In the Japanese American National Museum Store lives a five-generation family of teas, dressed in colorful labels, snuggling tin-to-tin on the shelf they call home. This flavorful family is the realization of Retail Director Maria Kwong’s more-than-a-decade-long dream to bring custom tea to the… Read full post »

*Update 3/16* If you watch just one Alexandra Wallace response video, make it this music video by Jimmy Wong

In one weekend, a video posted by UCLA student Alexandra Wallace exploded all over YouTube, spurring responses in only a matter of hours, ranging from public service announcement-ty… Read full post »

Writing, as it works out for me, involves a lot of time staring at blank space—the lined emptiness of notebook pages, or more often dauntingly white Word documents and input fields. In these moments, writing is more struggle than pleasure.

One afternoon, a writer friend and I both had assignmen… Read full post »

Adult film sensation Hideo Yutani of Paul Kikuchi’s most recent play, Wrinkles, isn’t what comes to mind when anyone imagines a porn star.

Under his stage name, Yutani has managed to make it in one of the most lucrative brands of fetish pornography in Japan. His “acting… Read full post »

When I was little, my mom used to make osechi ryori, the set of traditional good luck Japanese foods, for us at New Year’s. I remember tiered serving dishes, sweet kuromame black beans, and little inch-long fish covered in a sticky glaze with their eyes still in place. By the time… Read full post »

One of my great aunts died this week. She was in her late 80s, an age that another of our elderly family friends once called something that translates like "an age you can't complain about dying at," and she had been sick for almost as long as I can remember. To… Read full post »

This is my daruma.

For those who've never seen one of these guys before,  they're Japanese dolls made of papier mache and named for Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism (dharma --> daruma... get it?). 

The story of the daruma doll in a nutshell is that it's an object of… Read full post »

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Before I could read Ramona Quimby books on my own, or even before I could write sentences, it's something I remember always being able to declare confidently. My parents used to read to me at night and, in love with books, I… Read full post »

Last summer, I took a trip to visit a friend at her college, a college best known as one of the country's biggest party schools, no matter how many statistics about program rankings and Nobel laureate faculty members my (brilliant journalist) friend lists to defend its honor.

By the end… Read full post »

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There's a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase "hapa haole" ("half white"), the… Read full post »