Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | cdbf
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July 15, 2013

montbellodrumline-vidcap It was at Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock's suggestion that the nine members of the Montbello High School Drum Line got the chance of a lifetime -- to take the second historic flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner on United Airline's new direct flight between Denver and Tokyo. The students raised money for the trip with the help of sponsors, and they performed their synchronized drumming at the U.S. Ambassador's home in Tokyo, and several times in Takayama, Denver's sister city. The news report below is a sample of a half-hour special that airs this Friday, July 19 at 9:30 on KDVR Fox31. These students were cultural ambassadors for Colorado in Japan. So the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival is proud to introduce the Montbello High School Drum Line as one of the highlights of this year's Opening Ceremony. The Opening Ceremony, which begins at 10 am on Saturday, July 27, also includes a spiritual Eye-Dotting Ceremony with chanting Buddhist monks to awaken the spirit of the dragon boats; a dynamic Dragon Dance; and an Olympics-style Team Parade. The Drum Line will get the chance to perform in front of Mayor Hancock, who will speak during the ceremony.
August 2, 2011

Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai at CDBF 2011It 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.
July 12, 2011

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...

June 21, 2011

It looks easy -- lining up and following the movements of the little old ladies who have been doing it all their lives. But it's hard work, and I work up a sweat almost immediately during Obon practice at the Denver Buddhist Temple gym. I didn't grow up dancing Obon every summer like many Japanese Americans. Wherever you find JA communities, you'll find summertime festivals where people gather to dance to old-style Japanese folksongs in circular formations, where they watch a group of master dancers in the small circle in the middle, and mimic every move. My wife Erin, who grew up with Obon every year during Denver's Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, describes it perfectly as "Japanese line dancing -- in a circle." The dancing will take over Lawrence Street during the 40th Annual Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend on Saturday night at Sakura Square. The Obon -- or Bon Odori, which is the actual term for the dances -- follows a full day of performances and demonstrations, vendors and food served up by the Buddhist Temple (Erin and her mom and I volunteer each year to sell manju, or Japanese pastries, inside the gym). The dancing is festive and fun, but the purpose is serious: Obon is a traditional Buddhist custom that pays tribute to the deceased -- especially to one's ancestors.
June 5, 2009

The Asakawa family circa 1960 in Hokkaido, Japan: (from left) George, Gary, Gil and Junko (stranger in front). I was born in Japan, so I can say this with a straight face: I'm becoming a born-again Japanese, and it's kinda fun. For years now, Erin and I have thought of ourselves as Asian American first, and Japanese American second. Mostly, it's because we're interested in and feel a kinship with other Asian Americans, whether their heritage is Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Hmong, Indian, Filipino, whatever. We certainly have immersed ourselves in the local Asian American Pacific Islander community, through being involved in events such as the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, the AAPI Heritage Month Community celebration, the (now defunct) Aurora Asian Film Festival, Miss Asian American Colorado Leadership Program, Asian American Journalists Association and others. Erin spent six months last year serving as editor of the feisty little local pan-Asian magazine, Asian Avenue. It's wonderful to feel a part of a larger community within which we share lots of cultural values and appreciate the various cuisines. We've become friends with and learned about Asians across many borders, and generations from immigrant gens to very Americanized. It's also partly because the Japanese community in Denver is small, and insular, and tribal, and ... well, small. It's not like LA or San Francisco or Seattle or New York, where there are lots and lots of JAs to hang with, as well as tons more AAPIs in general. We just felt too constricted sometimes by the local community. But lately, I've found myself being among Japanese, and enjoying it.
May 4, 2009

A Japanese American festival in Seabrook, NJ where the community performs a traditional Japanese obon dance It's May. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I wonder, though, if this celebration of our heritage is an idea whose time has passed. I'm glad that we have our month every year, but I'm worried that we're emphasizing the wrong things year after year. Erin and I are starting to feel that APA Heritage Month may be counter-productive. The Pacific Citizen published a well-written piece last week, "Time to Rethink Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?" and I agree, it's time to re-think the tradition even though it's only 31 years old. Last year, I wrote about how a 10-year-old Denver event, an Asian community celebration held in downtown Denver every May, needed to evolve from just Asians performing for other Asians. It was a useful educational display back when our many communities stayed cloistered and Japanese didn't know much about Vietnamese, and Vietnamese didn't know much about Filipinos, and Filipinos didn't know much about Cambodians and Cambodians didn't know much about Koreans... you get the idea. But today, with especially young people mixing a lot more outside their own communities, it seems like a closed celebration, like preaching to the choir about the richness of our heritage. If you attend the annual event, you've seen many of the same performers year after year. Even if the audience was expanded outside the Asian community, though, to the wider non-Asian population, I wonder if that would be good or bad for Asian Americans.