NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

I’ve been looking for Asian restaurants in my area of Jersey City, and only having limited luck. Part of Jersey City is becoming “Hobokenized,” which is to say, the yuppies are overflowing from Manhattan and settling in parts of New Jersey that are closest to New York. But my part of Jersey City, which is [...]

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The ebb and flow of New York neighborhoods is a great example of how cities evolve.
When I attended Pratt Institute in the late 1970s, the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan along St. Marks Place (8th Street becomes St. Marks Place east of 3rd Ave.) was a haven for punk rockers and hipsters, with used record [...]

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Makoto Iwamatsu died on Friday at the age of 72, of esophageal cancer. It’s a huge loss to Asian Americans.
If you know him at all, you probably know him better as simply Mako, the Japanese actor, who played countless character roles and supporting parts in television shows and movies starting in the early 1960s.

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Wow, it feels weird, but I’ve finally written a new Nikkeiview column, the first in a year and a half. I’ve just been too busy (I know, it’s a lame excuse), but by writing these Nikkei Blog posts, I’ve been inspired to finally sit down and write a longer column.
It helps that I went [...]

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Here’s a story published June 20 from the Toledo Blade in Ohio about a Tower 98.3 DJ “apologizing” for an on-air stunt that sparked protests from Asian Americans. Lucas, a night-time DJ, made a series of mocking calls to Asian-owned businesses while on the air, including a Japanese restaurant where he reportedly told the person [...]

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Is it just me? I really think “Ask a Ninja,” a free video podcast that consistently ranks among the top-5 popular video podcasts on Apple’s super-influential iTunes store, is dumb. Really dumb.

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The humidity here isn’t merely a statistical aspect of the weather, like the temperature and the times of the sunrise and sunset. It’s different from the forecast, which is about the future and therefore, abstract.

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It had to happen - the cyclical nature of pop music demanded that eventually, the girl group sound of the early ’60s would become hip again.
That’s exactly what might happen with the release next week of the Pipettes’ first full album in the UK. The British group, fronted by a trio of women wearing [...]

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Here’s the best description I’ve read yet about the “Jack FM” format — a hodgepodge of album oriented and hit songs from the past two, maybe three decades played up in no particular order. The stations that feature the format (Denver’s Jack 105.5 FM was the first station in the U.S. to adopt the format, [...]

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OK, I can’t stand it anymore. I’m not much of a puzzle person — crosswords can’t catch my attention, and jigsaws don’t call out to me. I’m not much of a numbers person either — hence, I work with words (journalism), not numbers (engineering). So, Sudoku hasn’t exactly lit me on fire even though it’s [...]

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I know, I know, I’m painting all of the radio industry with an awful broad brush. But let’s face it, no one’s doing this kind of stuff on TV.
A year and a half ago, I wrote my (embarrassingly, most recent) Nikkei View column about Hot 97, a station in NYC, which broadcast a tasteless and [...]

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