NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

Enka music is often referred to as “Japanese blues.” The comparison is apt for a couple of reasons: the music is almost always about heartbreak and inconsolable loss. You can hear it in the singing. And, enka singing relies a lot on vocal inflections that are also common to American blues and gospel music: vibrato [...]

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A New York Times profile of Don Wakamatsu (thanks to reader Juan Lozano for pointing it out), the Japanese American named by the Seattle Mariners to manage the struggling team, reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about him since Wakamatsu’s hiring was announced in November.
It’s an historic signing because for the hype that [...]

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UPDATE: Dec. 19: Sometimes, good sense wins out. Despite the car dealer’s initial refusal to back down from the racist sentiments of radio ads that ran a couple of weekends ago, it appears Detroit may have exerted some influence.
The Japanese American Citizens League, which has a national anti-hate crime campaign funded by Ford Motor [...]

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It’s been over three years, but the legal ordeal of a Korean couple in Washington DC may finally be over. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals turned down an appeal by former DC Administrative Judge Roy Pearson Jr., who came to symbolize frivolous lawsuits when he sued Jin and Soo Chung, owners of Custom [...]

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OK, I can stop whining. I’ve been on a ramen hunt for a couple of months. But I’ve finally sated my jones, with a trip top Bento Zanmai on the Hill in Boulder.
Unlike Los Angeles, where a row of ramen shops take up most of a block along Little Tokyo, and San Francisco’s Japantown, which [...]

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Erin and I had dinner tonight at a restaurant we hadn’t visited in a couple of years — it’s been too long. Peking-Tokyo Restaurant is located in the southern part of the suburb of Lakewood, across town from where we live. Back a decade ago, when we both worked a few blocks from Peking-Tokyo Express, [...]

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Clint Eastwood, who looked at one of the most famous battles of World War II through the eyes of doomed Japanese soldiers in the 2006 film, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” is now lookng at Asian Americans and racism in an upcoming movie, “Gran Torino.”
Eastwood plays a racist Korean War veteran and retired Ford factory employee, [...]

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I’m having leftovers for lunch as I type. Really good leftovers: ramen from Taki’s Restaurant, an inventive, unique and funky dive of a Japanese joint on E. Colfax Avenue and Pennsylvania in downtown Denver’s Capitol Hill district. It a block from the state Capitol, and three blocks from my office.
Ramen is relatively new to [...]

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MSNBC.com this afternoon reported that an Asian American, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had turned from studying quantum physics to combating global warming, will be named next week as President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for the cabinet post of Energy Secretary.
Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California [...]

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The national organization APIA Vote made it abundantly clear during both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, where they did a lot of recruiting and convened caucuses: Asian American Pacific Islanders are not involved enough in politics.
We’re not great at getting the vote out, we don’t participate as much as we [...]

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The Hollywood news source Variety reported yesterday that Keanu Reeves, everyone’s favorite hapa actor (his father is Hawai’ian-Chinese) is going to play the lead role in a samurai epic, “47 Ronin.”
The 47 Ronin is the celebrated 18th century story from Japanese history, of a group of masterless samurai who avenged the death of their [...]

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The folk-rock group I play with, Mallworthy, was asked to perform at a holiday party and awards ceremony for the Sierra Club in Boulder last night. The event was held in the cafeteria of a Unitarian church, and there was a constant clatter with a couple-hundred people standing in line for the array of potluck [...]

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Back on Veterans Day I posted an article about how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been heroes for generations in the U.S. military, and ended the article with a note about retired Four-Star Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff and the highest-ranked AAPI in the military.
Today, NBC released an excerpt of [...]

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Surfing YouTube videos can be like the early days of surfing the Internet. Following links to random Web pages is a leap of faith, a trust in kismet, that what you’re about to see is both somehow related to what you were seeking in the first place, and hopefully entertaining.
In the midst of [...]

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I’m an off-and-on supporter of National Public Radio, I admit it. I’m a fair-weather donor to NPR, depending on how much I’m tuning in. There have been periods when I commute with the car when I listen to NPR a lot, and then there are times when I ride the bus to work and [...]

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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 [...]

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Meiko, a one-quarter Japanese American, or “quapa,” from Georgia by way of Los Angeles, is at the vanguard of the new folk music. At least, that’s the category where you’ll find her on iTunes. She strums and picks an acoustic guitar, so she fits the folksinger/troubadour image.
But her music isn’t based on the traditional [...]

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