I can't think of a good reason for me to want to live in Arizona. Via Yahoo, here's news that a judge has ruled that the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American Studies course violates state law because it's "designed primarily for one ethnic group, promoting racial resentment and advocating ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals." Part...
UPDATE DEC. 13: NBC Nightly News reported last night that one of the women in the photo above has come forward, and said that the photo was not taken on Dec. 7, as has commonly been captioned every time it's been published for decades. Instead, Katherine Lowe, who's now 96 and still living in Honolulu, says she was at church...
Colorado's Laotian community woke up yesterday to a terrible tragedy: The morning news shows kept showing breaking news footage from their helicopters circling over a raging fire in Westminster, off 108th and Wadsworth. The Lao Buddhist Temple of Colorado was burning down, the flames and smoke engulfing the building in less than half an hour as firefighters poured water from...
It's such a cliche to point out that Japan is a contrast of old and new traditional and modern, but the comparison keeps coming up because it's true, and is a part of the country's cultural DNA. It would be a surprise not to see some people -- women, men, old, young, children -- dressed in traditional kimono at...
Here are complete day-by-day photo albums of our trip to Japan on Facebook (you don't need a Facebook account to see them, but you'll need to log in to Facebook to share or post a comment). Many of the photos (like the food shots, for instance) will be included in individual blog posts. DAY 1 - Flight to Japan, arrive in...
I recently returned from a fantastic trip to Japan, with my wife Erin Yoshimura and my mom. We flew first to Sapporo in the northern island of Hokkaido, where one of my uncles lives, and then traveled to Nemuro, my mom's hometown on the easternmost tip of Hokkaido, where another uncle lives. Then we flew down to Tokyo for a...
[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's a fact: The 10 concentration camps built during World War II to imprison 120,000 people of Japanese descent -- more than half U.S.-born and therefore American citizens, and most of them mere children -- were all thrown together in godforsaken corners of the country. No offense to people who live near the sites of these former "relocation centers" (a...
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Read More