Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | asian american
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September 15, 2009

Two panels from a 1942 US Army training booklet drawn by famous cartoonist Milton Caniff, "How to Spot a Jap." Racist caricatures of Japanese were common during World War II, with even Bugs Bunny getting into the act in a cartoon, and a young Theodore Geisel -- Dr. Suess to decades of American kids -- contributing his share of racist stereotypes. These images, though despicable, are somewhat understandable because of the long history of racism against people of color in the U.S., and in particular the decades of "Yellow Peril" hysteria that had been building before the war. There was context for racial stereotypes, no matter how wrong and unjust. The attack on Pearl Harbor lit a tinderbox of racial hatred that was ready to burst into flame, and one of the results was the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps. Even Dr. Suess got into the act with racist caricatures during WWII.Another was the proliferation and propagation of racist stereotypes. One incredible example is a training booklet published by the U.S. Army titled "How to Spot a Jap," which was drawn by one of the most acclaimed comic artists of the time, Milton Caniff. Caniff drew a popular comic strip called "Terry and the Pirates," about an American adventurer fighting pirates in "the Orient." The settings for his strip were a natuiral fit for the Army to hire Caniff to illustrate the differences between the enemy Japanese and our allies, the Chinese. The booklet makes outrageous claims comparing a Chinese man against a Japanese man, such as the Chinese "is about the size of an average American: (the Japanese) is shorter and looks as if his legs are directly joined to his chest!" "The Chinese strides... the Jap shuffles (but may be clever enough to fake the stride)." "(Chinese) eyes are set like any European's or American's-- but have a marked squint... (The Japanese) has eyes slanted toward his nose." These expressions of racism, as ridiculous as they seem today, were produced (I hope) in the name of patriotism, which doesn't excuse their ugliness but does explain their existence. Unfortunately, because many of these images are available today on the Internet, they're being resurrected, without their original context, and by a surprising group: bloggers in China. The Global Times, a state-owned English-language daily based in Beijing, reported yesterday on a disturbing phenomenon with an equally disturbing tone of gleeful agreement: Chinese websites passing around the Milton Caniff booklet and stirring up "a nationalistic and racist buzz among some Chinese online users about the differences between the two historic enemies."
September 12, 2009

NOTE to visitors who may have come across this 2009 blog post from a 2019 New York Times article by Nina Ichikawa, "Looking for a Gold-Rush Town Named Chinese Camp," which links to my old blog post because the writer saw the wonton font on a building in northern California, I was surprised to see the bump in traffic from the link. So I updated the piece and re-posted it on my newer Nikkei View blog. Thanks for visiting, and please check out the new site. - Gil Asakawa

The logo for the Asia Food Fest in Austin, TX uses the Wonton font, which I think is a stereotype.

Can a font express a racial stereotype?

I know I'm climbing on my soap box and risking being called over-sensitive and too p.c. But when I noticed a promo on Facebook this morning for the Asia Food Fest in Austin, Texas, and saw the logo for the event, my stomach clenched just a little bit. The words were spelled out in the "Wonton" font, the curvy, pointy -- shall I say, "slanty" -- lettering that I associate with a lifetime of Asian racial caricatures.

I hate it when non-Asians use it as a way of appearing "Asian," and I'm disappointed when Asians use it thinking that non-Asians will identify with it. Austin's Asia Food Fest, which I'm sure is a wonderful event, is organized by the Texas Asian Chamber of Commerce, Texas Culinary Academy, and SATAY Restaurant (one of my favorite restaurants anywhere, and one I visited every year for a decade when I attended the South By Southwest music festival), so it's not a phony, faux-Asian affair. Here's how the Fest was started, from its About page:

Dr. Foo Swasdee, owner of SATAY Restaurant, founded the ASIA Food Fest in 2006 to educate people about Asian ingredients, food, and cooking. As Austin Asian population grows (doubling every 10 years), the more choices Austin Asian Food Lovers have to choose from!

But the logo still bummed me out, so I tried to reason my reaction out internally.

When I see the font, I hear the words spoken in my head in the sing-songy "ching chong" sound that I grew up hearing in racist chants, like when white kids taunted me in school, and told me to "go home" or "go back to China" (they never said go back to Japan, which would actually have been correct, since I was born in Tokyo).

World War II-era racist sign about Japanese, using the Wonton font. I think of words in anti-Asian or anti-Japanese signs. I see Wonton and I see the words "Jap," "Nip," "Chink," "gook," "slope." I can't help it. In my experience, the font has been associated too often with racism aimed at me.

Which is not to say it's always racist. Wonton's used all over the place, and a lot of times I zone it out. Chinese takeout boxes often have something written in the font. Many Asian restaurants (with old signs and menus) still use it. But then some old-timer Asian groceries still say 'Oriental" too. We allow for that, but as we move forward we expect those uses to fade.

Times change, right?

September 9, 2009

Tamlyn TomitaErin and I are taking September off from doing interviews for visualizAsian.com, our series of live conversations with leading Asian American Pacific Islanders. But we're kicking off October with a star: Tamlyn Tomita, whose inspirational career as an actor spans movies, television and the stage, and whose leadership and activism spans the Japanese American and Asian American Pacific Islander communities. Our conversation with Tamlyn Tomita will be on Tuesday, October 6 at 6 pm Pacific Time (7 pm MT, 8 pm CT and 9 pm ET) is archived as an MP3 and is available for download for a limited time. When we thought of starting visualizAsian.com, Tamlyn was the first person we thought of to interview, because of her prominence and passion, and because we'd met her on the set of "Only the Brave," Lane Nishikawa's powerful movie about the Japanese American soldiers of the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team. She was funny, approachable, salty and very real. I have a very vivid memory of her during the filming, taking a break between scenes by sitting in her pickup truck (this was a low-budget production -- no trailers for the stars). She was yelling and screaming and so animated we thought something was wrong. It turned out she's a huge LA Lakers fan, and was listening to the playoff game in progress. Last year, we saw her again at the Democratic National Convention, when I was one of the emcees at an APIA Vote Gala along with Tomita and Joie Chen, formerly of CNN. She's a passionate, exciting and entertaining public speaker, and I've since seen her on video (just search YouTube) giving lots of speeches and serving as an emcee on many Japanese American and Asian American community events.
September 4, 2009

The food at Thai Garden ranges from Thai to Chinese to Vietnamese. Ouch. I stand humbled... and embarrassed. I've changed my views on my long-held need to have Japanese words (especially food) pronounced correctly. I was such a purist about it that in the past I've even offered a pronunciation guide for often-mangled Japanese words. But tonight, I realized that despite Erin and my interest in and curiosity for all Asian cultures -- especially when it comes to food -- and our efforts to pronounce words correctly, I blew it when it comes to some of the most common Asian words we eat: Chinese food.
September 2, 2009

"Lumina, the web-only thriller series, begins webcasting on Sept. 8, 2009 "Lumina," an online-only series produced with Hollywood-level quality by an Asian American, Asian Canadian and plain ol' Asian cast and crew in Hong Kong, is set to debut on the Web on Tuesday, September 8 with a double-episode, and I for one can't wait to check it out. In case you haven't heard about it, here's an earlier post about "Lumina." The series is written and directed by Jennifer Thym, an Asian American who's a longtime expat, living in Hong Kong. From what I've seen of her vision, I think "Lumina" has the cross-cultural potential to make a splash on the international filmmaking scene. Who knows, maybe the webcast will lead to a major studio production. That would be a new way for a filmmaker to break into the Hollywood ranks. Here's what Thym says in a press release about the debut:
September 2, 2009

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who were captured, put on trial and convicted of trespassing and "hostile acts" by the government of North Korea, have written part of their story -- a lot is still too traumatic to tell. The article appeared last night on both the LA Times (interestingly, as an "Opinion" piece) and on the website of their employer, Current TV. The point of the public writing is to re-focus the narrative from their experience being captured (though they cover that as well) but on the story they were chasing in the first place when they were captured: The desperate plight of refugees escaping North Korea into China.
We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors, women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages. Now our guide, a Korean Chinese man who often worked for foreign journalists, had brought us to the Tumen River to document a well-used trafficking route and chronicle how the smuggling operations worked.
Their investigation took them into North Korea, but only for a very short time -- less than a minute, they say -- but the consequences were dire, and they wonder if they'd been set up by an informant.
August 31, 2009

The poster for the original Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in 1969I'm a big fan of Ang Lee, the Taiwan-born director of such terrific films as "The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Ice Storm," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain." He glides effortlessly between cultures, putting Chinese values to celluloid in one movie and reflecting America in the next. He also switches genres easily, from comedy to period pieces to drama to action. He's had one certifiable dud in my opinion: his take on "The Hulk." Now, I think there are two. Erin and I were sadly disappointed when we went to see "Taking Woodstock," Lee's take on the 1969 music festival that stands today as an iconic milestone of the rock era and baby boom generation. It's a nostalgic look back at Woodstock, the rock festival held between Aug. 15-17, 1969 in upstate New York. It's become iconic of the era because of the 1970 hit documentary film "Woodstock" and Joni Mitchell's song of the same name (which was a #11 hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and a lesser hit version by Mathews Southern Comfort). The song enshrined the number of people who flocked to the three-day concert: "half a million strong," probably taken from early news reports, but the turnout was probably closer to 300,000. Still an impressive number of attendees for what came to define the rock generation's tribalist instincts. Michael Lang from the original Woodstock festival Michael Lang riding his motorcycle around the original festival, captured in the "Woodstock" DVD. Mamie Gummer as Tisha, Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg in director Ang Lee Jonathan Groff playing Michael Lang in Ang Lee's fictionalized Woodstock weekend, along with Mamie Gummer as Tisha and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg. In Lee's misty-eyed look back at 40 years ago, all the surfaces are polished just right. In an early scene, the black-and-white TV in young Elliott Teichberg's parents' rundown motel in White Lake, a hamlet in the town of Bethel, New York, shows the July 20, 1969 Apollo moon landing, just a few weeks before the big rock show. The characters have the right hair, the right clothes, even the right hats (check out the mysterious and pointless character Tisha, and the woman who's captured in Woodstock documentary footage with the real Michael Lang). The cars, of course, are spot-on from that model year and before, right down to the hippie-decorated VW vans. Lee even includes several signature shots from the Woodstock doc, with his fictionalized spin. As Jake rides with a motorcycle cop through the traffic jam to get to the concert site, they pass a group of nuns who are being filmed by "Woodstock" director Michael Wadleigh's crew and one nun flashes a peace sign. Later, Elliott walks past a row of porta-potties where a film crew is interviewing the guy who's cleaning them out. He also spends some time sliding in the mud, another re-creation of a classic scene from the concert. These touchstone scenes from the original movie are fun to catch in the context of Lee's movie. What's completely missing from "Taking Woodstock" is an understanding of and appreciation for -- hell, even baldfaced nostalgia for -- the music that drew the hundreds of thousands to the festival in the first place.
August 26, 2009

Tak Toyoshima, creator of Secret Asian Man, and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of "Secret Identities," at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston. Tak Toyoshima, creator of "Secret Asian Man," and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of the recently-published book "Secret Identities," sign copies at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston. “Where are you from?” “So, where are YOU from?” “Hi, where’re you from?” I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago, at a convention where everyone asked each other “Where are you from?” and no one got offended. It cracked me up, hearing the question over and over. Let me explain, for my non-Asian readers: Just about every Asian American I know – seriously – has been asked this question sometime (or many times) in their life. It’s often preceded by a variation of the statement, “You speak English so well… where are you from?” And once we answer “California,” or “Denver,” it’s often followed by a variation of “No, you know what I mean, where were you born?” Which might be followed, after we answer “California” or “New York City,” by “No, where’s your FAMILY from?” That’s when we can cut off the silliness and get to the point: “Are you asking what’s my ethnic heritage?” I just don’t see European Americans having this conversation, unless they have, say, a British or French or German accent. People assume Asian Americans are foreigners even if we "speak English so well" because of the way we look. Anyway, I heard the “where are you from?” question dozens of times and we all answered eagerly without getting defensive. It’s because the ones asking were also AAPI, and we really did want to know where each other was from. We were at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, a non-profit professional organization that supports Asian Americans in the media. And after spending several days in Boston with the AAJA, I have hope for journalism.