Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | business
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January 30, 2018

Yesterday I was heartened to see the news that the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball team is going to stop using its blatantly racist caricature of an American Indian, "Chief Wahoo," on its uniforms starting the 2019 season. The leering cartoon character is so obnoxious that my wife Erin has included it for years in a workshop she gives on racist icons in American culture from Aunt Jemima to the Frito Bandito. But this being American in 2018, the philosophy of yin and yang means that for this bit of good news (the chief will be benched from uniforms but not from team merchandise) there is a balancing blast of bad news. That came at practically the same time, when I saw a post on Facebook sharing a godawful item from Walmart.com, a "Kids China Boy Costume," complete with a photo of a young white boy dressed in an inappropriate, culturally appropriate and inexcusably phony polyester suit with baggy pants, a Mandarin-collared shirt with Chinese-style knot buttons, and a matching hat with an attached queue of braided hair (which is sold separately to "improve your costume").
March 3, 2017

NOTE: I just heard today that Mas Nonaka, a member of the local Japanese American community who has cut hair at several iterations of his barbershop, Nonaka's, in and around Sakura Square since before the block was called Sakura Square, passed away. Nonaka's was where I first got my hair cut when my family moved to Denver from northern Virginia in...

May 12, 2016

NOTE: "Changing Season" will be screened during the Colorado Dragon Film Festival on Sunday, May 22 at 12 noon. Click here for full information about the festival. You’d think after a lifetime of growing and harvesting peaches, you’d get sick of eating them. But the Masumoto family still loves peaches and serves them up every way imaginable. David “Mas” Masumoto, 62,...

April 26, 2016

It's cold outside, but it's colder in Asahi Foods' refrigerated cutting room, where stacks of cardboard and Styrofoam boxes filled with giant fish await. The fish cutter is in early on a Saturday, wearing a white lab coat and heavy rubber gloves, various razor-sharp knives at the ready. Charlene Thai, a tiny woman in a similar lab coat, hovers nearby, watching...

March 22, 2016

I follow news from all over Asia. Primarily, I pay attention to all the news happening in Japan, from the goofy stuff to the serious headlines. But the world is so interconnected these days, that Japan can easily be affected by news developments -- political, economic, cultural -- in other parts of the globe, and especially Asia. The crazy dude...