Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | All Posts
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April 13, 2005

I just heard one of the most gawdawful songs of the rock and roll era -- or any era, for that matter -- on CNN. I was working away, and the TV outside my office door started playing Joe Cocker's 1973 Top 40 hit, "You Are So Beautiful." The sound stopped me cold, and I got all shakey and felt like vomiting.
April 12, 2005

I never got the attraction of cigarette smokers who roll their own smokes. Looks like a pain in the butt to me -- har, I made a punny! But then, I never got the attraction of cigarette smoking anyway. But these days I'm into "rolling my own" when it comes to tea... green tea, that is.
January 13, 2005

I went shopping with my 17-year-old niece Joann, who’s a music fan with typical contemporary tastes. Except…. When we were shopping, she bought “Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Greatest Hits, “ a compilation of guitar-driven ‘70s rock that had been part of my generation’s high school and college years.
December 6, 2004

We're making great headway in the United States in getting public names changed when they are reflections of an older era when racially charged terms were considered acceptable, or at least, not controversial.

October 18, 2004

Thank you very much, Michelle Malkin. Thanks a bunch for writing your book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror." Thanks for trying to prove that not only was putting Japanese Americans into U.S. concentration camps during World War II the right thing to do, but also urging that the United States use racial profiling as a tool today, against Muslims.
August 23, 2004

Samurai are big in Western pop culture these days, what with Tom Cruise's hit "The Last Samurai" and of course, Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies.
July 18, 2004

You'd think in the 21st century, that racial epithets would be so old-fashioned that anyone using them would be laughed out of the country.

But no, that's not the case. At issue today, as it has been for decades, is the use of the word "Jap" to describe a person or thing that's Japanese or Japanese American.

Amazingly, there have been a couple of instances of "Jap" in the media in recent weeks.