NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

OK, I had to post these two photos, in which Spanish athletes mock Chinese by pulling back their eyes to make them slanty — ha ha ha.
The first is a posed shot of of the Spanish Olympic basketball team. It was used in an ad in a Spanish newspaper, which calls into question not [...]

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Check out the widget above. What’s a widget?
Widgets are cool, portable little online features that you can put onto websites easily by just copying a little bit of code into your page. I’m helping to get the word out about The Denver Post’s widget for coverage of the Democratic National Convention, coming up in [...]

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Saw this via Angry Asian Man (a daily must-read): Young Asian Americans are proving they can dance, and not just on MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.”
This cool video is performed by FarEast Movement but created by Wong Fu Productions, a trio of Chinese Americans from UC San Diego who started making cool content online [...]

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Erin, Jared and I ate at a Benihana restaurant recently, and then learned just a couple of days later that Rocky Aoki, the founder of the Benihana chain, had died.
I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection [...]

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Erin, our friend Joe Nguyen and I dined the other night at Korea House, a popular restaurant in Denver (actually, Aurora, the eastern suburb, where the Korean community is concentrated). The dinner was part of an arrangement by Korea House to advertise in Asian Avenue Magazine, and we were there to write a preview of [...]

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It’s been a couple of weeks since the Japanese American National Museum’s national conference was held in Denver. Sorting through the many bits of video I took over the conference, which ran July 3-6, my favorite parts were the tribute to JA veterans on the Fourth of July, and the July 6 bus tour to [...]

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One of the dangerous things about finally having cable TV, is tuning in to HGTV. For one thing, the network gives Erin way too many ideas for projects for us to tackle around the house. For another, it reveals my lack of ability to do most of the do-it-yourself projects that show up on the [...]

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I know I still need to blog the JANM conference, but I had to write about this: Officials at a Louisiana school district are trying to prevent students from including foreign languages in their graduation speeches.
The brouhaha was sparked by Vietnamese American cousins Hue and Cindy Vo, who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School’s [...]

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It’s been a busy start to the conference organized by the Japanese American National Museum. We worked from home, setting up media coverage including sending a reporter and photographer from The Denver Post on a bus trip to Amache, the WWII internment camp in southeast Colorado. The result this morning is a powerful, well-written A-1 [...]

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The JANM conference that starts today in Denver has a whole bunch of interesting and important panels, workshops and discussions. I’m moderating one on Saturday, about Hapas — mixed-race Asian Americans. But some of the most powerful parts of the conference will be the ones that bring people together with their past.
Today and Sunday, caravans [...]

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Considering that many — if not most — Asians are allergic to alcohol, it’s amazing how much the culture of alcohol is part of society in Japan. I guess it’s the same all over the world, but since I’m very allergic to alcohol, I’m just out of the loop when it comes to booze.
You’re [...]

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The Japanese American National Museum is sponsoring a conference in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend, called “Whose America? Who’s American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice.”
Erin and I are helping out the conference, and one of Erin’s main projects has been contacting and inviting Colorado Japanese American veterans to the conference’s Welcome [...]

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Growing up, I didn’t think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it’s amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans — almost always as “bad guys.”
Seeing these movies today, you could tell they’re not ethnic actors, and could almost see the [...]

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The Boulder Daily Camera today ran a front-page story about the recent study about Asian Americans and the model minority myth.
The study found that because Asians are not all high-achieving academic wiz-kids, and that the diversity of the Asian communities (we’re not just Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but also Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, Indian, Filipino, [...]

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It’s been a couple of weeks, but congratulations are in order for Amanda Igaki, the winner of the “Miss Asian American Colorado” pageant held in Denver May 31.

Now, before you recoil at the thought of a beauty pageant, rest assured that this pageant, organized by a crew of young people led by the energetic and [...]

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Update 18 June: News media are reporting Tiger Woods will miss the rest of this year’s golf season because he needs more surgery on his left knee. That’s a big bummer, but not surprising, given how he grimaced after many of his tee-offs. I almost winced with empathy pain as he twisted his knee each [...]

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Here’s a blog post I just came cross, from AdAge.com, that adds to the dialogue on the use of the word “uppity” to describe African Americans.
Pepper Miller points out that some African Americans take the use of “elitist” to describe Barack Obama as code for “uppity”:
As another example, WVON-AM Chicago talk-show host Perri Small [...]

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Stereotypes sometimes are based on a kernel of truth, but they’re twisted and blown out of proportion and used out of context. Sometimes, stereotypes can even be “good” in that they’re not negative images. But trust me, a stereotype is still a stereotype. It’s a generalization that’s not universally true, and even the good ones [...]

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File this under “you’re too sensitive” if you want, but I think people of color notice these types of media mistakes because they reflect, deep-down, America’s lack of evolution on the diversity front.
From Gawker a few days ago: an MSNBC reporter described Spike Lee as “uppity” because of his back-and-forth spat with Clint Eastwood [...]

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The characters Harold and Kumar, played by APA actors John Cho and Kal Penn, are like embarassing uncles who fart in public and cuss and tell stupid jokes. In fact, in lots of ways, Harold and Kumar are stupid jokes.
But like those uncles, you have to embrace them when you see them, even though you [...]

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