Author Archives: Gil Asakawa

Not so rosey for Rosie

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Asians traditionally don’t speak up about injustices — it’s the “don’t bring attention to yourself,” “don’t complain, it’ll cause trouble” syndrome. But more and more, Asian Americans are different.

So when Rosie O’Donnell mocked the sound of the Chinese language a week ago on “The View,” the Asian American Journalists Association’s New York chapter e-mail list began a spirited conversation, with most members outraged and demanding an apology and some cautioning that O’Donnell hadn’t gone on a racist “rant” like Michael Richards, and that it was a poor attempt at humor.

I wasn’t laughing. Like many Asian Americans, I was familiar with that “ching-chong, ching-chong” sound, from when I was taunted by European-American kids telling me to go back where I came from. That sound makes my gut clench as much as a punch. (Click here for the video on YouTube.) Continue reading →

Another side of December 7, 1941

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I grew up being apprehensive every December 7. I’m Japanese American, and was born long after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, but for a long time I felt an inescapable sense of responsibility for the attack.

My early years were spent in a military environment — my dad was in the U.S. Army. But I still felt… guilty every December when people started mentioning “Pearl Harbor Day” and when I started to hear comments and sometimes jokes about those “sneaky Japs. ”

Being Japanese American means feeling an ambivalence because for many Japanese Americans, 120,000 of them, December 7, 1941 wasn’t just the day Pearl Harbor was bombed and drew the United States into World War II. Japanese Americans were just as outraged at the attack as everyone else in the U.S. — Daniel Inouye, the senior senator from Hawaii and a WWII veteran and medal of honor recipient, tells the story of being a young man in Honolulu that day, and shaking his fists at the Japanese planes and screaming, “damn Japs!”

There’s another side to this story. Continue reading →

Hippu-hoppu: Japanese doing the Double Dutch

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I caught a cool video story today on NYT.com, about a Double Dutch competition held in Harlem. (You may have to do a search for it once you get to the NYT video page).

Interestingly, the competitive African American tradition, which counts the number of times you can jump rope in two minutes and then add on layers of amazing acrobatic performances, has become a focus of Japanese youth who are fascinated with black culture. The NYT story points out that Japanese teams have won “Best of Show” in this competition eight out of the past 10 years, and sure enough, a team from Chiba, the city northeast of Tokyo, won this event.

Another manifestation of this cross-cultural fascination are the young Japanese women who dress in retro-funky ’70s black styles, who are called “ganguro” — “gang girls.”

The Japanese dining cops are coming

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The Washington Post recently reported that the government of Japan is going to start checking out Japanese restaurants all over the world and handing out seals of approvals for those deemed to be serving “authentic” Japanese cuisine.

This rather extreme step (it sounds like something the snooty French would do) is the result of a recent visit by the country’s Minister of Agriculture, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who went to a Japanese restaurant in Colorado and saw that the menu also featured Korean barbecued beef. Continue reading →

“Love” is one you need: The Beatles reconsidered in a mashup

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It took the urging of Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatic dance performance group, to bring the music of the Beatles – the most iconic of 1960s baby boomer musical catalogs — into the 21st century.

The bulk of the project is a mashup, the digital-era, technology-enabled ability of taking two different kinds of data and “mashing” them together to make something new. Mashups can be a newsworthy online database of crime statistics overlaid onto a Google map, for instance, or it can be cool cultural commentary, like overdubbing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” onto the Destiny’s Child hit, “Bootylicious” (they fit so perfectly, it’s spooky).

Or, mashups can be the melding of two generations of music, like producer Danger Mouse’s weaving of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with the Beatles’ own “White Album.”

This time, though, the work of reconstructing and reassembling the Beatles’ recordings was a sanctioned deal. Continue reading →