Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | All Posts
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May 2, 2012

[caption id="attachment_4376" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="Connie Lim portrait by Shane Sato (courtesy of connielimmusic.com)"][/caption] The V3 Conference organizing committee got some great news last week, when we learned that singer-songwriter Connie Lim had agreed to be part of the Opening Night festivities for the third conference of Asian American digital media-ites that started as the Banana gathering way back in 2009. Lim is...

April 22, 2012

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...

April 18, 2012

This jaw-dropping shamisen throwdown took place during a free performance sponsored by the Consul General of Japan at Denver, of ABEYA Tsugaru Shamisen Performance Ensemble. It's an incredible eight-piece group that performs traditional folksongs (and original material) on the shamisen, a three-stringed lute with a tone similar to a western banjo, that's plucked with a tool that looks like a...

April 17, 2012

[caption id="attachment_4327" align="alignright" width="515" caption="Cherry blossoms at the Japanese Imperial Palace moat in Tokyo (photo Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons)"][/caption] When I was a kid in Japan, my family would make the requisite trek out every spring to see the cherry trees, or sakura, blooming at places like the Imperial Palace (above) or Ueno Park, which is better known the rest...

March 29, 2012

I happened to catch a terrific documentary the other night, "I Am Bruce Lee," which combines a well-researched biography of the late great martial arts star Bruce Lee with interviews with everyone from his wife Linda Lee Caldwell, to LA Lakers star (and martial artist) Kobe Bryant who discuss Lee's legacy and enormous influence on American pop culture. Much of the...

March 28, 2012

Yuki Kokubo, a talented filmmaker and photojournalist whom I met at the Asian American Journalists Association convention in Detroit last year, certainly has been busy. She's been working on a documentary about her hometown of Kasama, Japan, which is not far south of Fukushima, in the part of Japan devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011....