Monthly Archives: December 2008

Keanu Reeves as a samurai: Is it still ‘yellowface’ if the actor is hapa?

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Actor Keanu Reeves, who is half-Asian, will play a samurai in an upcoming move, 47 Ronin.The Hollywood news source Variety reported yesterday that Keanu Reeves, everyone’s favorite hapa actor (his father is Hawai’ian-Chinese) is going to play the lead role in a samurai epic, “47 Ronin.”

The 47 Ronin is the celebrated 18th century story from Japanese history, of a group of masterless samurai who avenged the death of their feudal lord, or daimyo, after a year of planning and then committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, to maintain their warrior code of honor, or bushido. The story’s been told a lot in Japanese movies, in variations of the title “Chushingura.” The most recent remake in Japan was “47 Ronin” (“Shijushichinin no shikaku”) in 1994, written and directed by Kon Ichikawa.

It’s cool to think that Hollywood is going to tell this story, with the the spectacle of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and the star power of Reeves.

Keanu Reeves played Siddhartha in the 1993 film Little Buddha.But it makes me wonder about the choice of Reeves. Yeah, he knows martial arts (and proved it in the Matrix movies), and he’s part Asian. But he’s not Japanese. And, hellooo, he doesn’t look very Asian.

When “Memoirs of a Geisha” was produced with Chinese women in the lead roles, it bothered some in the Japanese American community, including me. (It also caused a stir in China, where the women were criticized for playing Japanese roles.) Could it really have been so hard to find qualified Japanese actresses (which was the filmmakers’ excuse)?

I definitely get that Reeves brings a big name-brand to the samurai film so he’s important. But his one previous role playing an Asian was downright surreal, and it makes me apprehensive about how this one will go.
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The Sierra Club’s privileged caste: Is the green movement white?

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Sierra Club decalThe folk-rock group I play with, Mallworthy, was asked to perform at a holiday party and awards ceremony for the Sierra Club in Boulder last night. The event was held in the cafeteria of a Unitarian church, and there was a constant clatter with a couple-hundred people standing in line for the array of potluck food and then sitting and eating the food, while they talked and laughed.

We could barely hear ourselves play our brilliantly rehearsed setlist, never mind anyone in the “audience” paying any attention. One woman who stood about four feet in front of me while she waited in the food line leaned over and said she could barely hear our instruments but not our voices at all.

So when a well-heeled middle-aged woman in all black began banging her wine glass with a fork — during one of our songs — so the crowd could quiet down and listen to her announcements and several pages of “Bushisms” that she’s collected, I had had enough. It was a reflection of how invisible and unnecessary we were to the festivities at hand. Almost half an hour later, while the merry members held their raffle giveaway, we decided we should just pack up and go home.

We couldn’t even consider this a rehearsal since we couldn’t hear each others’ parts. It was nice to just get out of there.

But I had a cloud nagging at me all night, long after I’d gone home and started watching TV to distract my brain.

Even before the presumptuous woman interrupted our playing, I had looked out over the room and noted a disturbing fact: Besides myself, there were two Asian faces (women, who appeared to be there with Caucasian partners) and one African American woman. I wasn’t sure if anyone in the room was Hispanic. But it was clear that overwhelmingly, the room was filled with eager, erstwhile, Earth-loving white people.
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Obama names retired General Eric Shinseki as Veterans Affairs Secretary

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Retired Army General Eric Shinseki was named by Obama to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Back on Veterans Day I posted an article about how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been heroes for generations in the U.S. military, and ended the article with a note about retired Four-Star Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff and the highest-ranked AAPI in the military.

Today, NBC released an excerpt of an interview with Barack Obama to air on tomorrow’s “Meet the Press” program, during which the President-elect tells Tom Brokaw that he’s naming Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

The timing of the announcement isn’t coincidental.

Tomorrow is Sunday, December 7, the 67th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Shinseki is Japanese American, and he was born in Hawai’i on November, 28, 1942. He and Barack Obama both have childhood roots in Hawai’i. Shinseki is a Vietnam veteran, who lost part of a foot from stepping on a land mine. He was named Army Chief of Staff in 1999 and retired in 2003… many thought, under duress from the Bush administration for his views which contradicted the official one on the war against Iraq.

On February 25, 2003, a few months before the end of his appointment and the start of his retirement, Shinseki testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought an occupying force of several hundred thousand men would be needed to stabilize postwar Iraq. His analysis was bluntly dismissed by the Bush administration. Here’s part of a transcript of the proceedings:
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‘Sukiyaki,’ Kina Grannis’ music and the random magic of YouTube

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hapa singer-songwriter kina grannis Surfing YouTube videos can be like the early days of surfing the Internet. Following links to random Web pages is a leap of faith, a trust in kismet, that what you’re about to see is both somehow related to what you were seeking in the first place, and hopefully entertaining.

In the midst of one of my YouTube forays, following related videos then backing up and taking another path to other videos, I came across one of my favorite songs of all time, “Ue O Muite Arukou” by Kyu Sakamoto, the Japanese pop star who had a worldwide #1 hit with the song in 1963.

You probably know the song better by the name put on it by its American label, “Sukiyaki.” It’s been covered in English by a number of artists, most notably Taste of Honey in the ’80s and the Viet pop singer Trish Thuy Trang more recently. She sings both English and Japanese in her version. (See Sakamoto’s, Taste of Honey’s and Tran’s video versions below. They’re all available on YouTube.)

From there, I clicked to a cover version of the song by a hapa musician named Kina Grannis and was pleasantly surprised by the sweet, cool, understated quality of her version of the song — which she sings in the original Japanese — as well as the scope and depth of her talent on other videos. Here’s the video:

Grannis is from Southern California, and won a songwriting contest sponsored by Doritos with the catchy song, “Message from Your Heart,” which was aired during the Super Bowl in February. The contest led to a deal with Interscope Records.
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NPR’s ‘Radio Bookmark’: the future of news radio in the Internet age?

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National Public radio I’m an off-and-on supporter of National Public Radio, I admit it. I’m a fair-weather donor to NPR, depending on how much I’m tuning in. There have been periods when I commute with the car when I listen to NPR a lot, and then there are times when I ride the bus to work and I pass the time with my iPod set to shuffle.

Lately, I’ve been driving to work more, thanks to a parking space in the building that’s too inviting not to take advantage. So, I’ve been listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” more again.

During the run-up to the election, I was a complete news junkie, and also tuned in at the office, streaming my local NPR station, KCFR‘s news programming all day via the Web.

So when the most recent pledge drive came around in October, I was easily enticed to give more support than I ever have. Instead of the minimum of $50 that I’d usually donate, I committed $120 on my credit card just so I could get the premium they offered for that level of support: A Radio Bookmark.

The Radio Bookmark allows me to save stories on NPR to hear them again later. It lets me leave the car instead of sitting in the driveway or a parking lot (or, in some cases, on the shoulder of the road), riveted to my seat and listening until the end of a fascinating report.
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