Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | ja
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July 21, 2017

The historical story of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II is still not well-known in mainstream American culture and literature. When it comes to books, there are only a handful of books that are based on JAs' wartime experience. After the groundbreaking, angry "No-No Boy" by John Okada in 1957, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's "Farewell to Manazanar" was the...

January 22, 2017

Most books about Japanese Americans focus on the West Coast because that's where Japanese first arrived and settled on the US mainland. So few well-known books tell the stories of Japanese as they crossed the country and decided to live in the mountains, or the midwest, or the northeast or the south. Yet I know of communities of JAs in New...

April 21, 2010

Erin and I are thrilled to announce the next call in our visualizAsian.com AAPI Empowerment Series, with Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara, whose fourth Mas Arai mystery, "Blood Hina," was recently released. The Edgars, by the way, are the prestigious annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the best in mystery writing. I fell in love with Hirahara's ability to effortlessly capture...

September 9, 2009

Tamlyn TomitaErin and I are taking September off from doing interviews for visualizAsian.com, our series of live conversations with leading Asian American Pacific Islanders. But we're kicking off October with a star: Tamlyn Tomita, whose inspirational career as an actor spans movies, television and the stage, and whose leadership and activism spans the Japanese American and Asian American Pacific Islander communities. Our conversation with Tamlyn Tomita will be on Tuesday, October 6 at 6 pm Pacific Time (7 pm MT, 8 pm CT and 9 pm ET) is archived as an MP3 and is available for download for a limited time. When we thought of starting visualizAsian.com, Tamlyn was the first person we thought of to interview, because of her prominence and passion, and because we'd met her on the set of "Only the Brave," Lane Nishikawa's powerful movie about the Japanese American soldiers of the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team. She was funny, approachable, salty and very real. I have a very vivid memory of her during the filming, taking a break between scenes by sitting in her pickup truck (this was a low-budget production -- no trailers for the stars). She was yelling and screaming and so animated we thought something was wrong. It turned out she's a huge LA Lakers fan, and was listening to the playoff game in progress. Last year, we saw her again at the Democratic National Convention, when I was one of the emcees at an APIA Vote Gala along with Tomita and Joie Chen, formerly of CNN. She's a passionate, exciting and entertaining public speaker, and I've since seen her on video (just search YouTube) giving lots of speeches and serving as an emcee on many Japanese American and Asian American community events.
August 7, 2009

Attorney Dale MinamiThe next interview scheduled for Erin and my visualizAsian.com project is one close to our hearts. The free, live interview on Tuesday, August 25 at 6 PM PT (9 PM ET) will be with with Japanese American attorney Dale Minami. Dale is a rock star within the AAPI community -- in fact, the entire U.S. legal community -- as the lead attorney in Korematsu v United States, the landmark case that cleared the name of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who resisted being sent to internment camps during WWII and was sent to prison. A 1944 U.S. Supreme Court's decision established the constitutionality of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Dale and a team of young pro-bono lawyers took on the case and in 1983, got Korematsu's conviction overturned. He's most famous for the Korematsu case, which he won on a writ of coram nobis, a legal tactic that forced the court to admit that an error of "fundamental character" had been made in Korematsu's conviction.
Here's a must-see video about Dale made for an award ceremony when he received the UC-Berkeley law school's highest honor:
But Dale has been fighting for the AAPI community all his career. He filed the first class-action lawsuit over employment by AAPIs on behalf of AAPIs with United Pilipinos for Affirmative Action v. California Blue Shield, and he helped the Spokane chapter of the JACL take on Washington State University with a class action suit to establish an Asian American Studies program. He also led a fight against UCLA over tenure that was denied an Asian American professor that revealed the layers of discrimination in the academic community.
December 4, 2008

Consul General of Japan in Colorado, Kazuaki Kubo, left, and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, right, congratulate Judge Kerry Hada on his appointment at a ceremony on Dec. 3. When Denver County Court Judge Melvin Okamoto announced earlier this year that he was retiring after two decades on the bench, the legal community offered up a handful of qualified candidates to take...

September 24, 2008

You read it correctly: MTV is looking for a host for a new Japanese Game Show to be produced here in the U.S. They're casting around for a hip young Asian American dude. here are the details, copied from an email I was sent by an MTV casting producer for series development: "MTV is searching for a host for a fun,...

July 17, 2008

It's been a couple of weeks since the Japanese American National Museum's national conference was held in Denver. Sorting through the many bits of video I took over the conference, which ran July 3-6, my favorite parts were the tribute to JA veterans on the Fourth of July, and the July 6 bus tour to Amache, the internment camp in southeast Colorado. The conference brought a bevy of famous and not-so famous speakers and panelists (I moderated a panel on Hapas, mixed-race Americans who are the future of the JA community) to Denver's nice new Hyatt right by the nice new Convention Center. The famous included the likes of actor George Takei, a superstar in the JA pantheon; Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawai'i), a Medal of Honor World War II veteran of the all-JA 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team; Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), who as a baby was interned at Amache with his family; former Congressman and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta; JA leaders and activists such as John Tateishi and Dale Minami; authors including mystery novelist Naomi Hirahara; Cynthia Kadohata, who writes books for pre-teens; and Uma Krishnaswami, who writes multicultural children's books from a South Asian perspective. The conference, which had the awkward and ungainly title but righteous theme of "Whose America? Who's American?," also brought more than 800 attendees and volunteers for the four-day span, meeting and greeting and learning about the history, present and future of not only Japanese Americans but also of Americans in general. One of the noteworthy speakers was Anan Ameri, the director of the Arab American National Museum, who spoke at a Plenary Session alongside JA scholars about internment, civil rights and the question of American identity posed in the conference title.