Man sues Japanese broadcaster NHK for using too many foreign words… but can you stop language from evolving?

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I was amused to see a recent news story about a 71-year-old Japanese man, Hoji Takahashi, who has sued Japan’s public television broadcaster, NHK. His reason for filing suit? He’s suffering “mental distress” because of what he considers NHK’s excessive use of foreign words.

He’s no elderly gadfly with a silly gripe. He’s a member of an organization that is dedicated to preserving the Japanese language, so this is an organized effort to try and stop the influx of foreign words. What foreign words, you ask? Here are a few cited by news reports including from the BBC:

If you tune into NHK’s news or entertainment shows, you can easily make out words such as “toraburu” for “trouble,” “risuku” for “risk” and “shisutemu” for “system.” I’ve been at my mom’s house when she has NHK satellite programming on and I’ve heard “toppu hoh-ty” for “Top 40” in a story about pop music, and many other words that I can make out as English, albeit somewhat mangled in pronunciation.

My mom isn’t a member of any group fighting this trend, but she’s griped to me plenty about the same issue.
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Dale Li vividly brings to life Japanese American tragedy in ‘Dust Storm’

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Colorado’s first Asian American theater company, Theatre Esprit Asia (TEA), has launched its debut season with a pair of one-person plays in repertory, and I was fortunate to see one of them, “Dust Storm,” last week starring Dale Li. If you haven’t seen this or the other play, “Spirit and Sworded Treks” starring Maria Cheng, hurry — they run tonight through Sunday, and then close after next weekend.

“Dust Storm” is a monologue about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. It’s loosely constructed on a real incident, an attack on Chiura Obata, a celebrated artist, in Topaz, an internment camp in Utah.

The story is told from the perspective of Seiji, an angry teenager who’s imprisoned at Topaz (with his family, but he abandons them to hang with a bunch of tough teens). Like Obata, Seiji was rounded up in Berkeley, California after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which allowed the camps to be built. Anyone of Japanese descent in the Bay Area, including U.S.-born citizens like Seiji, were told they could pack whatever they could carry, and were first sent to a temporary holding center before being transferred to Topaz.
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Denver’s direct flight to Tokyo is no longer a flight of fantasy

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United flight 139 from Denver International Airport to Tokyo’s Narita Airport flies direct daily, and shaves off hours of travel time and stress from flying to the west coast for a connecting flight to Narita.

Here’s what I wrote when the direct flight on Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was first announced. Technical issues grounded the plane for several months from the original March launch, but it left on a fine late spring June day from DIA.

Here are other reports of yesterday’s celebration and inaugural; flight:

CNBC: “Sake Toast” for First United Denver-Tokyo Boeing 787 Flight

Huffington Post Denver (with KDVR Fox-31 report about Montbello Drumline traveling to Japan on second 787 flight): DIA Launches First Direct Denver To Tokyo Flight With Montbello High School Students Aboard

Follow Fox31 reporter Eli Stokols and photojournalist Anne Herbst on their blog as they travel to Japan and chronicle the direct flight and the adventures of the Montbello Drumline students. (The station will air a 30-minute soecial documentary later this summmer.)

Here’s my Nikkei View post about the Montbello Drumline’s orientation, an introduction to Japanese cuktyure including their first sashimi, even octopus.

Denver Post: Denver flight successfully takes off for Japan in inaugural journey

Museums — even tiny ones — are where our collective culture is stored

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Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center internment exhibit

I visited the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland, Oregon last week while on a business trip to the northwest, and I was struck at how important organizations like it, and the museum it operates are for our community.

Institutions from the largest such as the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to one-room repositories such as the Nikkei Legacy Center or the Amache Museum in Granada, Colorado, are repositories for our collective memory as a community, and home to our history.

Portland’s museum is a project of the Oregon Nikkei Endowment, and it’s tucked into a storefront in the city’s Old Town district, in the midst of what used to be the Nihonmachi, or Japantown neighborhood.

One of the first items on display inside the door is a scale model of the district, with all the buildings labeled with the Japanese businesses that used to thrive. Only a couple of the businesses still exist, but they’re no longer in the neighborhood – the Nikkei Legacy Center is the only remaining sign of the community that was based here before WWII.

The museum does a great job within its limited space of tracing the Japanese’s arrival in the area, the variety of businesses, and then imprisonment during WWII. There are artifacts, models, and text explaining historical milestones.

A small area features a re-creation of an internment camp barrack’s interior, with actual tables, chairs, desk and dresser (shown above) that were all built by internees in Minidoka, Idaho, where Portland JAs were imprisoned. The historical timeline of the permanent exhibit ends with a small video viewing area with interviews with local Nisei about the war years.

Hiroshima exhibit at Oregon Nikkei Legacy CenterIn a small rotating gallery space in the back is a powerful, somber art exhibit (right) that addresses the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, titled “Shadows and Black Rain: Memories, Histories, Places, Bodies.”
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