Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | japanese american
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April 30, 2013

the-red-kimonoFor a long time, there were painfully few novels that were about the experience of Japanese Americans who were put into concentration camps during World War II. “Farewell to Manzanar,” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, which was published in 1973, stood alone, unless you counted the powerful post-war story of John Okada’s 1957 classic, “No-No Boy.” In recent years, there have been more fictional works set during internment, most notably David Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars” but also Julie Otsuka’s “When the Emperor Was Divine,” Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s “Why She Left Us,” K.P. Kollenborn’s “Eyes Behind Belligerence” and even a children’s book, “Baseball Saved Us” by Ken Mochizuki and and Dom Lee. And now, there’s “The Red Kimono,” a terrific novel by Jan Morrill and published by the University of Arkansas Press. Morrill, who is hapa (her mother was interned during the war) and who lives in Arkansas, writes, as they say, about what she knows. “The Red Kimono” is chockfull of finely observed details that draw the reader into the world of a Japanese American family in Berkeley, California at the start of World War II. Through thorough historical research and her own knowledge and family experiences, Morrill captures what life was like during that era, and also accurately captures the values that informed Japanese Americans as their lives were so tragically disrupted. The story is told through the experiences of three young people who were shaped by the events that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor: Nine-year-old Sachiko Kimura and her 17-year-old brother Nobu, and Nobu’s friend Terrence Harris, a young African American schoolmate. The power of “The Red Kimono” is in its interweaving of racial issues that run deeper than the unjust imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent. Morrill sets the internment narrative on its edge by exploring the complex relationships of white/black/Asian/southern values clashing amidst the chaotic social backdrop of the war.
December 21, 2012

Mmmmm. Chinese food. Just thinking about Lao Wang Noodle House in Denver, which I swear serves the best dumplings in the universe (it's where the photo above was taken) gets my mouth watering. It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall tucked into a tiny strip mall along the South Federal Asian strip of mostly Vietnamese eateries. It's run by an elderly couple who...

December 6, 2012

I've read about, and talked about, and written about the internment of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, so much that in a weird way, I've come to think of internment as a clinical, historical event. But once in a while, I'm reminded of the human scale of the tragedy, and feel the pain personally, of...

August 22, 2012

George Takei is a pleasure to watch and listen to any time. This hour-long interview on TheLip.tv's "Media Mahem" web show is especially fun because it covers a lot of ground, and Takei is funny and relaxed and open, discussing his media incarnation as a gay community icon, his work with Howard Stern, his "feud" with William Shatner, being Japanese...

May 23, 2011

I had the pleasure in April of giving a presentation, "From Newsprint to New Media: The Evolving Role of Nikkei Newspaper," followed by a panel which I moderated, looking at the vibrant history of Japanese community newspapers. The program, which was organized by Discover Nikkei, was held at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Discover Nikkei is a project of JANM, and hosts its own very cool website that showcases the Nikkei experience from people of Japanese descent all over the world. Like the newspaper industry in general across the U.S., publications that serve Japanese communities -- both Japanese-speaking and English-speaking Japanese Americans -- have suffered from tough economic times, falling advertising dollars and declining readership. But also like the rest of the industry, Nikkei newspapers are evolving to suit the needs of the future. That's the framework I wanted to establish in my presentation, which I've embedded above. I followed my talk with brief introductions by four panelists describing their history and various current approaches to Nikkei media, and then a panel discussion about what's in store for the future. I've embedded videos of the entire program below, which was shot, edited and assembled by the Discover Nikkei staff as an album of video clips on this page.
August 18, 2010

roxana saberiErin and I took a summer hiatus, but visualizAsian.com is back, and proud to kick off a new season of interviews with a conversation with Iranian-Japanese American journalist Roxana Saberi, whose recent book, "Between Two Worlds," chronicles the harrowing experience of being imprisoned, charged with espionage and sentenced to eight years in a notorious Iranian prison before being released after five months in May 2009. We'll be talking to Roxana on Tuesday, August 31 at 6 pm PT (9 pm ET) via phone and web --You've missed the live interview, but for a limited time, you can still join in the conversation by registering and listening to the archived MP3 recording.. Roxana recently spoke about her ordeal at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, and I sat in on the panel. She captivated the audience with her story of choosing to be a journalist in a dangerous political hotspot, of her unexpected capture and fear and frustration at her situation, the flashes of humane treatment she received from some of her guards, and even the humorous moments (in hindsight) over her efforts to give surreptitious messages to her boyfriend and family. She captures all of this and more in compelling prose in "Between Two World," and she'll be reading passages from it during our conversation.
December 15, 2009

Photograph of Yoshiaki Noguchi when he was on the Polytechnic High School 1940 track team, courtesy of the Noguchi family.This past summer, the University of California announced it would award diplomas to Japanese Americans who had been students at one of the school's four campuses at the time, but had their education disrupted by World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. About 700 students of Japanese ancestry were enrolled at the University of California at the time of internment, when they and their families were uprooted and sent to concentration camps scattered within barren parts of the American interior. Some graduated that year, in 1942, with the aid of sympathetic faculty and administrators. Some returned to graduate after the War. And some eventually obtained degrees at other universities. But many never completed their educations. So the Cal system did the right thing and decided to award these students honorary diplomas. Out of the 700, about 400 are set to receive honorary degrees this winter and next spring. The Associated Press sent out a perfunctory, four-paragraph news article about the diplomas over its wire service, which no doubt many news outlets picked up and published. But the real story that needs to be shared is the human one, and some news outlets have been tracking down former students and capturing their quotes. I was particularly moved by one story where the student is no longer able to give a quote. At UC-Berkeley last weekend, 42 former students received their degrees, and the event was captured in an eloquent and moving article, "Emotional day as UC-Berkeley awards honorary degrees to former internees," written by Sharon Noguchi, a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. Her story does what few newspaper journalists can accomplish: It balances accurate, unbiased reporting with a poignant personal narrative. It turns out that her father, Yoshiaki Noguchi (photo at top as a track athlete at Polytechnic High School in 1940, courtesy of the Noguchi family), was one of those students who never got to graduate from UC-Berkeley. His degree was accepted by her mother, because he passed away more than 20 years ago, without even hearing the U.S. government's official apology for internment which was passed by Congress in 1988.
December 5, 2009

http://discovernikkei.org http://iamkoreanamerican.com/ Every once in a while, people ask me about the name of my blog, because they only hear the word "Nikkei" when it's used for the Japanese stock exchange. "Nikkei" is also so the word used to describe people of Japanese ancestry outside of Japan. I'm a Nikkei-jin, or Nikkei person. When my blog first started out in the 1990s as a column in Denver's weekly Japanese community newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Jiho, its publishers, Eiichi and Yoriko Imada, suggested I call the column "Nikkei View" since it reflected my perspective on pop culture and politics. The name stuck. In the years since, I've come across "Nikkei" a few times as a term for who I am -- mostly on research projects such as the International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10 countries and 14 participating institutions including the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in LA. There are organizations that use the term, such as the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and the blog "Nikkei Ancestry." Now there's another "Nikkei" site, which is republishing some of my babbling from this blog. In 2005, JANM launched Discover Nikkei, which is a gathering place for stories about Nikkei-jin from all over the globe, not just Japanese Americans but also Japanese Peruvians and Japanese Brazilians (two countries that have very large Nikkei populations), and every other country, as well as mixed-race people of Japanese ancestry.