In the U.S., snack food manufacturers in recent years have become creative, and come up with a variety of flavor combinations beyond the old barbecue-flavor potato chips or the nacho cheese flavored Doritos. Now you can get black pepper and olive oil Triscuits, or chili-lime flavored corn chips.
But American palates probably aren’t ready for some of the flavors that are available in Japan. Continue reading
 Members of the Grateful Crane Ensemble’s “Moonlight Serenaders” in “The Camp Dance: The Music & The Memories,” include (front row) Keiko Kawashima and Jason Fong; (back row) Kurt Kuniyoshi, Darrell Kunitomi and Haruye Ioka. (Photo by Phil Nee) |
You wouldn’t think that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II would make for great source material for a stage musical. But it does, and in a way, makes a much more effective vehicle to tell people about that time, and what happened to JA families, than heavier, dramatic works such as the novel and movie, “Snow Falling on Cedars.”
“The Camp Dance: The Music & the Memories” is proof that internment can be explained in an entertaining way through a musical.
Written and produced by Soji Kashiwagi, a sansei, and performed by his Grateful Crane Ensemble of actors, the play combines narration (the actors announcing what’s going on on the stage), acting (there’s plenty of terrific, believable and historically accurate dialogue), music and dance to entertain and educate audiences about the internment experience. Continue reading
 Bill Hosokawa in 2005, sitting next to a caricature at the Denver Press Club |
Bill Hosokawa died of natural causes at age 92 in Sequim, Washington, where he lived with his daughter. He was a pioneering Japanese American journalist, author and diplomat who lived in Denver for 60 years.
Those are the facts of Bill’s life and death. But there’s lots more to Bill than just the facts.
I wrote an obituary for Bill that will run in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, the APA civil rights organization. Bill was a leader within the JACL, and a columnist for the PC for decades. I’m the editorial board chair for the newspaper, and a national board member of JACL, and I knew Bill because we’d run into each other at many events in Denver. So it made sense for me to write the obit for the PC.
But I also owed it to Bill to write about him because he was a role model for me as a writer — we both wrote columns for Denver’s Japanese community newspaper (he kept his up long after I ran out of juice and got too busy). I wrote about Bill’s influence on my career years ago, in one of my columns. Continue reading
 We ended the week with a flurry of shopping at the famous Flea Market at Aloha Stadium. |
Sat. Sept. 22
It’s our last day in Honolulu, but we’re now slowing down. It’s jam-packed, with a trip to the fabled Flea Market that Erin has been raving about since we’ve been planning the trip. It’s a sale that’s held every Wednesday and Saturday at Aloha Stadium near the airport, and it’s truly a treasure trove of inexpensive omiyage – gifts to take back to the mainland.
There are vendors with t-shirts as cheap as eight for $20; ties for $5; aloha shirts for under $10. It’s a shopper’s delight, and a negotiator’s training ground. Everyone haggles for a better price.
In my case, I was proud to have talked a woman down on her Hawaiian print ties, only to find a vendor a few booths down who had them even cheaper. C’est la vie. Continue reading
 We didn’t see many geckoes during our visit, but here’s one tiny one we saw next to a sculpture of a gecko, outside Richela’s front door. |
Friday, Sept. 21
Another big food day. We’re eating our way across Oahu.
It was also a day of hunting history.
We began the day with Richela, who joined us in a drive downtown to the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i.
It’s a very nice facility in a nice building, with a museum, gift shop and research library dedicated to the history of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Continue reading
It;s also available for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader and in the iBooks store for Apple's iOS devices!
