NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

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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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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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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We had dinner last night at the venerable Denver Press Club with Jennifer 8.Lee and learned about Chinese food. The dinner was Chinese takeout, of course, from a DU-area eatery called “Hong Kong Cafe.” It was pretty good. The dinner was organized by John Ensslin, president of the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional [...]

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I’ve been drinking something that tastes like dirt. I’ve also been drinking something else that tastes like weeds. Both are supposed to be good for me.
It’s an Asian thing — there’s a cultural fascination in with potions and powders and pills outside of “Western” medicine and healthcare. I don’t doubt that a lot of Eastern [...]

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In the U.S., snack food manufacturers in recent years have become creative, and come up with a variety of flavor combinations beyond the old barbecue-flavor potato chips or the nacho cheese flavored Doritos. Now you can get black pepper and olive oil Triscuits, or chili-lime flavored corn chips.
But American palates probably aren’t ready for some [...]

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The world lost a food pioneer on January 5. Momofuku Ando, 97, the self-professed “Noodle King,” was the man who invented instant ramen — the low budget dining delicacy of college students everywhere.
Long before sushi, there was another and more profound Japanese food invasion in the United States. Since the mid-1970s, instant ramen has been [...]

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A friend of mine just got some nice news to finish out the year. Daigo Fujiwara is a Japanese-born journalist, graphic artist, Web dude and baseball fanatic who now lives in Boston and works for the Boston Globe and Boston.com as a graphic artist.
Yesterday, Boston.com announced that it had cut a content partnership with [...]

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I caught a cool video story today on NYT.com, about a Double Dutch competition held in Harlem. (You may have to do a search for it once you get to the NYT video page).
Interestingly, the competitive African American tradition, which counts the number of times you can jump rope in two minutes and then add [...]

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The Washington Post recently reported that the government of Japan is going to start checking out Japanese restaurants all over the world and handing out seals of approvals for those deemed to be serving “authentic” Japanese cuisine.
This rather extreme step (it sounds like something the snooty French would do) is the result of a recent [...]

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Iva Toguri D’Aquino died Sept. 26, at age 90, in Chicago. You might not know her, or remember her today, but she was a victim of circumstance who was once one of the most hated women in the United States.
You might not know her, but you might know her nickname: Tokyo Rose.

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I finally saw Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of “King Kong,” and I’m afraid I was underwhelmed. It was corny, and overly long and not engaging, even when the excitement factor revved up for the final third of the film. It reminded me that although Hollywood has been making monster movies since the original 1933 “King [...]

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The ebb and flow of New York neighborhoods is a great example of how cities evolve.
When I attended Pratt Institute in the late 1970s, the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan along St. Marks Place (8th Street becomes St. Marks Place east of 3rd Ave.) was a haven for punk rockers and hipsters, with used record [...]

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OK, I can’t stand it anymore. I’m not much of a puzzle person — crosswords can’t catch my attention, and jigsaws don’t call out to me. I’m not much of a numbers person either — hence, I work with words (journalism), not numbers (engineering). So, Sudoku hasn’t exactly lit me on fire even though it’s [...]

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Post / Gil Asakawa

Real sushi, from the source: a bento box at a sushi restaurant in Sapporo.

I’m in the middle of a two-week trip to Japan, and it’s been a fascinating visit.
I was born here in Tokyo (an Army brat — my dad, a Nisei from Hawaii, was stationed here and met my mom during [...]

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I never got the attraction of cigarette smokers who roll their own smokes. Looks like a pain in the butt to me — har, I made a punny!
But then, I never got the attraction of cigarette smoking anyway.
But these days I’m into “rolling my own” when it comes to tea… green tea, that is.

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We’re making great headway in the United States in getting public names changed when they are reflections of an older era when racially charged terms were considered acceptable, or at least, not controversial.

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Samurai are big in Western pop culture these days, what with Tom Cruise’s hit “The Last Samurai” and of course, Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies.

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