How cool is this? The March 16 visualizAsian.com show is going to be a conversation with Eric Nakamura, the owner, publisher and co-editor of Giant Robot magazine. Our call with Eric will be at 6 pm PT on Tuesday, March 16!
From movie stars, musicians, and skate-boarders to toys, technology, and history, Giant Robot magazine covers cool aspects of Asian and Asian-American pop culture. Paving the way for less knowledgeable media outlets, Eric put the spotlight on Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li years before they were in mainstream America’s vocabulary.
Although Giant Robot has an Asian pop culture focus, it has earned a loyal readership of all colors. The readers are about half-Asian and half-not.
Under Eric’s leadership the magazine consistently has featured superior editorial content, innovative design, and a no-holds-barred attitude, garnering Giant Robot notoriety across a diverse crowd ranging from high schoolers to senior citizens. The magazine’s graphic sensibility has featured a slew of artists who have gone on to fame in the art world.
The magazine’s popularity even led to the opening of Giant Robot retail stores, selling the kinds of cool products that the magazine writes about. [Read more →]
Three years ago this week, a student news website at the University of Colorado sparked a firestorm of protest. The website posted a column by a student, Max Karson, which ineptly tried to address racism on the CU campus by poking fun at Asian stereotypes. The column, “If It’s War the Asians Want, It’s War They’ll Get,” stirred the Denver area’s Asian and Asian American communities to organize and demand changes at the University. The timing was unfortunate, because it ran on Feb. 18, just a day before the 2008 Day of Remembrance, when Japanese Americans mark the signing of Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps during World War II. The column joked about “locking up” all Asians.
The area’s Asian communities weren’t amused, and rallied quickly to protest. So did student organizations not just at CU, but at the states other universities. National Asian American and civil rights organizations sent letters of protest to the Campus Press, but to the CU administration.
In the two years since, there haven’t been a lot of concrete changes at CU in general over racial issues as far as many students can see, but there have been lots of changes at the Campus Press. Its faculty advisor, Amy Herdy, a former colleague of mine at The Denver Post, was an early target of protesters but it turned out the rules for the website prevented her from having editorial control. It’s a student-run website. But since then, Herdy and the students who run the website have been busy rebuilding the class’s reputation, upgrading its commitment to quality journalism, and have worked hard to avoid ever allowing something like the “War Against Asians” column from bubbling up again. [Read more →]
We’ve taken several months off, but Erin and I are ready to resume our series of interviews with inspirational Asian Americans for 2010. We’re especially proud to be able to speak with Dan Kuramoto, one of the founding members of the fusion jazz group Hiroshima, because the group has been nominated twice for a Grammy award! We’ll be speaking with Dan on Tuesday, March 2 at 6 pm PT (9 pm ET). You can register now for the call and submit questions for Dan on our webcast page.
Only a few Asian Americans have been nominated for a Grammy Award over the years, and Hiroshima has managed the feat twice — once in 1980 for “Winds of Change,” a track off the groups second album, “Odori.” Hiroshima was nominated again for their latest album “Legacy,” a collection of re-recordings of songs from the band’s first ten years together. The band has been together for over 30 years, and have become an institution on the fusion jazz and R&B scene. [Read more →]
As a kid in Japan, we always celebrated New Year’s Day, or Oshougatsu, on January 1, just like in the United States, but with different traditions than in America. Japanese clean the house like crazy leading up to the day, and New Year’s Eve isn’t the big party that it is in the U.S. Instead, New Year’s Day is more important, with a family feast featuring special dishes that are made just for the day (called “osechi ryori“). For days everyone visit family and friends to start the year with a fresh slate.
We never celebrated “Chinese New Year.” Looking back, the January 1 New Year is another affectation of Japan’s fascination with the West: Until 1873, Japan celebrated the New Year at the start of the lunar calendar, along with most East Asian and Southeast Asian countries. But five years after the start of the “Meiji Restoration,” when the Japan opened up to the West and began embracing Western ways, the country changed the official date of its New Year to the Roman, or Grgeorian calendar.
In the U.S., most people call the Lunar New Year “Chinese” and it’s become a popular not-quite-holiday, a mid-winter blast of Chinese culture. But it’s not just a Chinese celebration. It may have spread through the influence of China, but the Lunar New Year is celebrated with different traditions in Korea (as Seollal), Vietnam (Tet), Tibet (Losar) and Mongolia (Tsagaan Sar). It’s also celebrated in countries with large ethnic Han Chinese populations, such as Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Macau, and in Chinese communities throughout the world.
In 2010, the start of the Lunar New Year falls on Valentine’s Day — Feb. 14 — and heralds the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac.
So, to ALL my Asian brothers and sisters everywhere, HAPPY NEW YEAR OF THE TIGER (and Valentine’s Day)!
Chalk this up in the victory column. Sometimes, just pointing out something that’s offensive can make a difference. Earlier this week, Asian American bloggers like 8Asians (where I borrowed the great graphic) and Slant Eye for the Round Eye, among others, pointed out that the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, had named a train line that runs to Doraville, home to a large Asian community, as the “Yellow Line.”
Does anyone need to point out that “yellow” has been used as a racial epithet against Asians for centuries?
Asians and Asian Americans took offense and the decision became an Internet meme for a few days. Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that MARTA has decided to change the rail line to the name that critics had suggested: The Gold Line.
MARTA CEO Beverly Scott, who made the decision said she’s still planning to meet today with members of Atlanta’s Asian community. Now, the meeting is sure to be much warmer than it would have been despite the winter weather crunching down on the region.
It’s nice to see that the voices of the Asian community can be heard when they’re organized and in unison. I bet some (non-Asian) folks are wondering what the big deal it, but you know what? There’s a rule about Intent and Impact that Erin teaches in her coaching and emotional intelligence trainings, which says it doesn’t matter if your intent was good, if someone takes away a negative impact from something you do, then you need to accept that it’s negative.
The management of MARTA did just that, and I applaud them for it.
The social media blog Mashable snagged a pretty cool interview with Hawai’ian ukulele maestro Jake Shimabukuro at the annual TED conference (TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and it’s a chi-chi invitation-only think-tank gathering of great minds) after his performance yesterday, which drew a standing ovation.
I’ve written about Shimabukuro before, and I’m glad he got to play in front of such an august audience. Good for him — I hope it sends him to superstardom status in all of pop music, not just ukulele fanatics.
I’m embedding both parts of the video interview, plus the very popular video of Jake creating new and amazing art out of the old George Harrison chestnut, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” There are tons of Jake Shimabukuro videos out there on YouTube. Check em out:
I downloaded my copy. You should too. Kina Grannis is letting you download a free copy of “Valentine,” the catchy folk-pop track that’s captured in the lyrical video above, as a preview of her new full-length album, “Stairwells,” which is available for pre-order. You can get a signed copy of the “Stairwells” CD, which officially releases on Feb. 25, for a mere $12. I pre-ordered. You should too.
Grannis, if you don’t know, is a talented hapa singer-songwriter whose prolific work is available on a YouTube channel that includes her hummable originals and tons of interesting covers. Back in 2008 I wrote about her when I stumbled upon and was enchanted by her breezy cover of “Sukiyaki.”
She’s part of a growing list of Asian American musicians who are making a mark on the mainstream pop scene.
Colorado music fans can get a taste of an up-and-coming Asian American indie band from Charlottesville, Virginia next week, when Tim Be Told comes through Colorado Springs and Denver during their national tour. Tim Be Told are alternative rockers led by a young, multi-talented Chinese American singer, songwriter and keyboard player named Tim Ouyang. The other members are Korean American guitarist Andrew Chae, Vietnamese American guitarist and backup vocalist Luan Nguyen, Filipino American drummer Jim Barredo and European and Native American bassist Parker Stanley.
Their sound is rooted in unabashed pop, with well-crafted melodies polished off with a shiny veneer of tight harmonies. You know the genre: think Maroon 5, and Denver’s own Fray. Ouyang brings a wide sonic palette to his songs, from simple, piano-based arrangements to full-on rockers. His voice cuts through even the densest wall of sound with an amazing clarity and power — you can imagine his soulful, gospel-drenched vocals taking the finals at American Idol, or the show-stopping spotlight in a Broadway production.
Ouyang hails from New Jersey and had already written dozens of songs by the time he was out of high school; Tim Be Told came together when the members were all students at the University of Virginia. They won the UVA Battle of the Bands, and have since become regulars playing the college circuit. The group released a debut album, “Getting By” in 2007, and they’ve recently released an EP, “From the Inside.” You can download the song “Analyze” from the new EP for free below.
You can catch the group during their Colorado swing on Feb. 9, 3pm at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Feb 10, 7pm at the Chinese Evangelical Church of Denver (1099 Newark Street in Aurora).
Here’s the band’s full upcoming schedule as they criss-cross the country (note that they’re back in Colorado to play at Denver University on May 12): [Read more →]
The interview is scheduled for Wednesday, February 24 at 6 pm PT (7 pm MT, 9 pm ET), and like our other talks, it’s a free call held over a conference line and webcast, so you can listen via phone (long distance charges may apply) or online (free). Just register for the call, and you can also submit questions both before and during the interview on the webcast page, and we’ll pass them along to Adam.
This is a good time to revisit Adam’s excellent biography of Ralph Carr, which was published in 2008. The paperback edition has just been released, and Day of Remembrance is coming up on February 19.
OK, you say, what’s Day of Remembrance, and who’s Ralph Carr, anyway? [Read more →]
Kate Agathon, a grad school instructor at Purdue University and producer for photographer William L. Snyder (who took the portrait above, which was used originally on AngryAsianMan.com in a profile of Kate), is taking on a big art project and she needs your help. She’s organizing a show called “ImaginAsian,” and inviting anyone who is interested in submitting artwork to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, to get the art by Feb. 28.
You don’t have to be an “arteest.” You just need to fit an image or statement about the Asian American experience into an 8 1/2×11″ space, and submit it with a mere $5 donation as an entry fee. The project is a fundraiser for Purdue’s Asian American studies department, which is just getting started.
The exhibit will be on display at the Tippecanoe Arts Federation in West Lafayette, Indiana, from April 2-May 9.
Agathon explains the concept very eloquently: [Read more →]
Like a lot of geeks and a lot of people in journalism, I paid close attention to the weeks of hype and rumors, and then the official announcement yesterday, of Apple’s potentially “game-changing” new tablet computer, the iPad. For weeks, the tech media have passed along rumor after rumor about the device and its features, but the most vexing of all rumors was the name. Blogs tracked down trademark filings and obscure documents and the main contenders for the name were “iSlate” and “iTablet.” At the last minute, “iPad” was proposed.
And during Apple’s hour-and-a-half media event unveiling the gadget, Steve Jobs immediately announced it would indeed be called the “iPad.”
Then I immediately thought, “Wow, I wonder how the Japanese are going to deal with this name?”
The iPod has been long-established in Japan as the premiere digital music player, as it is all over the world. I saw “i-pahd-do” everywhere in Tokyo, in shop windows and being used by music fans, with those iconic but crappy white earbuds.
Now comes the iPad. And I predict there will be some major consumer confusion stirred up in Japan. [Read more →]
I saw this on Angry Asian Man and it made me smile, both because Erin and I really enjoy the Fox series “Glee!” and because it’s good to see that Akebono, the sumo wrestler who sings “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the commercial, is still a star with drawing power in Japan.
You might notice that for a sumo wrestler, Akebono sings the Journey chestnut with nary a Japanese accent. He may not be a great singer (ahem) but his accent is American. That’s because he was born in Hawai’i, and his real name is Chad Haakeo Rowan. In 1993, he shocked Japan and the sumo establishment by becoming the first foreigner ever to win the coveted title of Yokozuna — Grand Champion.
I remember my mom, who’s addicted to watching sumo via NHK satellite here in Colorado (her schedule revolves around being home for the matches, or as a last resort videotaping them), expressing her amazement and incredulity: “Hehhhhhhhhhhh? Hahhhhhhhhhhh? He’s not Nihonjin!”
Akebono was Yokozuna for eight years and won 11 championship tournaments during his reign, and became a Japanese citizen in 1996 before retiring from sumo competition in 2001 to become a coach.
He probably relished the chance to sing a Journey hit for the commercial (the song was part of an episode of “Glee!” last season). Akebono was born in 1969 and grew up in Hawai’i — he played basketball and football in high school — so he may have been a young fan of Journey when the song was a huge hit in 1981.
The commercial is an interesting cross-cultural artifact on several levels of the ongoing give-and-take relationship between the United States and Japan. And, it made me smile. Rock on, Akebono!
UPDATE: Japanese TV viewers can expect to see more of Akebono in a series of promos for “Glee!,” which debuts its first season Feb. 11 (with subtitles), while we in the U.S. wait until April for the start of the series’ second season. Here’s another spot, with Akebono playing a salaryman:
Wow, someone I know and have dined with was interviewed for a story on Time.com, “Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist?” and the story is also on Yahoo. That’s some bigtime exposure for Joz Wang, who many Asian Americans may know better as JozJozJoz. Way back in May 2009, she blogged about her mom’s new Nikon S630 camera, because its built-in facial detection software kept asking if someone blinked if the subject was Asian.
It took nine months and a similar incident where an African American man and a Caucasian woman posted a YouTube video proving that the facial detection software in a fancy new HP computer didn’t recognize black faces, but mainstream media has finally, and suddenly, caught up.
Joz sent out messages today after being featured with her photo and quotes in a Time story by reporter Adam Rose. Not surpisingly, Joz, who’s very active in the AAPI community in Los Angeles and everywhere online (she has her own blog and also contributes to the terrific group site 8Asians), is being deluged with emails and messages from friends near and far.
Congrats, Joz. May your 15 minutes stretch to fill your life!
Many of my fellow Asian American bloggers have mentioned this already, but time’s running out so I thought I better get a word in too. The Center for the Pacific Asian Family, a Los Angeles-based provider of support and services for women who are victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, is trying to get enough votes on Facebook to receive $1 million from the Chase Community Giving campaign. To help out CPAF, an all-star group of Asian American personalities including artists, performers, musicians and yes, bloggers in the LA area took the time to be part of the video above.
Here’s how it works: You click to the “Vote CPAF” page on Facebook (you’ll have to approve the Chase Community Giving app) and just vote for CPAF by THIS FRIDAY to try and boost their tally to the top of the list. You can see the leaderboard of all the non-profits across the country vying for this funding (the Chase Trust is giving away a total of $5 million, with $1m going to the top organization and the rest being spread out in smaller amounts).
So vote today, right now.
Having said all that, here’s why this Chase Trust program bugs me: It reduces charitable giving to a popularity contest, and forces hundreds (perhaps thousands) of non-profits to scramble and try to get votes from people who already support them, and people who who’ve never heard of them. I’m sure all the groups on the leaderboard are worthy causes. And I’m sure CPAF is deserving of the $1, or any smaller amount. [Read more →]
We saw an awesome theatrical performance over the weekend, as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts‘ “Stories on Stage” series of dramatic literary readings. The performance was a draft of “Laughing with My Mouth Wide Open,” a work in progress. It’s a one-woman show by Gwendoline Yeo, an actress and musician from Los Angeles whose script is an autobiographical look back at her life as an Asian American who immigrated as a child from Singapore.
Yeo sat on an austere stage accompanied by only one other actor sitting at the back, who read the light and sound cues from the script, as well as some lines as the Speak and Spell toy she speaks to as a child, and later, a college professor who befriends, and then betrays her.
Set up on one side of the stage was a guzheng, or Chinese zither, which Yeo played with great passion and ability several times during the performance. She read from a script she held in her hand — this was only the second time she’d performed the entire piece in front of an audience. The first time was the same day during a matinee reading. The only prop on stage was the Speak and Spell.
Although the completed one-woman play will have props and furniture and costuming, the lovely Yeo didn’t need any embellishments to hold the audience’s attention. She had us laughing and thinking, inspired and outraged, as we followed her life from an 11-year-old from Singapore, raised by a strict, authoritarian father and strict, traditional mother, competing for attention with a perfect, over-achieving “model minority” sister and a freakish but cool brother whose love for cowboys has turned him permanently into a drawling, American-style country boy.
Her stories are full of sharp observations about cultural differences, and the journey that all immigrants, not just Asians, undertake to become Americanized.
She recites stereotypes of white people when her father announces the family is moving to San Francisco in a week. In an effort to fit in at her private school in San Francisco, young Gwendoline tries to hang with a gang of Asian chicks who identify more with African Americans and speak “Chinkbonics,” but can’t quite make it through the initiation crime. She wants to break family tradition and attend college in Los Angeles instead of UC-Berkeley, where her sister and brother go. She wants to study communications, not medicine or law, which are the two choices her father gives her. She gets in trouble with her parents for coming home with a B on a test. The scenes are full of insights about traditional Asian values butting up against American ambitions.
She tells these stories with incredible humor, and mostly keeps us laughing out loud with our mouth open — something that she points out early in the play, is what white people in America do, but not Asians. [Read more →]
Is it just me, or is it irritating to have some white guy co-opting Asian iconography for a TV commercial and combining two different cultures? Sure, it’s a cool idea, and certainly well-executed production-wise. But this stop-action video made to pimp Google’s new Nexus One “super-phone” (their description, not mine) bugs me. The animated miniature ninjas — of non-specific, though presumably Asian origin — make the long-stereotyped high-pitched screams and yowls that Westerners imitate when they make Bruce Lee moves. To me, that’s like a TV commercial showing someone making French pastries with an Italian accent.
I love kung fu movies, and especially adore Bruce Lee. I’m old enough to have been fascinated by Kato in “Green Hornet” and seen his kung fu movies when they were first released. I also grew up loving the mythology of ninjas. And I know the difference between the two: Kung fu is a Chinese tradition (check out the documentary “The Real Shaolin” for a primer — I’ll be writing more about the film in a bit), and ninjas are Japanese (even if Hollywood had a Korean star in “Ninja Assassin“).
I mean, helloooo, ninjas don’t make any noises when they do their butt-kicking and killing stuff. They’re “silent assassins,” remember? That’s the whole deal with ninjas.
To me, it’s a sign of ignorance and disrespect to blend the two together for no purpose other than to evoke the essence of Orientalism. Maybe Patrick Boivin, the commercial’s creator, was being ironic and culturally astute when he combined the cultures. But I’ll bet dollars that more likely, he simply grew up seeing lots of kung fu and ninja movies and Power Rangers and Mutant Ninja Turtles on TV, and it’s all one undistinguishable blur of Asian-ness to him.
Culturally, that’s the same reason all Asians are taunted by “ching-chong” sounds from childhood to adulthood — non-Asians think we’re all alike and and look alike and we all sound like that. And fight like that.
Phooey on this commercial. I’m sure I’ll lust after a Google phone someday, but not because of this cheesy shill.
You’ve seen her on TV commercials for Microsoft (and one for Sony Vaio). She is Windows. If she or her family ever used a Mac at home, I bet they now have a stack of PCs to last all their lives. Anyway, five-year-old Kylie Kim was interviewed on Ellen Degeneres’ show, and she’s just as cute and lovable live in front of a camera as she is following a script.
It’s amazing how many coats and jackets a family can accumulate over the years, and how many are left hanging in the closet, hardly ever worn. This week, I took a bunch of coats to the Asian Pacific Development Center to be distributed to one of Denver’s newest immigrant communities, the Burmese.
The APDC is a non-profit that offers health and social services to the local Asian communities, and Erin serves its the board of directors. The APDC conducted a food and goods drive for the Burmese over the holiday season, and is still accepting donations at its three locations: 1544 Elmira Street in Aurora, 1825 York Street in Denver and 6055 Lehman Drive, Suite 103 in Colorado Springs. Last summer, the APDC helped collect donated school supplies for students from both the Burmese and another Asian immigrant community, the Bhutanese.
Because many Asian communities have been in the U.S. for two, three or even four or more generations and we’ve assimilated into American society, it’s easy to forget that there are recent immigrants from Asia who are not as fortunate as those of us from Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and other countries, whose families came here to seek better opportunities. In the case of the Burmese, and also the Bhutanese, another recent Asian immigrant group, they’ve arrived in America as refugees, like the waves of Vietnamese, Laotians and Hmong in the 1980s and ’90s.
The Bhutanese and Burmese refugees fled an oppressive regime or have been resettled from refugee camps across the globe.
But unfortunately, once here, they’re facing more oppression: In the past year, both Bhutanese and Burmese students were singled out and attacked in the Denver area. The first attacks were reported last spring; on December 11, a group of Bhutanese students were beaten and robbed after getting off a bus and one required emergency room treatment. The Denver Police Department distributed special cell phones to Bhutanese that are set to dial 911 in case of future attacks, but the community understandably would prefer the violence just stop. In the Denver Post story following the attacks, one Bhutanese refugee said:
“If they kill me and my son, what will my daughter and wife do?” said Dambar Bhujel, father of an 18-year-old victim, who is now wary of letting his son go to school.
“At first, I was happy to come to the United States. After one year, I’m feeling very bad and I don’t want to stay longer. But we can’t go back to Bhutan and we can’t go back to Nepal,” Bhujel said. “They told us America was secure.”
I know I spend a lot of posts writing about the ongoing racism and stereotypes that Asians face in the United States. That’s my passion, and it’s important to me. But I’m also aware that racism exists all over the world. At its worst, that’s why genocide still goes on, after all. And, I’m sad to say, racism is rife in Asia, even (especially?) in Japan, the country of my birth and family roots. It’s a tribal instinct to separate people by ethnicity, and we just have to constantly work at rising above those instincts in the 21st century, when we live in a much smaller and much more intertwined world.
My mother, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. in the mid-1960s with my two brothers and I when my father (himself Japanese but born in Hawai’i) was transferred stateside for his federal government job, is about as old-fashioned as they come. She’s been in the U.S. for over 40 years, but she’s still FOBish (“Fresh Off the Boat”) in a lot of her values, even today. When I called my parents to announce that my first wife — who was European American — and I were going to get a divorce, her first comment wasn’t anything sympathetic. She said bluntly, “See? I told you you should marry Japanese.”
Thanks mom, for the support.
So I was saddened but not exactly surprised to follow the controversy in China over Lou Jing, the Shanghai-born college student who’s shown in the video above, singing on “Go! Oriental Angel,” China’s version of “American Idol.” Lou (pronounced “LOH”) is mixed-race. Her mother is Chinese and her father, whom she’s never met, was African American. She’s a beautiful young woman, and a talented singer (her favorite performer is Beyonce). That’s a picture of Lou with her mother on the TV show, above.
But she’s such an unusual sight in China that the TV show labeled her “Black Pearl” and “Chocolate Girl,” and the media picked up on her inclusion in the show and made her a national racial sideshow. In a cultural switch from the “You speak such good English” line that Asian Americans get in the U.S., she’s grown up hearing people ask how she can speak such good Chinese. “Because I’m Chinese” is her answer, of course.
Following her appearances on the TV show, the Chinese blogosphere became filled with hateful comments aimed at both mother and daughter, venting outrage that her mother would have sex with a black man and calling Lou all manner of names and telling her to leave China (she will if she gets her wish for post-graduate study in the U.S.).
There are a lot of different ethnic groups in China, and they don’t all get along, as witnessed by the recent violence between ethnic Uighurs and Han in western China. But the majority of Chinese — 90% — are descended from the Han race. Although some Chinese are tolerant, many apparently are not.
CNN has a good video report with accompanying text about the racial issues that Lou Jing has sparked in China. Here’s a video of Lou performing on “Go! Oriental Angel”: [Read more →]
Tak Toyoshima is a pioneer. He’s been publishing “Secret Asian Man,” a smart, funny Asian American comic strip, since 1999 in various Asian American and Japanese American newspapers and websites. He’s a visual AAPI blogger, tackling issues of the day, racial stereotypes, friendships, the foibles of family life and of course, Asian American Pacific Islander identity.
SAM is an autobiographical reflection of Toyoshima. In fact, the main character, Sam, is, according to the cast of characters rundown in the book,”an aspiring cartoonist who works as an art director at his local alternative newsweekly. He is an incurable dreamer who is fascinated by what makes us all tick.”
The Boston-based artist has been the art director of a alternative newspaper, the Weekly Dig, the whole time that he’s been building a following for SAM. A couple of years ago, SAM was picked by by United Media, which syndicated the strip in mainstream newspapers across the country. That was great for Tak, because he was able to reach a much wider, mainstream audience with his witty, observant social jabs.
Earlier this fall, though, Toyoshima parted ways with United Media to concentrate on promoting SAM once again through AAPI channels and with a new, full-color comic every Sunday on his own website.
And now, he’s collected every strip syndicated by United Media into his first book, “Secret Asian Man: The Daily Days,” which is available now for pre-order from Amazon.com. I ordered my copy — be the first one on your block to have a copy! [Read more →]
How cool is this? The March 16 visualizAsian.com show is going to be a conversation with Eric Nakamura, the owner, publisher and co-editor of Giant Robot magazine. Our call with Eric will be at 6 pm PT on Tuesday, March 16!
We’ve taken several months off, but Erin and I are ready to resume our series of interviews with inspirational Asian Americans for 2010. We’re especially proud to be able to speak with Dan Kuramoto, one of the founding members of the fusion jazz group 
As a kid in Japan, we always celebrated New Year’s Day, or 
Chalk this up in the victory column. Sometimes, just pointing out something that’s offensive can make a difference. Earlier this week, Asian American bloggers like 
Erin and I are trying something different from our visualizAsian.com interviews with Asian Americans, and hosting a conversation with our friend 
