NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

When I first started the Nikkei View as a weekly column in 1998 that ran in a Denver Japanese community newspaper (now gone), I posted the columns on my nikkeiview.com website. I wrote as a way of telling the world how I saw pop culture and politics through my Japanese American experience. In the decade [...]

[Read more →]

Alas, there is no Asian film festival in Denver. There used to be — the Aurora Asian Film Festival was held in Denver’s eastern suburb (people in Aurora hate for their city to be called a suburb). It was sponsored by the Denver Film Society, the folks who bring the annual Deniver International Film Festival [...]

[Read more →]

The San Jose Mercury News has been driving the coverage of the ongoing controversy over the way San Jose police officers arrested Phuong Ho, a 20-year-old San Jose State math major who allegedly threatened his roommate with a steak knife. Another roommate shot cell phone video footage that appears to show Ho crying out as [...]

[Read more →]

Should musicians be praised and have the spotlight shined on them simply because they’re Asian American? Of course not. But if some of us AAPI bloggers didn’t pay attention to the Asian American artists out there, they may go quietly under the radar and not get any attention at all. Not that we make such [...]

[Read more →]

When President Obama officially declared the 2009 H1N1 outbreak a national emergency over the weekend, I thought, “good. Now it’ll force Americans to wear masks when they’re sick, or if they don’t want to get sick, like in Japan.
The Japanese (and other people throughout Asia) have always worn face masks to prevent the spread [...]

[Read more →]

Help out a brother and sister, everyone. Lori Fujikawa-Choy and Jackson Choy are newlyweds from Long Beach, California. She’s Japanese American; he’s Chinese American, and they both love Thailand. They first went to Thailand as “college sweethearts” (awww, aren’t they cute!) to do some volunteer work there and fell in love with the country and [...]

[Read more →]

I know it’s several months late, but I didn’t see a lot of sites spreading this around. Back in 2007, after the prison in Cebu, Philippines started using dance as a way to rehabilitate its prisoners by having them participate in a group creative endeavor and letting them perform for visitors, a video of the [...]

[Read more →]

Astro Boy,” the new American computer-animated version of the Japanese comic and cartoon that launched the revolution we now call anime, opens today.
I’m more than a little nervous about seeing the movie, since it may not resemble the Japanese cartoon I grew up with, and because Hollywood really screwed up “Speed Racer” when they [...]

[Read more →]

I’m starting to dread Hallowe’en. It seems like every year, there’s some new offensive costume that makes racist fun of Asians or perpetuates a racial stereotype. I wrote about this back in 2002, when a really sick costume called “Kung Fool” was sold.
Today I read AngryAsianMan.com and saw that mainstream America once again thinks [...]

[Read more →]

MyFoxNY newsman Ti-Hua Chang reports on a video that shows a New York City traffic agent — a parking enforcement officer, I think we’d call her in Denver — who can be seen intimidating, allegedly cursing and making racist statements and possibly striking a Chinese man, in Manhattan’s Chinatown district. I saw this first in [...]

[Read more →]

Like any school kid, I loved going on field trips when I was young, But, since we lived in Japan until 3rd grade, my earliest memories of field trips weren’t the typical ones that American kids remember. I remember looking out of a school bus and seeing steaming lumps of sticky rice being pounded into [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s a great idea: Rice St. is a new website launched by an Asian American webhead in Brooklyn New Yawk, to help us all keep track of the increasing number of Asian American news and blog sites, as well as news about Asian and Asian Americans in mainstream media sites and blogs. Check it out: [...]

[Read more →]

Asian American Pacific Islanders have been so invisible in mainstream American society, working hard in the background but rarely achieving high profile attention (unless it’s for something lousy, like Jon Gosselin or Falcon Heene!), that we’re shocked when the spotlight suddenly shines on some aspect of our culture and identity.
A lot of the reason [...]

[Read more →]

When I first found out Jon Gosselin is Asian American, I thought, “Cool!” His kids were an adorable hapa brood, and Kate was a somewhat… shall we say … difficult partner. A mixed-race family is nothing unfamiliar to many AAPIs (and especially Japanese Americans, who have had the highest out-marriage rate of all AAPI ethnicities [...]

[Read more →]

I learned a whole lot about Genghis Khan, the Mongolian ruler who in the 13th century conquered most of the known world of the time, from Asian to the Middle East and into Europe. We also learned about Mongolian culture, and this morning, I learned why, as a child, I was classified as “Mongoloid” — [...]

[Read more →]

I don’t know about other Asians, but I bet Erin and I are not the only ones who flinch whenever we hear or see coverage in the news media that involves an Asian or Asian American. If it’s good news, hooray and we cheer on the butt-kicking Asian, or applaud the award or medal or [...]

[Read more →]

The Asian American blogosphere is all abuzz, and with good reason. The White House has more AAPIs in high places (the Cabinet) than ever in history. And yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order restoring the President’s Advisory Commission and White House Initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, who [...]

[Read more →]

Wow. Wow. Wow. It’s a triple play. It’s a hat trick. It’s an Asian American trinity, sort of.
Erin and I have booked three killer guests for our visualizAsian.com series of interviews in the AAPI Empowerment Series:
Next Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 6 pm PT we’ll speak to filmmaker Lane Nishikawa of “Only the Brave,” an [...]

[Read more →]

Just saw this TV commercial for Priceline, and it made us bust out laughing. We’ve seen Kenny Choi in all kinds of roles from soldier to gangster to doctor, but never a mild-mannered husband doing a dead-on impression of William Shatner:

[Read more →]

Hiroshi Watanabe as Jimmy and Nae as his sister Aiko in director Dave Boyle’s independent film “White on Rice.”
Erin and I attended a screening tonight of a new movie, “White on Rice,” sponsored by Denver’s Asian Avenue Magazine at the Starz Film Center, and thoroughly enjoyed the film. It’s a sweet romantic comedy about an [...]

[Read more →]