NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Here’s a video that’s gone viral and forced Hewlett-Packard to respond quickly to try and minimize any damage to its brand from people who think that HP is manufacturing racist computers. Like most people who see this video, which pretty much proves that HP computers’ wiz-bang video tracking-facial recognition feature can’t distinguish dark-skinned faces, I’m [...]

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UPDATE: THIS EVENT IS NOW FREE! (Ticketmaster processing charges still apply)
It probably irks Chinese people to no end that their centuries of culture is often crammed into just a couple of off-hand images: Bruce Lee and martial arts, Chairman Mao holding up his Little Red Book, Jackie Chan and martial arts, the traditionalist flash of [...]

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This past summer, the University of California announced it would award diplomas to Japanese Americans who had been students at one of the school’s four campuses at the time, but had their education disrupted by World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
About 700 students of Japanese ancestry were [...]

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Denver’s Japanese community knew it was coming: Even before the current angst and pain that newspapers in general are feeling thanks to declining circulation and dire economic times, the city’s Japanese newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Jiho, shut down. Its owners, Eiichi and Yoriko Imada, had been subsidizing the weekly newspaper, which had one or two [...]

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Like it or not, we all come from immigrant roots. Like European Americans and African Americans, our families all arrived on these shores from somewhere else. Over the generations, we maintain some of our ethnic cultural values, and discard others.
At some point, most Asian Americans suddenly feel embarrassed about our parents because they’re so… [...]

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Erin and I have come to love “Glee!,” the Fox TV series about a group of outcast students who join their high school glee club (remember how glee club people were always the nerds?). We enjoyed the sneak preview premier, which was shown last fall, and then waited with great anticipation for the season to [...]

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My friends at sites such as Angry Asian Man, 8 Asians and Slant Eye for the Round Eye have already posted this but I want to bring attention to it too:
Asian students are being singled out and viciously beaten at South Philadelphia High School. Now, the students are protesting the lack of response by [...]

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I should just shake my head and mutter, “Kids these days, what were they thinking.” But I have deeper feelings than that, and I’m terribly saddened by the ongoing news coverage out of Japan, where four teen-aged dependents of U.S. military personnel were arrested over the weekend for attempted murder.
The three boys and a girl, [...]

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Every once in a while, people ask me about the name of my blog, because they only hear the word “Nikkei” when it’s used for the Japanese stock exchange. “Nikkei” is also so the word used to describe people of Japanese ancestry outside of Japan. I’m a Nikkei-jin, or Nikkei person. When my blog first [...]

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We attended a birthday party of sorts last night, except there was no cake. Ever since Japan stationed a Consulate General in Denver, there has been an annual gathering of invited guests to mark the birthday of Akihito, the current Emperor of Japan.
Royal birthdays are probably celebrated in the few countries that still have [...]

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Last time we checked in on the smart promotion sponsored by the Thai government, “The Ultimate Thailand Explorers Contest,” we were rooting for one couple to win. Unfortunately, Lori Fujikawa-Choy and Jackson Choy, newlyweds from Long Beach, California, didn’t make it to the finals.
But we now have a Filipino couple we can help, who did [...]

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The first single from Dawen’s debut album, “American Me,”which was released back in September, wastes no time stating his passion for Asian American identity. “Flip through the paper, turn on the telly, go to a movie,” he croons in his supple, silky soprano. Then he slips into the first verse:
Just because you saw the [...]

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I’ve avoided the media feeding frenzy over Tiger Woods because it just didn’t seem that big a deal. I was concerned when the first reports of his accident came out and some media outlets reported he was seriously injured, but that turned out to be incorrect. When he was released with minor injuries, I decided [...]

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Erin and I are finishing off 2009 on visualizAsian.com’s AAPI Empowerment Series with slam poet Beau Sia, on Tuesday, December 8 at 6 pm PT (9 pm ET).
If you haven’t heard of him, Beau Sia is a Chinese-American poet from Oklahoma City. He’s an artist who uses words as his paint and canvas, and his [...]

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