NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

Erin and I have always been wistfully jealous of our friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for lots of reasons but not least the fact that they can eat killer ramen any night of the week. We have our fave ramen-yas in both San Francisco’s Japantown and LA’s Little Tokyo (“ya” means “shop”). There’s [...]

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I realize that when I point out how something as seemingly benign as the “won ton” font bugs me, readers might think I’m being petty and overly sensitive. But I hope those readers will respect my opinion if something does piss me off. Plus, I hope everyone can understand why certain things are just plain [...]

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Racist caricatures of Japanese were common during World War II, with even Bugs Bunny getting into the act in a cartoon, and a young Theodore Geisel — Dr. Suess to decades of American kids — contributing his share of racist stereotypes. These images, though despicable, are somewhat understandable because of the long history of racism [...]

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Can a font express a racial stereotype?
I know I’m climbing on my soap box and risking being called over-sensitive and too p.c. But when I noticed a promo on Facebook this morning for the Asia Food Fest in Austin, Texas, and saw the logo for the event, my stomach clenched just a little bit. [...]

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Erin 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 [...]

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Ouch. I stand humbled… and embarrassed. I’ve changed my views on my long-held need to have Japanese words (especially food) pronounced correctly. I was such a purist about it that in the past I’ve even offered a pronunciation guide for often-mangled Japanese words.
But tonight, I realized that despite Erin and my interest in and curiosity [...]

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“Lumina,” an online-only series produced with Hollywood-level quality by an Asian American, Asian Canadian and plain ol’ Asian cast and crew in Hong Kong, is set to debut on the Web on Tuesday, September 8 with a double-episode, and I for one can’t wait to check it out.
In case you haven’t heard about it, [...]

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Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who were captured, put on trial and convicted of trespassing and “hostile acts” by the government of North Korea, have written part of their story — a lot is still too traumatic to tell. The article appeared last night on both the LA Times (interestingly, as [...]

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