NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

Erin and I are excited to announce the next call in our series of conversations with Asian American leaders and newsmakers. We’ll be speaking with Jen Wang and Diana Nguyen of Disgrasian on Tuesday, September 21 at 7 pm PT (10 pm ET — it’s an hour later than our usual calls). If you follow [...]

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Erin and I took a summer hiatus, but visualizAsian.com is back, and proud to kick off a new season of interviews with a conversation with Iranian-Japanese American journalist Roxana Saberi, whose recent book, “Between Two Worlds,” chronicles the harrowing experience of being imprisoned, charged with espionage and sentenced to eight years in a notorious Iranian [...]

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With Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month about to end, I thought I’d write a bit about the terms we choose to describe our identity. Like other ethnic groups, the labels we use for ourselves seems to be always evolving. Hispanic evolves into Latino; Negro to Black to African American; Native American to American Indian. [...]

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Once upon a time, I went to art school. And although I graduated with a completely useless (career-wise, anyway) BFA in Painting, I chose art school because once upon a time, I wanted to work for Marvel Comics. Real bad. See above. When I was a kid, I loved Marvel’s lineup of superheroes because they [...]

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Holy cow, what was this guy thinking? New Hampshire State Rep. Nick Levasseur posted on his Facebook wall earlier this week that “Anime is a prime example of why two nukes just wasn’t enough…..” Huh? That rates a WTF?! from any perspective. Otaku Review, an anime fan blog first picked up the quote, then Levasseur [...]

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I caught Corky Lee preparing to shoot photos of singer-songwriter Cynthia Lin at a 2006 Asian festival in New York City (picture #22) We’re thrilled to announce the next interview of visualizAsian.com’s Asian American Empowerment Series, a free one-hour conversation with award-winning photojournalist Corky Lee, who has captured Asian America through his lenses for over [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 just spent a great weekend in LA, and all day yesterday was the main event: We attended BANANA, the first-ever gathering of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers from across the country, and from Canada. It was kind of an ad-hoc event, organized in just two months and a little ragged on the [...]

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Here’s why I like this new Comcast commercial: It’s part of the new trend of showing Asian Americans in ads who are just, well, American, and not so much Asian. They don’t speak with accents and they’re not doing stereotypical stuff like martial arts and tech geekery. Instead, this kid and his dad are watching [...]

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The San Jose Mercury News, which broke the story several weeks ago of a video that shows San Jose police may have used unnecessary force when officers arrested a San Jose State University student, is now under a darkening cloud of questions about the batons and Taser used to subdue Phuong Ho. The Mercury News [...]

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A reader named Robin, who is Japanese American and born in Iowa and bakes apple pies, sent me this email: “I was wincing yesterday when Martha Stewart asked an asian american woman in the audience (Sumi somethingorother, who baked an apple pie for Martha’s contest) “Where are you from?” and the woman said with no [...]

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With a week before BANANA, the first-ever gathering of Asian American bloggers, I’ve been thinking about Nikkei View’s role, or how I see my voice as part of the AAPI blogosphere. The beauty of the Internet and of blogging as an avenue for self-expression, is that we can develop not just one mighty chorus of [...]

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Huh? Really? This is so wrong, on several levels…. First, it’s been years since I’ve had to explain to anyone that “People are ‘Asian,’ rugs are “Oriental.’” Second, Bo Dietl, a Fox pundit, actually pulls his eyes back on Don Imus’ show to mimic how he says Katie Couric’s eyes make her look “Chinese.” Third, [...]

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