Cool Global Biz

Summer Festivals and One Japanese American Family's Tale

 

 

The Nisei Week Festival 2010 in the "Little Tokyo" district of downtown Los Angeles. Hard to believe. But 75 years ago, my late mother and aunt as young teens performed Japanese dances on these same streets. Their spirits are strong. Video courtesy of RafuShimpoOnline on YouTube.

Editor's note:  Summer is festival time for Japanese Americans, who honor the memories of their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. I republish this blog post each year in honor of my late parents, grandparents and family spirits. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.

  

 

THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.  Like the legendary industrialist  Henry Ford  (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.

 

THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke   University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

 

President Obama & the Great American Cultural Mash-Up, Or Will the Republic Survive?

 

DASHING AROUND THE Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984, it seemed surreal and revolutionary to watch female v.p. candidate Geraldine Ferraro and black presidential candidate Jesse Jackson speak to the crowd and the nation. Few thought it would happen in the traditional, hidebound realm of U.S. politics.

The 1980s had exploded with diversity-related news and trends. Society was at the cusp of vast social change. Multiculturalism and diversity soon became dirty words, and a culture war and strong backlash against political correctness swept America.

Gays in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York were creating communities and gaining political strength.. Women and minorities were rising to political office and the corporate suite. Immigration, economic isues, the apartheid movement were making news. Ethnic studies in universities continued to grow and expose students to broader U.S. history. A former colleague, the late gay journalist Randy Shilts, was breaking the first stories on AIDs. I was writing stories on the Japanese American internment during World War II, including my family's history at Manzanar, and the political fight for monetary redress from the U.S. government. During the 1984 presidential race, I landed an interview with Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, the most controversial and polarizing figure of that election year.

The nation was divided. Volatile social issues seemed to be everywhere, and I wondered at the time if the country would ever change or heal.

Dave Eggers, Another American Writer Winging Across Borders in That Global Way

 

CHRIST, AND THEN came Dave Eggers, just nominated for a National Book Award for his new novel, A Hologram for the King. Where does that transcultural dude fit? How do we define him? He's a cipher and a chameleon, beyond typecasting. Was he born that way, flying Lady Gaga-like from the loins of all global writers? He not only bashes borders, he transcends them, reshapes them.

The Rise of Global American Writers, or Will Ethnic Literature Still Be Ghettoized?

 

SO JAZZED THAT American writers of more hues and cultures are winning wide recognition and critical acclaim, including Junot Diaz, Dinaw Mengestu, Krys Lee, and others who are eroding borders and shaping a new fictional language.  They represent a new generation of global urban writers who speak with much flava and authenticity.  They're the progeny of Sandra Cisneros and Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe.  A polyglot, mulatto, mashed-up crew of young writers who reflect a dynamic world spirit that only will grow.  No brush-painting in that cloying, annoying, colonial voice that old-school publishers loved to court.  Are modern-day demographics, cultures and commerce finally converging, creating what journalist Guy Garcia has called the "new mainstream"?  Will "ethnic lit" no longer be ghettoized?  Are outsiders the new insiders?  Is exotic the new norm?  Are the "other" now us?  And can we stop using the word diaspora?  For those who yearn for more literature of all shades, we've been waiting a lifetime for the rise of the next-gen global literati.  I have no doubt that we're at the cusp of a new cultural ethos.

 "Junot Diaz" by Christopher Peterson, via Creative Commons license on Wikimedia Commons.

Remember 9/11 and the Lives Lost

 

Editor's note: Here is a compilation of 9/11 photos from Flickr in recent years. This post originally appeared  on Sept. 11, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Soldiers Remember 9-11" by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Adam M. Stump, under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

 

Paris Street Artist, Photographer JR Creates Global Public Art on Soulful, Human Scale

 

 

From "JR in LA" by Lord Jim (Stefan Kloo), under a Creative Commons license on flickr. Kloo is a German photographer in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

 

 

 

Editor's note: An earlier version of this blog post was published last year.

 

UNLIKE ART HANGING in galleries, street art has the mojo to smash class boundaries and cultural biases. The eye-opening work of JR, the Paris-based photographer and artist, can be found in France's slums, Brazil's favelas and other impoverished areas. The pieces are large and looming, but still connect on a soulful, human scale. This is public art that people embrace -- not pretend to enjoy, to be polite. All are welcome, and they pass on the spirit. In his new film, Women Are Heroes (see below), a proud old matriach says: "I won't be here, but that doesn't matter. Others may benefit."

 

From JR's Web site : "JR owns the biggest art gallery in the world. He exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not the museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit."

From the TED video (below), after the global think tank awarded JR $100,000 last year: "I'm not trying to change the world," he says. "But you know when I see a smile up there in the favelas, or down there in Cambodia, in a way I feel like I achieved my goal."

(Photo, above) "Freeze, You're Being Filmed" by Miguel 77, under a Creative Commons license on flickr. JR artwork at the Tate Modern national art museum in London, England. 

 

Entrepreneurship and Immigration: One Japanese American Family's Tale

 

The San Jose Taiko group performed last year at the San Jose Buddhist Temple's annual Japanese obon festival in Silicon Valley, California, U.S.A. Video on YouTube courtesy of TravelWithChris.

Editor's note:  Summer is festival time for Japanese Americans, who honor the memories of their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. I republish this blog post each year in honor of my late parents, grandparents and family spirits. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.

  

 

THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.  Like the legendary industrialist  Henry Ford  (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.

 

THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke   University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

 

BOOKS: Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs & Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy by Edward Iwata

 

Updated Sept. 2012:  Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs & Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy, a new e-book by award-winning American journalist Edward Iwata, can be found at Amazon's Kindle Store, Apple's iTunes and iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Diesel eBookStore, Kobo, Mark Coker's Smashwords, the Sony Reader Store, and other e-book retail and library channels.*  Fusion Entrepreneurs is distributed by Smashwords, an independent e-book distributor in Silicon Valley.  Thank you for reading and supporting all digital and traditional authors, bookstores, and publishers.  Readers keep our craft alive.  

 

(Cover art by Edel Rodriguez, an acclaimed Cuban American artist/illustrator whose work can be found in the Smithsonian Institution, private galleries, the New Yorker, Time magazine and the New York Times.)

 

* Note:  If you're new to e-books, ideally you'll need an e-reader device or tablet (an Amazon Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, an Apple iPad, etc.) from your favorite e-book retailer. Or you can download free reading "apps" (small software applications) from the stores right into most laptops, desktop computers, and mobile devices.  This will let you read e-books bought from those stores.  Like anything else, this is only confusing the first time for non-techies.  After you get hooked, it's smooth as butter.

 

Mexican Writer Carlos Fuentes Dies at 83: "If You Do Not Name, No One Will Name"

 

ROLE MODELS IN literature and journalism were scarce for me when I was growing up. Even through my 20s, as a young reporter out of college, few writers who reflected my reality were published widely in U.S. mainstream fiction and non-fiction. At first I read John Cheever and John Updike, as far from the 'hood in L.A. as I was from soirees in the Hamptons. Homeboy, Run. Then I read global writers based in other countries for inspiration. Strong, bold voices such as Salman Rushdie, Yukio Mishima, James Baldwin. One of those writers, Carlos Fuentes, the renowned Mexican novelist and journalist, died on Tuesday. If you wanna blow your mind, try reading Terra Nostra, his epic global novel to end all novels. Oddly, that morning I was digging through musty boxes in the closet when I found an old, yellowed manuscript that I hadn't touched in 21 years. Big psychological block there. The epigraph I had chosen to guide readers into the manuscript was by Fuentes. It goes:

 

"What is your name? What is the name of this mountain, this river? Who are your father and mother? Who are your brothers? . . . If you do not name, no one will name."

 - Carlos Fuentes, "The Novel of the Americas: Dreaming in Spanish."

 

• Paris Review, "Carlos Fuentes, the Art of Fiction No. 68," interview by Alfred Mac Adam and Charles E. Ruas.
  
• Daily Beast, "Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's Universal Man of Letters, Dies at 83" by Mac Margolis.
• NPR, "A Fleeting Memory of Carlos Fuentes" by Linton Weeks.
• LATimes, "Carlos Fuentes dies at 83" by Reed Johnson and Ken Ellingwood.

 

 

Photo credit: Carlos Fuentes at the Miami Bookfair International, 1987. Photo courtesy of MDCarchives, under a Creative Commons license on Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Jeremy Lin of New York Knicks: Smart, Athletic Asian Dude Smashes Stereotypes

 

Highlights of NBA guard Jeremy Lin when he starred at Harvard University. Video courtesy of HarvardAthletics channel on YouTube.

 

LINSANITY, YOU BETCHA. Wrote long ago that Jeremy Lin and Asian Americans could hoop it up. Lin, a New York Knicks point guard extraordinaire via Harvard University and Palo Alto High School in Silicon Valley, is tearing up the National Basketball Association. Shaq calls him a "baby Nash" (as in Phoenix Suns superstar guard Steve Nash) who thrives at moving the ball around and making his teammates better. It's no coincidence that Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni coached Nash for many years in Phoenix, when the Suns were playoff contenders.

Lin's star turn doesn't surprise me -- or ColorLines writer Jamilah King, Disgrasian's Jen Wang, former Oakland Tribune editor Bill Wong, and the HuffingtonPost's Dan Treadway-- who show real depth and diversity of thought in their stories. I'm only surprised at how long it's taken b-ballers of Asian descent to make it in the pros. Yellows have played hoops at a high level since the 1940s, when hot-shooting guard William "Woo Woo" Wong starred at the University of San Francisco and Japanese American Wat Misaka played briefly for the Knicks. Raymond Townsend (part Filipino) and Rex Walters (part Japanese) also starred for many years in the NCAA and NBA. And many have played in schools and community leagues on the West Coast for nearly a century.