Last week an over-eager reporter for WCCO, the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, aired a "gotcha" investigative piece about a local puppy mill that had apparently shipped dogs to a meat shop in New York City's Chinatown, where the intrepid reporter, James Schugel, got a clerk to say on the record that they do indeed sell dog as food. The only problem...
[caption id="attachment_3824" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="My father took this photo sometime in the 1950s when he was stationed in Japan with the US Army."][/caption] I panicked a couple of weeks ago when reports circulated that the Japanese government, in an effort to increase tourism, was going to give away 10,000 free trips. Then I was relieved to learn that though the Japan...
It took four decades before Japanese Americans received a formal apology for the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. The apology was part of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. The Chinese in America are still waiting for an apology from the top, 129 years after...
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising in China, which occurred on October 10, 1911. The date is celebrated annually as Double Ten Day in the Republic of China as the event that marked the end of dynastic rule and the close of the Qing Dynasty. That's the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China, or...
I find this magically powerful. It's a sweet rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs (and one I was just playing last night on the guitar). And it's also an expression of hope, community and rebirth from musicians in the Tohoku region of NE Japan, set amidst the cleaned-up but still devastated area hammered by the March 11 earthquake...
It’s not often that Denver receives visitors at the highest levels of the foreign diplomatic corps, but the 25th anniversary of the start of the Colorado-Yamagata Sister State relationship brought Ichiro Fujisaki, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to the United State of America, to the Brown Palace on August 6. Fujisaki gave a keynote speech during a luncheon hosted...
It struck me towards the end of the first day of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival that the clash of cultures I had just witnessed perfectly encapsulates why I’ve been a volunteer for this event since it was started in 2001.
(Full disclosure: Last year, my partner Erin Yoshimura took on the role as executive director of the festival, after volunteering from the beginning. I help out with media, the website and emceeing on the main stage.)
As the first day of the two-day event came to a close, the main stage lineup included a sampling of performers from the festival’s very popular Cultural Unity stage, a showcase of Colorado’s diverse hip-hop community.
The hip-hop sampler was fantastic – and showed why their stage is always so jammed that you can barely see through the crowds surrounding the tent, especially when the dancers are spinning on the ground.
The elevated main stage offered an eye-popping view for the audience, most of whom hadn’t gone by the Cultural Unity area before. The performance was a 20-minute introduction to the artistic principles and driving aesthetics of hip-hop culture, starting with naked rhythm from a conga drum, then showing the evolution of the rhythm into the DJ’s scratching with turntables and vinyl records.
Then the B-boys and B-girls assembled around the stage in a half-circle took turns strutting their stuff to the rhythmic riffing, spinning, flipping and contorting their bodies into unbelievably elastic poses and leaving the audience agog.
The set emphasized the multicultural appeal of hip-hop and pointed out how the performers on stage with him ran the ethnic gamut: Asian, Caucasian, African American, Latino.
Following the Cultural Unity sampler, which drew a huge crowd to the stage, most of the audience stayed for the Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai, a group of women from Okinawa who preserve the traditional dances of Okinawa, a culture that’s distinct from Japan.
Many thanks to FOX 31 weekend anchor Deborah Takahara and reporter Chris Jose, as well as the FOX 31 crew and Dragonboat Race Association of Colorado (DRACO) members who manned the dragon boat for this shoot on a hot summer day! My wife Erin is the executive director for the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival. We volunteered for the first seven years...