attorney friend of mine took me there for lunch one day, and I loved the food so much that I returned for lunch five days straight, and on the last day took bags of takeout food back to the office to share with my co-workers. Paul was the host and manager, and I found out later that his wife, Oranuch, was the talent behind the dishes -- she cooks, while Paul takes care of business.

The Pad Thai was delicious, extra-spicy (at my request) and filling. For those of you unfamiliar with Thai cuisine, Pad Thai is the "spaghetti" or "teriyaki" of Thailand, the one dish most foreigners have heard of, which is made with various meats and vegetables stir-fried with noodles and served with varying degrees of peppery heat. Over time I tried almost all the dishes, from the cold beef salad to the green and red curries and Sriracha, an explosion of flavor served in a spicy red sauce. And, I got completely hooked on Thai iced coffee, a concoction of strong coffee served over ice with sweet condensed milk added. Try one sometime -- it's like sucking down liquid candy, and it has the double-kick of caffeine and sugar so you'll be buzzing round for hours.

Whenever I had a business lunch, I suggested Tommy's for the meeting, and helped tell more people about the quaint hole-in-the-wall eatery which had started life as a KFC chicken outlet.

After a few years of running Tommy's, Paul outgrew Tommy's and tired of the fast-food pace. He longed for a larger, sit-down restaurant. After scouting locations, Paul announced he had found a space in Boulder -- which coincidentally had for years housed the Kobe An Japanese restaurant but had been vacant for some time.

He handed Tommy's to his brother-in-law, Sam (both are former mail carriers), and then began renovating the space in Boulder, which is right on the Pearl Street Mall at 14th Street. Paul redesigned the interior but he had to work with some of the existing architecture: Kobe An had tatami-mat rooms so Paul left them for groups who wanted the privacy of the enclosed rooms. Sawaddee, the new restaurant started off slowly, but within a year attracted a regular clientele.

During this time, I got to know Paul better, and discovered that he lived in Littleton -- the suburb south of Denver -- and I marveled at how he and his wife, and even his teenaged daughter Dipany, who worked with them during the summer, commuted to Boulder. The daily grind sounded horrible to me. They got up early every morning and headed to the restaurant, stopping only to pick up ingredients for the day's meals, and had the restaurant open for lunch. The entire family worked straight through to closing and got back home well past midnight after cleaning up the restaurant. Then they got up and did it again.

I admired the entire Santanachote family for its united effort to help the entire business succeed. Their single-mindedness was then, and still is, a great inspiration to me.

Paul again got the itch to start another restaurant after a couple of years, and this time to do it from the ground up and literally control every aspect of the building. He scouted locations in Fort Collins, the small college town another hour north of Boulder, where Dipany planned to attend Colorado State University when she graduated from high school.

I regrettably lost touch with Paul and his wonderful family about this time, because I got a job south of Denver in Colorado Springs, and only occasionally managed to visit Boulder. But I wasn't surprised at all when I heard that Paul gave Sawaddee to another family member and finally opened Sri Thai in Fort Collins.

Two years after he opened Sri Thai, I managed to finally visit Paul in Fort Collins last month.

I called ahead for directions for my friend Leland and me, and spoke briefly to Paul. It was great to hear his eager voice, and he told us how he had achieved his dream. He had bought the land -- a corner lot at a busy intersection -- and designed and oversaw the construction of the restaurant from start to finish.

When we got to Sri Thai, the place was packed, but Paul had held open the one table in the room that had a corner view of the entire restaurant. Paul wanted us to have the best seats in the house to watch the choreography of his friendly, knowledgeable waitstaff and the servers scurrying around with dishes.

The food tasted fantastic, naturally, and even though we were stuffed from dinner and ready to leave, Paul made us sit back down and was kind enough to finish us off with some mango and sweet sticky rice for dessert.

I hugged Paul afterwards and told him how much I admired him, and explained how I try to work hard, partly because of my own "Asian work ethic" but also because of role models like Paul in my life.

I'll go back to Sri Thai soon (I won't wait years again before I see Paul) but I can always visit the other restaurants closer to home that are Paul's legacy. Tommy's Oriental is still doing great business, though Sam who took over for Paul is now running his own fine restaurant called Wild Ginger. Sam handed Tommy's to family members to run, of course. And Sawaddee still serves up delicious Pad Thai and other staples.

This legacy reminds me always of the lesson that success has to be earned, but that it's always achievable if you're dedicated to it. And best of all, life's lessons never tasted so good.

Note: Sri Thai is located at 950 S. Taft Hill Rd. in Fort Collins, (970) 482-5115. Tommy's Thai is located at 3410 E. Colfax Ave., (303) 377-4244. Wild Ginger is at 399 W. Littleton Blvd., (303) 794-1115.

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October 18, 1999

RACE RELATIONSHIPS: SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS

I haven't read "Snow Falling on Cedars," the 1994 bestseller by David Guterson, but I got a sneak peek at the movie version of the novel last week at the closing night screening of the Denver International Film Festival. I enjoyed the film and hope it's a hit, with its twenty-something star Ethan Hawke as the main attraction.

For Japanese Americans, Hawke is a sidelight. We'll go to the film to see how it depicts our history -- or at least, the experience of a small JA community near Seattle. Much of the discussion over both the book and now the movie focuses around the topic of Internment and whether "Snow Falling on Cedars" does a good job of explaining what happened to Japanese Americans who were uprooted from their Pacific Northwest home and transplanted in concentration camps thousands of miles away.

Some people I've spoken to think "Snow Falling on Cedars" isn't politically charged enough, and that the film misses the chance to educate mainstream America about the tragedy of Internment and how Japanese Americans were treated as recently as a generation ago. That's probably true enough, but I find this perspective misses the point of the story.

I didn't see the movie as a political statement. I walked away thinking more about the inevitability of the story's romantic subplot, and I felt saddest not for the JAs who suffered the historic ignominies, but for Hawke's Caucasian lead character, and his devastating realization that he'll never regain the love of his life.

The story has several levels: First, it's a murder mystery. Second, it's a poignant if somewhat impressionistic look back at the Internment of Japanese Americans from the small island community of San Piedro. Third, it's a romance as star-crossed and doomed as Romeo and Juliet, with race serving to divide the Capulets and Montagues in this passion play.

The film -- like the book -- opens with the death of a fisherman on a foggy night in Puget Sound, and the arrest of a childhood friend, Kazuo Miyamoto, for murder. As the trial unfolds, we find out that Miyamoto hated the victim and was on his ship the night of his death. A journalist covering the trial for the island's community newspaper, Ishmael Chambers, is forced to deal with his emotions because Miyamoto's wife is Hatsue, a woman he's loved from childhood, and with whom he had a torrid teenaged affair just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed everything. Although he confesses his love for Hatsue before the war, he doesn't speak up to try and stop the evacuation of Hatsue's family along with the rest of the island's JAs. And though his father (played in a righteous cameo by Sam Shepard), the editor of the newspaper, championed the rights of the Japanese Americans to the consternation of the island's other Caucasians, Chambers doesn't immediately reveal crucial information that could affect the outcome of the trail.

On the other hand, Hatsue's family plays the role of stoic outsiders who endure the evacuation and then pressure Hatsue to give up her misguided affection for Ishmael Chambers and settle down with her own kind. When Japanese use the word "hakujin" for Caucasians, it stings because it's so obviously a racist slur, and reveals how much racial division and paranoia simmers below the "inscrutable" surface of our Asian skin. It doesn't surprise us when the townsfolk call us "Japs" and display their ugly prejudice during the courtroom scenes. But I bet Caucasians will be somewhat shocked to see the bluntness of the Japanese characters' racism against them.

As a film, "Snow Falling on Cedars" is lovely -- the lyrical camera work captures breathtaking scenes of the northwest landscape, though the quick-cut flashbacks and non-linear storytelling style can be confusing at first.

Some of the most affecting and effective scenes include the roundup of the island's JAs; the extended flashbacks of Chambers and Miyamoto's separate WWII experiences; and the tender moments of the young Chambers and Hatsue hiding out in a hollow of a gigantic cedar tree in the forest.

The out-marriage rate of Japanese Americans has of course increased over the decades since the period in which "Snow Falling on Cedars" takes place. It's hard to imagine a family insisting on marrying only Japanese -- it would seem as shockingly out of place as a Caucasian family refusing to allow a child to marry an African American, or -- gasp -- an Asian. Still, these sad situations occur, even now.

The movie will surely stir sales of the book again, and I hope with the combined popularity of the story, people will ponder the Internment and our country's legacy of race and hatred. But then I hope people will also think a little farther -- or closer to home -- and see how race can break hearts as well as communities.

You can read about the movie release at http://www.snowfallingoncedars.com, or order the book from Amazon.com, Tatteredcover.com or your neighborhood book store.

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September 20, 1999

JAPAN THROUGH VIDEO GAMES: FROM PONG
TO POKEMON

I recently watched Jared, the teenaged son of a Japanese American friend of mine, drop a few quarters into an X-Men vs. Street Fighter video arcade game at a movie theater. I noted with some interest that though the X-Men is an American comic book institution, the characters in this video game were clearly drawn in a Japanese cartoon style. Jared was slamming away at the game, using rapid wrist movements to control the "joystick" for movement and the fingers of his other hand to slam down the buttons that controlled various weapons and martial arts moves carried out onscreen by the characters.

After a couple of minutes, two other Asian young men came by, and the older of the duo slipped to the joystick next to Jared and pressed a button that brought a message on the screen announcing a challenger. Jared and the new kid on the game went at it, with teeth gritted, hands and wrists banging away at the controls and a furious fight onscreen: two superheroes (hell, I couldn't even tell which was the bad guy and which was the good guy) hitting, kicking and jumping at each other, then shooting balls of fire and other assorted powerful mutant weaponry at each other.

Jared lost this round, but I didn't find out until much later, when he told me. The second round, Jared kicked the other guy's ass. I had no idea what was going on at all.

The entire exchange was bewildering to me because everything moved too fast for my middle-aged mind to absorb. But it took me back to the earlier days of amusement arcades and video games, and how companies from Japan such as Nintendo, and later, Sega and Sony have taken over the market for computer-driven video games for both the home and arcades.

Not to sound too nostalgic, but I am a baby boomer, after all, and baby boomers are nothing if not nostalgic. I still remember when a little company called Atari introduced Pong, first as an arcade game (most popular in bars next to the foosball and air hockey tables and pinball machines) in 1972, with a home version in '74. The California-based company was named after a term used in the Japanese board game Go.

When I was in high school, my friend Bubba bought the first Pong game consoles, sold by Sears. By today's standards it's incredibly simple and unappealing -- it sort of replicated a ping-pong table on a TV screen, with cursors at each side as "paddles," and an electronic "ball" that bounced back and forth across the screen as players used a knob to move their paddles up and down to intercept the ball.

Not too challenging compared to Jared's encounter with the X-Men, but the silly pinging sound of the Pong ball as it bounced heralded a new age of games and entertainment. The stuff that has come since from Pac Man and Donkey Kong to Space Invaders and Super Mario all owe a debt to Pong.

Thanks to the dumb-named "Donkey Kong," Nintendo was the first superstar company of this new era of entertainment.

The Kyoto-based company has its roots in a small family business formed in 1889 to manufacture sets of a card game called "Hanafuda." The company grew and became Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. in 1933 and eventually Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd. before expanding from playing cards and started manufacturing other types of games in the early 1960s. The company created the first video game system in 1975 in cooperation with Mitsubishi Electric. Donkey Kong came in 1981, and the Super Mario Brothers came in 1985 with the very popular Nintendo Entertainment System for home use.

By 1989, the company was hugely successful, and got even huger with another  hit: The portable, battery-operated Game Boy which allows users to take their obsessions out of the home or arcade (I'll admit, I own one and will mindlessly play "Tetris," a simple puzzle game, to waste time at the office).

Currently, Nintendo has a lock on the electronic game merchandise for Pokemon, the mega-hit anime TV show. I think they're doing all right.

The company doesn't have a lock on the industry at large, though -- Sega, the Tokyo-based company, is worth $3 billion dollars -- nothing to sneeze at. And Sony's PlayStation has shipped well over 30 million game systems worldwide.

Why am I focusing on all this commerce?

Because so much of it serves as an indirect ambassador of Japanese style to the world, and particularly to the U.S. I look at the characters and see Japanese manga (comics) techniques. Even on the X-Men game, I heard snippets of Japanese being spoken amidst the flying fists of fury.

There's a Japanese aesthetic that's hard to describe but which is tangible in these games. And Sony, in its TV commercials, pays the ultimate homage to its cultural roots by using the very recognizable voice of a Japanese female announcer whispering, "PlayStation" with her familiar accent (Japanese TV commercials often end with the soft voice of a woman saying the name of the company).

But you know, all this excitement can be tiring for an old guy like me, who was there at the dawn of the digital entertainment revolution.

And now that I think about it, I feel downright nostalgic about my own youth. I think I'll drag out that Pong game (I eventually bought it from my friend Bubba) and hook it up for some old-fashioned fun....

I bought the Pong from Bubba long after high school -- it's a miracle he still had it -- for research for The Toy Book, which I co-authored with my pal Leland Rucker in 1991.

(return to index)

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September 13, 1999

THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY FRICTION FICTION

Towards the end of her debut novel,"Why She Left Us," Rahna Reiko Rizzuto titled one chapter, "Shikata Ga Nai." A few pages into this chapter, Emi Okada, the supernova around which the other characters orbit, explains to her daughter Mariko: "'You know,' she said, 'my mother had a saying. "Shikata ga nai." She used it a lot, especially during the war. It means,"It can't be helped."'"

This is a very familiar phrase for Japanese, because it’s an all-purpose repository for anything that could be described as an act of God, a fluke of nature or more commonly, a man-made mess. It’s all about accepting what might appear as wrong -- or worse -- and resigning yourself to having the all-too-human element of emotion scarring your psyche.

“Why She Left Us” is an examination of how the emotional fallout of this phrase has infected three generations of the Okada family, starting with the first-generation immigrants Mitsuo Okada and his wife Kaori, their children Will, Emi and Jack, and their children.

Rizzuto tells the epic story, which starts before World War II and ends in 1990, with skill, vision and verbal dexterity - her deft telling of the Okada family’s cross-generational breakdown is an intense dig into psychological archeology.

The story’s revealed in novel ways, with pieces told from the perspective of four of the characters in non-linear fashion. Like archeology, the story emerges rather flows. The reader has to assemble the truth about the Okada family from memories preserved as shattered artifacts, jumping back and forth in time, place and voice - each perspective even exists within its own set of storytelling conventions.

The holistic tale is simple: A Japanese American immigrant family in California finds itself imprisoned at the Amache Relocation Camp near Granada, Colorado, during World War II. Each of the Okada children have different experiences -- Emi, the wild child, already is an unwed mother who has given up her son Eric for adoption. But as war looms, Kaori brings Eric back from his adopted family to raise with his birth family. Emi comes and goes from this nuclear family, giving birth during the war to her daughter, leaving her also with her mother and later coming back to claim just Mariko to take with her new husband to Hawaii.

Throughout the book, Mari is the protagonist who’s curious about her past, and who eventually discovers the secret of Eric, who she had been told all her life was her cousin. The plot is actually about the need for both disclosure and closure about the unspoken, unresolved wounds of past.

The fragmented memories suits the herky-jerky pace of the story. And, the different points of view serve as Rizzuto’s verbal playgrounds - there are terrific passages of dialogue that read like a killer screenplay (hint, hint), striking images and lusciously crafted passages everywhere.

In the very first chapter, when Eric thinks his mother Emi has finally come back to take him with her, just the sound of his name unleashes his emotions. “When at last she says his name, the woman’s voice splashes into Eric’s chest, cooling his insides down in a rush that reaches his toes. It floods his eyes, too, blurring the perfect lines in her face.”

Longing lingers throughout Eric’s story, as he grows up with his surrogate family of his grandmother, grandfather and uncle Jack. At one point Rizzuto writes, “Families, Eric thinks, are deadly.”

He grows up a troubled youth but settles down finally with a wife and children by the time Mariko undertakes her journey to discover the truth about herself and her family. Near the end of the book, Mari meets Eric again, and the two quietly begin to bridge the family chasm.

It's an enormous chasm to cross: The oldest generation, protecting traditional values of image and honor, commited brutal sins and effectively destroyed a family unit in the name of preserving it. The young generation can play peacemaker in a dysfunctional family, and if loose ends are still left hanging raw like a live wire shooting off sparks, at least the circuit was finally turned back on and the electricity can flow again.

Ultimately, “Why She Left Us” isn’t about the internment. It’s about the ties that bind families together - and the peculiarly Japanese knots of obligation that can snarl and tangle those ties over time. Perhaps Rizzuto’s great accomplishment here is in capturing the tortured dynamics that are inherent in the line, “shikata ga nai” - the Japanese side of her Japanese American background has served her well here.

Rizzuto’s proven she’s a first-rate storyteller - there’s some temptation to assume some of the characters and situations are autobiographical, because her mother was interned at Amache and after the war moved to Hawaii, where Rizzuto was born.

Despite the historical accuracy and observant details that could have been drawn on her own childhood, “Why She Left Us” is fictional. Rizzuto interviewed many former internees about their experiences and created composite experiences from the fragments of sad anecdotes she collected.

But as fiction, the book rings true -- there’s truth enough here for anyone who comes from a Japanese family to recognize the inexorable dynamics on display... and then to sigh, "Shikata ga nai."

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto will make two app