Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | asian american
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July 3, 2008

The JANM conference that starts today in Denver has a whole bunch of interesting and important panels, workshops and discussions. I'm moderating one on Saturday, about Hapas -- mixed-race Asian Americans. But some of the most powerful parts of the conference will be the ones that bring people together with their past. Today and Sunday, caravans of buses will be taking conference attendees to southeast Colorado, to the Amache concentration camp near the town of Granada (the official name of the camp was Granada Relocation Center) where more than 7,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Erin and I will be hosting one of the buses on Sunday. The day will begin at 6am and we'll return in the evening -- the drive to the camp takes about 3 1/2 hours through desolate eastern plains terrain. I'll blog about the trip afterwards, but I wanted to share a couple of links about Amache:
July 1, 2008

Considering that many -- if not most -- Asians are allergic to alcohol, it's amazing how much the culture of alcohol is part of society in Japan. I guess it's the same all over the world, but since I'm very allergic to alcohol, I'm just out of the loop when it comes to booze. You're probably familiar with the nightly practice of businessmen going out with their fellow "salarymen" after work and dining and drinking themselves into a stupor before trudging home to the families they hardly see. I can sip half a glass of beer and I turn bright red and splotchy, my eyes glow in the dark and I get dizzy as hell. It was hard to go out drinking in high school when my face gave myself away whenever I stumbled home and mom was up waiting for me. I guess if I were with co-workers who were all equally red, I wouldn't have been so self-conscious. Anyway, I recently came across what looked like a cool soft drink at Pacific Mercantile, the Japanese grocery store in downtown Denver, and I realized that Japan's alcohol culture starts earlier than I thought, and in insidious ways. I saw a display for bottles of a drink called "Kodomo no Nomimono," with a cute retro 1930s illustration of a child on the label, and the words, which translate as "Children's Drink" written out in hiragana, the simplified alphabet that's familiar to Japanese school kids. The bottles were on sale -- buy one, get one free -- so I bought one to try, and got one for my friend Jordan, the "Energy Examiner" for Examiner.com. He wrote about Kodomo no Nomimono, and found to his shock that the stuff is marketed as a beer for kids by its manufacturer, Sangaria, the makers of the popular lemonade-flavored pop, Ramune.
June 29, 2008

The Japanese American National Museum is sponsoring a conference in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend, called "Whose America? Who's American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice." Erin and I are helping out the conference, and one of Erin's main projects has been contacting and inviting Colorado Japanese American veterans to the conference's Welcome Ceremony on July 4, during which the vets will be honored for their service. Many of them are elderly veterans of the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, who fought in Europe during WWII even though many of them had family members living behind barbed wire in U.S. concentration camps. These men, as well as their lesser-known Pacific campaign counterparts, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) who fought in the Pacific, for the country that imprisoned them at the start of the war just to prove their patriotism, remain today the most highly-decorated combat unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. In one celebrated battle, the men of the 442nd, whose motto was "Go for Broke!," suffered over 800 casualties to save 211 men of a Texas "Lost Battalion" in the Vosges mountains of France towards the end of the war. It should be a moving tribute to these men, and the veterans will include both Hawai'i Sen. Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm as a member of the 442nd, and former Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who served in the Army during the 1950s. They'll join over two dozen Colorado veterans as well as JA veterans from all over the country who are attending the conference.
June 21, 2008

Growing up, I didn't think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it's amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans -- almost always as "bad guys." Seeing these movies today, you could tell they're not ethnic actors, and could almost see the smudges from the makeup smeared over their faces and hands. It wasn't any more sophisticated than the blackface makeup white actors wore to play African American roles in silent movies or the early talkies, wide-eyed, shiny black visages like masks, singing about "mammy." You don't see that any more, at least, not with blacks and Latinos. Hollywood also has a long and tiresome tradition of "yellowface" -- having Caucasian actors portray ethnic Asian roles. And, unfortunately, you can still see that on the big screen today. The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies. Even the great Katharine Hepburn, one of my favorite actresses, put on yellowface, to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie "Dragon Seed."
June 21, 2008

The Boulder Daily Camera today ran a front-page story about the recent study about Asian Americans and the model minority myth. The study found that because Asians are not all high-achieving academic wiz-kids, and that the diversity of the Asian communities (we're not just Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but also Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and so on) and the range of generations from first-generation immigrants with poor English skills to fourth, fifth or sixth generations of Americans, leads to a reality that's less modeled and more uneven. Not all Asian Americans go into the top Ivy-League schools, either: a growing number is opting to go to community colleges instead of major universities. The article quotes CU professor Daryl Maeda, an assistant professor of ethnic studies:
Another part of the “model minority myth” — that Asian-American students should perform well in science, technology, engineering and math fields — also can be unfair to students, Maeda said. “Some are great at music or English,” Maeda said. “And if they don’t live up to the model minority myth it puts an extra pressure on them, giving them the idea that they somehow aren’t good enough in their endeavors.”
June 18, 2008

It's been a couple of weeks, but congratulations are in order for Amanda Igaki, the winner of the "Miss Asian American Colorado" pageant held in Denver May 31. Now, before you recoil at the thought of a beauty pageant, rest assured that this pageant, organized by a crew of young people led by the energetic and entrepreneurial Annie Guo, whose family publishes Asian Avenue Magazine, was not a traditional beauty pageant. The most obvious proof that this wasn't a typical pageant was the lack of a swimsuit competition. In fact, although Igaki was crowned "Miss Asian American Colorado" at the end of the four-hour event (which felt much shorter because it was so interesting), it didn't feel like a competition between the 26 contestants at all. These women had become close friends, like a small, tight sorority.
June 17, 2008

Update 18 June: News media are reporting Tiger Woods will miss the rest of this year's golf season because he needs more surgery on his left knee. That's a big bummer, but not surprising, given how he grimaced after many of his tee-offs. I almost winced with empathy pain as he twisted his knee each time. Everyone's favorite hapa/Asian American, Tiger Woods, is important enough news to accomplish a pretty impressive feat. I'm not just talkin' clinching the U.S. Open Championship in a nail-biting last round and sudden death match against Rocco Mediate. I'm talkin' about pushing up the publication date of one of the most popular magazines in the country, Sports Illustrated. MinOnline.com reports that the July 23 issue of the mag, which had been scheduled to hit the newsstands with a Woods cover on Wednesday, was rushed to the printers early, and is already out, one day after the golf superstar's victory.
June 15, 2008

Here's a blog post I just came cross, from AdAge.com, that adds to the dialogue on the use of the word "uppity" to describe African Americans. Pepper Miller points out that some African Americans take the use of "elitist" to describe Barack Obama as code for "uppity":
As another example, WVON-AM Chicago talk-show host Perri Small nailed the rationale for black frustration over charges of Sen. Obama's "elitist" attitude during an appearance on CNN last month. Ms. Small explained that many in the black community took "elitist" to mean "uppity," a particularly troublesome translation as the term "uppity" dates back to pre-Civil Rights and the Jim Crow era. Despite progress in the black community, "uppity" continues to be perceived as code for blacks who do not "stay their place."