Children of U.S. military arrested for attempted murder in Japan

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Graphic from the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, showing how the victim was forced off her motorbike by a rope strung across the road.

I should just shake my head and mutter, “Kids these days, what were they thinking.” But I have deeper feelings than that, and I’m terribly saddened by the ongoing news coverage out of Japan, where four teen-aged dependents of U.S. military personnel were arrested over the weekend for attempted murder.

The three boys and a girl, aged 15 to 18, are charged with an August attack in Tokyo, when a woman was knocked off her motorbike when she ran into a rope that had been tied across the road, and fractured her skull and broke her neck, leaving her hospitalized for three months.

The rope was moved from its position across the driveway entrance to a business, and re-tied to a post across the road. The graphic above from the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan’s huge national daily newspapers, illustrates what happened.

After the woman crashed, one of the assailants reportedly flagged down a passing motorist and asked the person to call for an ambulance, then the attackers fled the scene.Police questioned the teens after viewing footage from a nearby security camera. The arrests came Saturday, aftr negotiating with U.S. officials. Two of the teens live on Yokota Air Base, an American Air Force facility, close by in Tokyo; the other two live off-base with their families.

This attack, or prank, or stupid act, whatever it turns out to be, if it was committed by teenagers, would make the news in the U.S., but it’s especially grabbing attention in Japan because there’s an ongoing debate within that country about the need for, and level of, U.S. military presence there. Continue reading →

Sites like I Am Korean American & Discover Nikkei collect stories about identity for our communities

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http://discovernikkei.org

http://iamkoreanamerican.com/

Every once in a while, people ask me about the name of my blog, because they only hear the word “Nikkei” when it’s used for the Japanese stock exchange. “Nikkei” is also so the word used to describe people of Japanese ancestry outside of Japan. I’m a Nikkei-jin, or Nikkei person. When my blog first started out in the 1990s as a column in Denver’s weekly Japanese community newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Jiho, its publishers, Eiichi and Yoriko Imada, suggested I call the column “Nikkei View” since it reflected my perspective on pop culture and politics.

The name stuck. In the years since, I’ve come across “Nikkei” a few times as a term for who I am — mostly on research projects such as the International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10 countries and 14 participating institutions including the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in LA. There are organizations that use the term, such as the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and the blog “Nikkei Ancestry.”

Now there’s another “Nikkei” site, which is republishing some of my babbling from this blog. In 2005, JANM launched Discover Nikkei, which is a gathering place for stories about Nikkei-jin from all over the globe, not just Japanese Americans but also Japanese Peruvians and Japanese Brazilians (two countries that have very large Nikkei populations), and every other country, as well as mixed-race people of Japanese ancestry. Continue reading →

Happy birthday to Emperor Akihito of Japan

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The bow seen

We attended a birthday party of sorts last night, except there was no cake. Ever since Japan stationed a Consulate General in Denver, there has been an annual gathering of invited guests to mark the birthday of Akihito, the current Emperor of Japan.

Royal birthdays are probably celebrated in the few countries that still have a monarch. For instance, the Queen of England’s birthday is April 21 and it’s officially celebrated on the third Saturday of June. But Japan is the only country in the world that has an Emperor as its titular head of state.

The role of Emperor is hugely important in Japan — so much so that after World War II, when many wanted to prosecute then-emperor Hirohito, the Allied Occupation Forces led by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, who’s still fondly remembered by many Japanese as the “Gaijin (Foreigner) Emperor,” decided to allow Hirohito to remain in power even though the country was drafting a new, democratic constitution. Abolishing the royal structure and prosecuting Hirohito would have been too deep a disruption of Japanese society at a time when they needed to unite and pull the country out of the postwar ruins.

So the Emperor became a symbolic head of state, with no actual ruling power. That’s in the hands of the Diet, or parliament, and the prime minister.

Hirohito died in 1989, and Akihito, his son, succeeded to the throne the same year. Japan’s Imperial Household is the oldest continuing hereditary monarchy in the world, with a straight line drawn from Emperor Jimmu in 660 AD to Akihito today. Continue reading →

Help a Filipino couple win the Ultimate Thailand Explorers contest

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Michael Paul and Jennifer are hoping to win the Ultimate Thailand Explorers contest.Last time we checked in on the smart promotion sponsored by the Thai government, “The Ultimate Thailand Explorers Contest,” we were rooting for one couple to win. Unfortunately, Lori Fujikawa-Choy and Jackson Choy, newlyweds from Long Beach, California, didn’t make it to the finals.

But we now have a Filipino couple we can help, who did make it to the contest’s finals. Michael Paul and Jennifer are newlyweds who live in the Philippines. She’s a TV and magazine journalist; he’s a travel agent, and they’re trying to win a trip to Koh Samui, Thailand’s second most popular island destination. They sound like a natural for taking the big prize, because they can create a travelogue and book travel to Thailand.

In fact, they’re sharing their visit to Koh Samui on a contest blog and doing a great job.

You can follow their adventures on the blog, but the most important way you can support them is to register on the site and vote for them (you can vote once every day). The public’s votes will determine the grand prize winners, who will receive: Continue reading →

Dawen’s “American Me” is a gem of an R&B-pop recording; don’t miss him in NYC dates this week

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Dawen, LA-based Asian American R&B singer-songwriter The first single from Dawen‘s debut album, “American Me,”which was released back in September, wastes no time stating his passion for Asian American identity. “Flip through the paper, turn on the telly, go to a movie,” he croons in his supple, silky soprano. Then he slips into the first verse:

Just because you saw the movie Crouching Tiger
Doesn’t mean that I know kung-fu
And just because Mr. Yan has an accent
Doesn’t mean that I’ve got one too
People tell me I “speak good English”
Or that I’m “too thin to be Bruce Lee”
Where do they get their preconceptions
Of what I’m supposed to be?

That’s his first single, but the first track on the album, is more blunt in addressing the inequities of many immigrants of color to the U.S.:

Welcome to the USA
Freedom is your right
Land of opportunity
Only if you’re white

Welcome to the USA
Sea to shining sea
I give my money, give my life
Still they stare at me

Welcome, Welcome, hey…

On the third track, “Ku Li,” Dawen weaves in the lyrics from the folk song, “I’ve been working on the railroad,” into a stunning statement about how Chinese immigrants were treated as slave labor during the taming of the American West. Dawen

What’s amazing, despite such in-your-face lyrics, is that Dawen wraps his message in an incredible wealth of warm musicality, starting with his soulful R&B vocals to his must-be-classically-and-jazz-trained keyboards and his guitar work, and his hooky instincts for get-in-your-head melodies and late-night funk bedrock rhythms.

The album is a mellow, low-key wonder that can play in the background or zoom into the foreground with the sharply-observed social activism of the first eight tracks. Continue reading →