2012 was a good year for Denver’s Japanese and Japanese American community

Campai at Emperor's Birthday Reception in Denver

Kimiko Side, recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun award from the Emperor of Japan, toasts “campai” during the Emperor’s Birthday reception Dec. 3, with Consul General Ikuhiko Ono at the left of the photo and Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock behind her.

This was a good year for Japanese and Japanese Americans in Colorado. A lot of the credit goes to Ikuhiko Ono, the Consul General who came to Denver late last year, and has made a concerted effort to reach out to the local JA community.

Previous Consul Generals have invited local JA leaders to the official residence for private dinners and to special receptions and events, including an annual reception at a downtown Denver hotel to mark the birthday of Emperor Akihito, celebrated Dec. 23 as a national holiday in Japan on his actual birthday.

The birthday reception is a lively annual reunion for the local Japanese and JA community. We end up seeing a lot of people only at this event, and get to catch up with each other.

But Consul General Ono and his staff do much more than just hold a birthday party every December. During the past year he’s interacted with the community in lots of other ways. Partly, that’s because of the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan. Ono arrived in Colorado in the wake of a number of fundraising efforts for disaster relief, including events and donation drives by the Japanese community.
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Richard Aoki, the Asian American Black Panther, was an FBI informant

When journalist Seth Rosenfeld wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle article in August that Richard Aoki, the mysterious Japanese American who was one of the leaders of the radical Black Panther Party, was an FBI informant during the turbulent 1960s, the revelation exploded within the Asian American community.

The bombshell brought on a fussilade of defenses of Aoki’s place as a revered activist and civil rights leader.

Aoki had become a godfather of Asian American activism for his role as “Field Marshall” for the Panthers, and getting the revolutionary group its first guns and firearms training. After his time as the only high-level Asian with the Black Panthers, he became an educator and counselor, and committed suicide in 2009 after an illness and hospitalization.

Rosenfeld’s article was a sham, and not based on credible or complete information, claimed the critics. After all, it ran in the Chronicle the same week that his new book about the FBI’s long history of surveillance and infiltration of radical groups at the University of California at Berkeley, “Subversives,” was published. But after the FBI released stacks of more documents that confirmed Rosenfeld’s assertions, even diehard Asian American supporters and Panther-era friends had to admit that Aoki must have lived a double life.

He was apparently recruited in the early 1960s as an informant starting when he was a student after getting out of the Army, and stayed on the FBI’s payroll well into the 1970s, when he had settled into a career as a college counselor and teacher, and had no more radical organizations he could inform on.

Here’s a video about Aoki and the FBI that was produced by the Center for Investigative Journalism, where Rosenfeld works:
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When will Asian Americans have an impact on national elections & media coverage?

Now that the Pew Research Center announced that Asian Americans are the “highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States,” and since the buzz on the Democratic victory is the changing demographics of the American electorate, I was hoping that the national media would include our voice more in the coverage of the elections last night. Nope. Not yet.

By far, the focus of all the racial discussion has been on African Americans and Hispanic voters.

We may be fast-growing, but at just 3% of the electorate (a number that flashed onscreen last night, during one of two mentions of Asian Americans) there aren’t enough of us casting ballots yet, I guess. Reappropriat created a terrific spreadsheet of Asian American voters in some states, including Colorado, with a blank column for people to fill in numbers for their state last night.

It bugs me that Asian Americans are so often still left out of the national conversation about racial issues, as if we don’t matter. Obviously, given the growth curve of the AAPI community, we will matter in time. But Hispanics will be the population getting the most attention — and wielding the most electoral power — for some years yet.
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A national town hall to mark the 30th anniversary of Vincent Chin’s death

"Vincent Who" is a documentary about the death of Vincent Chin

Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat 30 years ago on June 19 in a Detroit suburb, and died four days later.

At the time, I was three years out of art school, managing a paint store, and was a budding young rock critic writing for a Denver newspaper. I didn’t follow any news coverage about the attack on Vincent Chin, and I was clueless about the importance of his tragic death. I was still a “banana” — yellow on the outside, but white on the inside. Like the name of the 2009 documentary film about the impact of Chin’s murder on the Asian American community, if you had asked me then about him, I would have said, “Vincent who?”

Today, Vincent Chin is very much on my mind.

In the decades since his death, I’ve become aware and much more appreciative of my ethnic roots, culture and history as a Japanese American, which I used to take for granted. I’ve also become much more aware of my place in the much larger Asian American community.

Chin’s death still resonates three decades later, like the murder of Emmett Till resonates within the African American community as one of the driving forces of the civil rights movement. The 14-year-old Till was murdered in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman.
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Marion Barry keeps digging a deeper hole with racially insensitive remarks

DC's "Mayor-for-Life" Marion Barry

Marion Barry is the elected councilman for Washington DC’s 8th Ward, but he’s more commonly referred to in the District as “Mayor for Life.” That’s because the man seemingly has nine lives, politically speaking.

He’s now embroiled in a controversy over anti-Asian remarks he made a couple of months ago, but an attempt to mend fences with a community meeting today added some more fuel to the fire when he called Polish people “Polacks” — which is tantamount to calling Asians the “C-word” and African Americans, uh, you know, the “N-word.”

Barry’s no stranger to controversy as a politician.
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