speach tree

DW found me an article by Michio Kaku (famous physicist on string theory and - apparently - sometime anti-racist cultural critic) anayzing the history of racist Asian imagery/stereotypes in U.S. comics! Amazing! and I am also reading a feature article in the Japanese magazine, PEN with New Attitude, about the history of world comics and its impact on Japanese manga! The analysis, to come.

This is turning into a weekly installment brought to you from Wall Street... J-Class! ...I need to think of a more catchy name for it... Operation Asian Sabotage... hmmm, too Fu Manchu. After this Tuesday's class, I decided to try to write a post about performing/entertaining for my students in after-school. Basically, my supervisor keeps telling me that I can't expect to turn out fluent speakers by June. We meet for basically an hour once a week to learn whatever we can while eating pizza or mochi after being in school since 8am. What can we possibly do in such little time? (The answer, of course, is a lot, but first...) I am worried that in the absence of real material, I am basically performing a racialized culture of "Japaneseness" for the entertainment of my students and for the agency that employs me, instead of being a facilitator/educator. There are a few reasons why I feel this way: My students see me as Japanese. And I am. But that's not the only thing t...

(10/8/07) I’m actually writing this the day after Day 2 before I head to Day 3 because last night, after the convention, I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening at Party for the People in BK. (It was excellent, but that is a different post entirely.) After P4P (or PftP as it is also known) I spent the night snacking and chatting with my room-mates DW and RL, and DW’s sister and our friend JW, aka Janejane. JW asked a lot of fun questions about my recent (?) interest in anime/manga, since we hadn’t talked in a minute. So I decided to talk here a little bit about what I’m trying to do. This is true of a lot of pop culture media but anime/manga (as most people in the US know it today) is full of the problematic gender/race/class stereotypes that permeate its source society (Japan/USA). A lot of people in the U.S. today think that anime has something to do with crazy big-eyed and impossibly skinny animated characters often involved in either magical/fantasy fighting scenarios or octopus ...