Maintaining, Exporting, Protecting Racism
When the Amerasian School of Okinawa opened its doors in 2003, it already opened amidst controversy. I will not go into any details about most of it here. But my point in bringing this up is the particular criticism that this would further the divide between “ordinary” Okinawans, and mixed-race Okinawans fathered by American military personnel, American civilians, and other non-Okinawans.
VIDEO: Eric Robinson of Black Tokyo – Race & Identity in Japan
I am featured, along with Black-Okinawan thinker Mitzi-Uehara Carter, in the latest edition of Black Tokyo‘s Vlog at Youtube.
This edition features issues whiteness, blackness and Japanese-ness in relation to Race and Identity in Japan.
Reflecting on the election of Ariana Miyamoto as Miss Universe Japan in 2015, Eric points to various critiques, insights, and conditions that construct the definitions of social change, Japan and Japanese-ness, and the roles of mixed-race-ness in Japanese society, whether influencing Japan or not.
Also: Visit Eric Robinson’s BLACK TOKYO blog here: http://www.blacktokyo.com
My Early Puzzling racial questions……..
When I run into and get to know mixed-race American-Japanese people in the U.S., most of the time, they mention histories of being confused about who they were, their identity. Although, let’s say out of fifty persons I knew, seven or eight of them did not tell me that they questioned their identity, about confusion, the others did. I am one who never had any questions of who I was. But I also began noticing that those who questioned their identity, were mostly born in the United States, or left Japan as a child, before they could form too many sentences. Since American-ness is a place of individuals disconnected from communities, where people must craft their intimacies and friendships and relations, it began to dawn on me that this was not a surprise.
Equally so, was that I was quite sure of who I was and never questioned who I was or what I was.
Beiging & Dream: Two of my WORKS to be PUBLISHED this year!
Very Very Happy to Report: two of my works will be published this year!! Both are *Definitely* on Track, on Time, and will happen (barring destruction of the publishing house).
In June, I will have a chapter in the anthology of mixed-race people in America, entitled: The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century. It has some very powerful authors in it, of many racial and national backgrounds, sexual and gender identities, of various generations.
Final proof is being edited as we speak.
In November, after six long years of creative struggle after turning in my book to the publisher, my long-awaited book: Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, will be released. Yes!
The Final proofs and images are being edited and are being put in after being finalized, and waiting for the Introduction and Afterword to be finalized as well. After this, there will be a final go-over by the chief editor and myself, and then it will be printed!
To be honest, since my publisher, for both of these works, is a small independent publisher, the marketing and promotion will mostly fall on me.
Please contact me if you can write a REVIEW for publishing in another publication or online site (or know of someone who is interested and can get published), or if you can plan a promotional reading by me (alone or on a panel or in a group), or help out in any other way.
Let me know if you need more info.
MY BOOK: Update! – ENTIRE PROOF going through!
My BOOK is, for the FIRST TIME in six years of being in the works with the publisher, is ON TRACK!
For the first time, the ENTIRE manuscript has been proofed and is being reviewed for final edits and placement of photos. This has never happened! So it is going to be ready by next fall!
The many photos need to be placed throughout the book in the right places, the captions need to be cleaned up, and then the Index needs to be done.
While this is going on, those doing extra chapters such as the Introduction, will be able to read the manuscript and write their pieces for the Front Matter.
So it feels GOOD to finally be in the “BOOK IS HAPPENING” stage, and no longer in the start-and-stop phase.
My BOOK will be RELEASED next year: November 2017
The book is taking longer but it will be better when it comes out! Thanks for your patience.
Biracial Athletes in Japan – an article in Japan Times
Here is a recent article in relation to my last post, about biracial athletes in Japan:
Young Black-Japanese Volleyball
The Rio Olympics have come and gone! Although I know that like many other global events such as the Olympics, is made possible through the displacement of underclass communities and in many cases, a stress on ecologies and linked to economic-social-ecological ruin for the local, and at the same time linked with benefits for a certain few, there is the ideal, the spectacle, the beauty and tragedy of sport, of different world cultures, of the striving toward excellence.
The next summer Olympics is slated for Tokyo in 2020. As one born in Japan, and raised there twice in my younger life, and with Japanese being my first language until I was fully bilingual as a teenager, I have a special place for Japan and Japanese sport. My chosen sport was volleyball. I learned basic skills from young teenager players at a Japanese Junior national team public practice in Japan, after I had first been attracted to volleyball in Hawaii in the mid-1960s. I continued in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a player and later as a player at Long Beach City College in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1970s. Volleyball in Japan, in the 1960s, was the most popular women’s sport, and there was a ブーム (boom, or explosion in popularity) in those days, and due to the popularity of the National Women’s Team that had gone undefeated in years and in 1962, had won the world championships and ending with the Gold Medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, against bigger, taller opponents. “Witches of the Orient” (東洋の魔女) as they were called, became an attraction to me and later became a reality for me in Hawaii in 1966, upon seeing volleyball there.
T-Tasha / Yoon-Mi-Rae : Korean Rap/Hip-Hop/R&B QUEEN
Tasha – or Yoon Mi Rae in Korea, alternatively known as “T-Tasha”— is definitely South Korea’s greatest Hip-Hop/Rap/R&B or more accurately: K-R&B artist. Her heritage is African-American/Korean, and is in my other posts and the purpose of this whole blog site, her experiences growing up in Korea were full of the prejudiced, racist violence against her.
Often, these lives produce tremendous artistic expression.
This is a 9-year-old video. She was a teenager and still, you can sense how good she is.
This song seeks to empower Black-Korean girls, recorded live off of Korean television, entitled: Wonder Woman.
I will post more of her videos later.
Enjoy.
