Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | asian american
2
archive,paged,category,category-asian-american-nikkeiview,category-2,paged-55,category-paged-55,qode-quick-links-1.0,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,qode-title-hidden,qode-theme-ver-11.0,qode-theme-bridge,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-5.1.1,vc_responsive
August 14, 2008

Check out the widget above. What’s a widget? Widgets are cool, portable little online features that you can put onto websites easily by just copying a little bit of code into your page. I'm helping to get the word out about The Denver Post's widget for coverage of the Democratic National Convention, coming up in a little over a week here in Denver. It’s a simple way for sites to include syndicated content from outside sources, contained within a defined box or space. Think of all the different elements on a MyYahoo or iGoogle home page – those individual boxes of content are all widgets on the page.
August 5, 2008

. Saw this via Angry Asian Man (a daily must-read): Young Asian Americans are proving they can dance, and not just on MTV's "America's Best Dance Crew." This cool video is performed by FarEast Movement but created by Wong Fu Productions, a trio of Chinese Americans from UC San Diego who started making cool content online in 2003 and now run...

July 19, 2008

Erin, Jared and I ate at a Benihana restaurant recently, and then learned just a couple of days later that Rocky Aoki, the founder of the Benihana chain, had died. I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection to being a Japanese eatery: its food. The staff at the one we go to, for instance, used to have one Japanese woman chef, which was a rarity in the entire company, but she's been gone a couple of years now. The waitstaff and cooks are all non-Japanese, and as far as I can tell, the chefs are all Latino. They love to tell jokes about how they serve "Teri-juana" sauce (get it? Tijuana, teriyaki?). They no longer are sent to Japan to train with master chefs like they used to decades ago. But they are all trained well as entertainers, and come up with some amazing tricks with their knives, throwing food around and catching the morsels. The food's still good, which is why we go from time to time... probably once a year, if that. (YouTube has a lot of videos of dinners at Benihana, including the one above, of a birthday celebration. Most evenings at the restaurants are interrupted by the clatter of multiple birthday celebrations.) The diners likewise are no longer Japanase or JA families. The diners are almost all white; a couple of weeks ago, we were the only Asians in the room.
July 19, 2008

Erin, our friend Joe Nguyen and I dined the other night at Korea House, a popular restaurant in Denver (actually, Aurora, the eastern suburb, where the Korean community is concentrated). The dinner was part of an arrangement by Korea House to advertise in Asian Avenue Magazine, and we were there to write a preview of the eatery. We had the full spread of Korean barbecue -- Bulgogi (marinated sliced beef), Calbi (marinated beef shirt rubs, cut off the bone) and Spicy Chicken -- as well as some Soon Doobu (seafood tofu stew) and Bibimbab (meat and vegetables served with spicy sauce over rice). The food was good (I'll post a link to the advertorial when it's up) and the experience was fun.
July 17, 2008

It's been a couple of weeks since the Japanese American National Museum's national conference was held in Denver. Sorting through the many bits of video I took over the conference, which ran July 3-6, my favorite parts were the tribute to JA veterans on the Fourth of July, and the July 6 bus tour to Amache, the internment camp in southeast Colorado. The conference brought a bevy of famous and not-so famous speakers and panelists (I moderated a panel on Hapas, mixed-race Americans who are the future of the JA community) to Denver's nice new Hyatt right by the nice new Convention Center. The famous included the likes of actor George Takei, a superstar in the JA pantheon; Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawai'i), a Medal of Honor World War II veteran of the all-JA 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team; Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), who as a baby was interned at Amache with his family; former Congressman and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta; JA leaders and activists such as John Tateishi and Dale Minami; authors including mystery novelist Naomi Hirahara; Cynthia Kadohata, who writes books for pre-teens; and Uma Krishnaswami, who writes multicultural children's books from a South Asian perspective. The conference, which had the awkward and ungainly title but righteous theme of "Whose America? Who's American?," also brought more than 800 attendees and volunteers for the four-day span, meeting and greeting and learning about the history, present and future of not only Japanese Americans but also of Americans in general. One of the noteworthy speakers was Anan Ameri, the director of the Arab American National Museum, who spoke at a Plenary Session alongside JA scholars about internment, civil rights and the question of American identity posed in the conference title.
July 9, 2008

One of the dangerous things about finally having cable TV, is tuning in to HGTV. For one thing, the network gives Erin way too many ideas for projects for us to tackle around the house. For another, it reveals my lack of ability to do most of the do-it-yourself projects that show up on the network's programs. What we noticed tonight, after several hours, was how diverse the network is with its shows' hosts -- especially the number of Asian Americans. First we watched Hong Kong-born Vern Yip in "Deserving Design," sort of a scaled-down version of the ABC hit show "Extreme Makeover Home Edition," in which Yip, a doctor-to-be turned architect and designer, does makeovers of parts of a home for someone who deserves it. In this show, he helped a woman with cancer redo her kitchen and bedroom.
July 9, 2008

I know I still need to blog the JANM conference, but I had to write about this: Officials at a Louisiana school district are trying to prevent students from including foreign languages in their graduation speeches. The brouhaha was sparked by Vietnamese American cousins Hue and Cindy Vo, who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School’s graduation in Houma, Louisiana. Cindy Vo spoke one sentence in Vietnamese dedicated to her parents, who don't speak fluent English, from the podium. "Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh," she said, and explained to her English-speaking classmates that the sentence roughly translates as "always be your own person." Her cousin Hue gave more of her speech in Vietnamese, but again, the point was to pay homage to her parents. At least one member of Terrebonne Parish school district, Rickie Pitre, took offense to the Vietnamese passages, and he says that all graduation speeches should be given in solely English, or that passages can be paraphrased in foreign languages -- but only after they're spoken first in English.
July 4, 2008

It's been a busy start to the conference organized by the Japanese American National Museum. We worked from home, setting up media coverage including sending a reporter and photographer from The Denver Post on a bus trip to Amache, the WWII internment camp in southeast Colorado. The result this morning is a powerful, well-written A-1 -- front page -- story by Jordan Dresser, with photos by Helen Richardson (kudos to the DenverPost.com staff, who added a couple of the extra photos from the print edition onto the online story). Last night Erin and I attended our first official conference event, because Erin wasn't feeling 100% during the day. We went to a reception for the conference at the home of Kazuaki Kubo, and mingled with Denver's Japanese American leadership, and the likes of former JANM Executive Director Irene Hirano (who recently married Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i, who wasn't at the reception but will be at the conference today for the veteran's salute), former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta and actor/JANM President George Takei.