Note: The blog I just posted got me to thinking about a column I wrote way back in the day, before blogs were a twinkle in some developer’s eye, about Asians on TV. It’s posted in the archives of my Nikkeiview site, but I thought I’d re-post it here. I wrote this after seeing the final “Seinfeld” episode.
Like a zillion other people across the country, I tuned in to the final episode of “Seinfeld,” and I gotta say, I was only mildly impressed. Oh, I liked the show whenever I caught it, but I was a casual viewer, so the nasty humor that the characters reveled in didn’t connect with me the way they may have for diehard fans.
What the show did, especially with its segments making fun of foreigners, was get me thinking about Asian faces on TV. As a Japanese-American kid enchanted by American popular culture of the 1960s, it never occurred to me growing up that there were very few people like me on the shows I watched for hours on end. Continue reading
