NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

How cool is this? The March 16 visualizAsian.com show is going to be a conversation with Eric Nakamura, the owner, publisher and co-editor of Giant Robot magazine. Our call with Eric will be at 6 pm PT on Tuesday, March 16!
From movie stars, musicians, and skate-boarders to toys, technology, and history, Giant Robot magazine covers [...]

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Three years ago this week, a student news website at the University of Colorado sparked a firestorm of protest. The website posted a column by a student, Max Karson, which ineptly tried to address racism on the CU campus by poking fun at Asian stereotypes. The column, “If It’s War the Asians Want, It’s War [...]

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We’ve taken several months off, but Erin and I are ready to resume our series of interviews with inspirational Asian Americans for 2010. We’re especially proud to be able to speak with Dan Kuramoto, one of the founding members of the fusion jazz group Hiroshima, because the group has been nominated twice for a Grammy [...]

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As a kid in Japan, we always celebrated New Year’s Day, or Oshougatsu, on January 1, just like in the United States, but with different traditions than in America. Japanese clean the house like crazy leading up to the day, and New Year’s Eve isn’t the big party that it is in the U.S. Instead, [...]

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Chalk this up in the victory column. Sometimes, just pointing out something that’s offensive can make a difference. Earlier this week, Asian American bloggers like 8Asians (where I borrowed the great graphic) and Slant Eye for the Round Eye, among others, pointed out that the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, had named [...]

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The social media blog Mashable snagged a pretty cool interview with Hawai’ian ukulele maestro Jake Shimabukuro at the annual TED conference (TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and it’s a chi-chi invitation-only think-tank gathering of great minds) after his performance yesterday, which drew a standing ovation.
I’ve written about Shimabukuro before, and I’m glad he got [...]

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I downloaded my copy. You should too. Kina Grannis is letting you download a free copy of “Valentine,” the catchy folk-pop track that’s captured in the lyrical video above, as a preview of her new full-length album, “Stairwells,” which is available for pre-order. You can get a signed copy of the “Stairwells” CD, which officially [...]

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Colorado music fans can get a taste of an up-and-coming Asian American indie band from Charlottesville, Virginia next week, when Tim Be Told comes through Colorado Springs and Denver during their national tour. Tim Be Told are alternative rockers led by a young, multi-talented Chinese American singer, songwriter and keyboard player named Tim Ouyang. The [...]

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Erin and I are trying something different from our visualizAsian.com interviews with Asian Americans, and hosting a conversation with our friend Adam Schrager, the author of “The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story.”
The interview is scheduled for Wednesday, February 24 at 6 pm PT (7 pm MT, 9 pm ET), and like our other talks, [...]

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Kate Agathon, a grad school instructor at Purdue University and producer for photographer William L. Snyder (who took the portrait above, which was used originally on AngryAsianMan.com in a profile of Kate), is taking on a big art project and she needs your help. She’s organizing a show called “ImaginAsian,” and inviting anyone who is [...]

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Wow, someone I know and have dined with was interviewed for a story on Time.com, “Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist?” and the story is also on Yahoo. That’s some bigtime exposure for Joz Wang, who many Asian Americans may know better as JozJozJoz. Way back in May 2009, she blogged about her mom’s new Nikon S630 [...]

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Many of my fellow Asian American bloggers have mentioned this already, but time’s running out so I thought I better get a word in too. The Center for the Pacific Asian Family, a Los Angeles-based provider of support and services for women who are victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, is trying to get [...]

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We saw an awesome theatrical performance over the weekend, as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts‘ “Stories on Stage” series of dramatic literary readings. The performance was a draft of “Laughing with My Mouth Wide Open,” a work in progress. It’s a one-woman show by Gwendoline Yeo, an actress and musician from [...]

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You’ve seen her on TV commercials for Microsoft (and one for Sony Vaio). She is Windows. If she or her family ever used a Mac at home, I bet they now have a stack of PCs to last all their lives. Anyway, five-year-old Kylie Kim was interviewed on Ellen Degeneres’ show, and she’s just as [...]

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It’s amazing how many coats and jackets a family can accumulate over the years, and how many are left hanging in the closet, hardly ever worn. This week, I took a bunch of coats to the Asian Pacific Development Center to be distributed to one of Denver’s newest immigrant communities, the Burmese.
The APDC is [...]

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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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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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