Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | banana
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June 21, 2012

[caption id="attachment_4449" align="alignleft" width="300"] Jane Lui will be performing at the Opening Reception and Awards Ceremony for V3con.[/caption] We're deep in the planning process for V3, the Asian American Digital Media Conference, scheduled for Aug. 25 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles with an Opening Night Reception and Awards ceremony on Friday, Aug. 24 at the Pacific Asia...

January 6, 2011

Banana 2 is scheduled for Feb. 26 in LA The Banana 2 conference of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers is now officially set for Saturday, February 26 at CBS Studios in Studio City, Calif. If you haven't heard of Banana, you can check out my blog post and photos from the first Banana gathering, which was an informal affair in late 2009. It was mostly one very large panel on the USC campus in LA, with most of us meeting up for dinner afterwards near Little Tokyo. This year's Banana will be an all-day conference with a handful of panels and breakout sessions, as well as a reception afterwards with entertainment (more details to come). And it'll be held at CBS Studios in Studio City, with (I think) the reception planned for a New York street set for "CSI:New York." Cool, huh? I'm organizing a panel titled "Bananas, Twinkies, Coconuts & more: The rainbow of the AAPI blogosphere." Here's a draft description: The Asian American blogosphere (as represented in the richness of Banana's panels) covers a lot of ground, from the political to the whimsical, from foodies to Asian pop fanatics to bloggers that focus on specific communities. AAPI blogs can be about the Asian experience or exclusively about the Asian American experience.There are even blogs by Asian Americans that have nothing to do with Asian American culture, values or identity. What does it mean to be an Asian American blogger? Other panels include:
November 22, 2009

Gil & Erin with our new "daughters," Emily & Suzanne of AbsolutelyFobulous.com @ Banana Erin and I just spent a great weekend in LA, and all day yesterday was the main event: We attended BANANA, the first-ever gathering of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers from across the country, and from Canada. It was kind of an ad-hoc event, organized in just two months and a little ragged on the execution side, but it was also exhilarating in many ways, and a pure pleasure to meet so many great people who make up the growing chorus of AAPI voices on the Internet. It felt at times like much more than just a conference or a get-together. It felt like the foundation of something that has a future, as if this event was ground zero where the spark was lit for a fire that could burn strong and bright for a long time. The event was organized by San Diego-based Lac Su, author of "I Love Yous Are for White People" (shown in the photo above) and LA-based filmmaker Steve Nguyen (third photo, below). Ironically, neither are bloggers, but as regular visitors of many AAPI blogs, they recognized that we've been building up momentum, and more and more Asian Americans (and Canadians!) are expressing ourselves online. They thought if we could all meet and share our passion and knowledge and learn more about each other and our areas of expertise, that we could harness our combined energy and make all our blogs better. I applaud their vision and the effort the two of them made, with help from friends at the University of Southern California, where BANANA was held, to pull off the event in such a short time. I bet they didn't expect that they'd have more than 20 panelists on stage, representing all different views and perspectives on the AAPI experience, along with 30 or so audience members -- some who were also bloggers -- who wanted to learn and ask questions and share their stories.
November 12, 2009

With a week before BANANA, the first-ever gathering of Asian American bloggers, I've been thinking about Nikkei View's role, or how I see my voice as part of the AAPI blogosphere. The beauty of the Internet and of blogging as an avenue for self-expression, is that we can develop not just one mighty chorus of an Asian American voice, but that we can cultivate many, many disparate voices, all with different tones and characters. It's like jazz -- not everyone will play the melody; many prefer to play harmonies, or like the beboppers of old, turn the melody inside out. Some will come up with atonal free jazz; some will play safe and mainstream instrumental soft rock; some are suited for taking fiery, flying solos while others will be content keeping up the steady rhythm that allows the soloists to take off. Man, I didn't think I'd stretch the metaphor quite so far.... but it kinda works. My point is, I think of myself as a bridge in that I will write about very mainstream topics like a traditional dance concert, and then get all up in arms about racism or internment or whatever.
October 30, 2009

The Banana conference of Asian American bloggers will be held Nov. 21, 2009 in Los Angeles. When I first started the Nikkei View as a weekly column in 1998 that ran in a Denver Japanese community newspaper (now gone), I posted the columns on my nikkeiview.com website. I wrote as a way of telling the world how I saw pop culture and politics through my Japanese American experience. In the decade since then, I've become involved in the larger Asian American Pacific Islander community, and converted the old website to this here blog. At the time, I don't think there were a lot of Asian Americans writing stuff on the web like I was. There may have been, but I didn't reach out to find them. There were columnists who'd paved the way in traditional media (newspapers), like the late Bill Hosokawa, whose footsteps I followed early on, and Emil Guillermo of AsianWeek. The cool magazine Giant Robot launched back in 1994. The terrific Pacific Citizen newspaper had been publishing for decades, but didn't have a website until a few years ago. But there weren't a lot of columns being posted online back in the day. Now, the blogosphere allows for many voices from the AAPI community -- the long list in my blogroll on the right of this page is always growing as I find new blogs to add -- and a couple of them have risen to national prominence. So Erin and I are planning to participate in a first-ever gathering of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers called BANANA, Nov. 21 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (it's a link to a Facebook page). It's being organized by Lac Su, the author of the terrific memoir "I Love Yous Are for White People," who ironically is not a blogger. (We'll be interviewing Lac Su on Nov. 17 for visualizAsian.com.) BANANA will hopefully establish once and for all that there's an emerging chorus of voices that's distinctly Asian American, that's rooted in many Asian ethnic heritages, but is all tied together by shared experiences and values from living in, being born in and growing up in, these United States of America. Not all of the bloggers I mention below will be at the BANANA event (see Joz's comment below), but a couple of these voices have even developed a national audience outside the AAPI population: