Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | asian american
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May 30, 2005

Post / Gil Asakawa
Real sushi, from the source: a bento box at a sushi restaurant in Sapporo.
I'm in the middle of a two-week trip to Japan, and it's been a fascinating visit. I was born here in Tokyo (an Army brat -- my dad, a Nisei from Hawaii, was stationed here and met my mom during the Korean war) and moved to the states when I was 8. But as an adult, I've only been in Japan twice -- in 1994 and 1995. This time it's for a family trip, and I'm traveling with my mom. Here are some observations:
April 22, 2005

11:00 a.m. Here I sit in my rental car, mere yards from the water. I'm waiting for the Bainbridge Island Ferry in Seattle -- I missed the last one by just seconds and the next one leaves in an hour. Bainbridge Island is the place captured poetically in the book and movie, "Snow Falling on Cedars" (which means, come to think of it, that it snows in Seattle, at least sometimes).
April 12, 2005

I never got the attraction of cigarette smokers who roll their own smokes. Looks like a pain in the butt to me -- har, I made a punny! But then, I never got the attraction of cigarette smoking anyway. But these days I'm into "rolling my own" when it comes to tea... green tea, that is.
December 6, 2004

We're making great headway in the United States in getting public names changed when they are reflections of an older era when racially charged terms were considered acceptable, or at least, not controversial.

October 18, 2004

Thank you very much, Michelle Malkin. Thanks a bunch for writing your book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror." Thanks for trying to prove that not only was putting Japanese Americans into U.S. concentration camps during World War II the right thing to do, but also urging that the United States use racial profiling as a tool today, against Muslims.
August 23, 2004

Samurai are big in Western pop culture these days, what with Tom Cruise's hit "The Last Samurai" and of course, Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies.
July 18, 2004

You'd think in the 21st century, that racial epithets would be so old-fashioned that anyone using them would be laughed out of the country.

But no, that's not the case. At issue today, as it has been for decades, is the use of the word "Jap" to describe a person or thing that's Japanese or Japanese American.

Amazingly, there have been a couple of instances of "Jap" in the media in recent weeks.