Vincent Chin rally in Detroit, 1983 (Photo by Victor Yang, China Times) On the night of June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin was celebrating his bachelor's party with friends in a Detroit strip club. He got into an altercation with two white men, and both groups were thrown out. The two men tracked down Chin with the help of a...
I wasn’t surprised that anti-Japanese sentiments were expressed when Takuma Sato, a Japanese driver, won the Indianapolis 500 race -- he is the first driver from Japan to take the flag. But I was shocked, and disappointed that the hateful sentiment was blurted by a journalist. In Denver, where I live. And that it was someone I had worked with. Terri...
One of the great benefits of today’s social media – and why I urge everyone, young and old, to at least be on Facebook – is that it can connect you to people you know, people you don’t know, and maybe most surprisingly, to people you used to know. When baby boomers starting logging into Facebook about a decade ago, I...
Many Japanese Americans I know don’t pay much attention to Japan, which I think is a pity. I believe JAs should keep up with news from Japan, and travel to Japan. A lot. However, most JAs I know closely follow the news of Donald Trump’s presidency, and what he’s doing in the US. A standing-room-only crowd attended this year's Japanese American Day...
NOTE: I just heard today that Mas Nonaka, a member of the local Japanese American community who has cut hair at several iterations of his barbershop, Nonaka's, in and around Sakura Square since before the block was called Sakura Square, passed away. Nonaka's was where I first got my hair cut when my family moved to Denver from northern Virginia in...
Here's a query from Facebook, where someone shared a story about how the blocky end tips of disposable chopsticks are meant to be snapped off and used as chopstick holders on your table. I responded with this comment and posted some photos I took: I've seen this post, or one like it, before. I can honestly say that although you might be...
I'm the chair of the editorial board of Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the JACL. Below is my column in the New Year's issue of the PC. I wanted to post it here and also add even more current concerns given President Trump's rocky first three weeks, his eyebrow-raising relationships with world leaders (including Japan's Shinzo Abe, which merits...
Most books about Japanese Americans focus on the West Coast because that's where Japanese first arrived and settled on the US mainland. So few well-known books tell the stories of Japanese as they crossed the country and decided to live in the mountains, or the midwest, or the northeast or the south. Yet I know of communities of JAs in New...