For 12 years, Jake Adelstein was embroiled in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo crime and nightlife, spending late nights schmoozing with police, conducting investigations at brothels and fielding death threats from the Japanese mafia. Adelstein himself, however, was not in law enforcement or a criminal. Rather, from 1993 to 2005, Adelstein worked as a crime […]
Arts & Entertainment
ENTERTAINMENT RE-ORIENTED: Race and Reality: The ‘Balloon Boy,’ Jon & Kate
October 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment
On Wednesday last week, a six-year-old hapa boy captured the attention of the world when it was reported that he was trapped in a homemade helium balloon floating 15,000 feet in the air. Falcon Heene, dubbed “the balloon boy,” replaced President Obama’s New Orleans town hall meeting as the day’s big story on cable news. […]
Military Service and Legal Challenges: Martial Law in Hawaii
October 8, 2009 by Leave a Comment
(Note: The following is an excerpt from the book “A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America,” published by Columbia University Press) Intimately connected to the confinement of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry was the denial of civil rights to all civilians, Japanese Americans and others, under wartime military dictatorship in Hawaii. Although there […]
SFMOMA’s First Postwar Japanese Photography Exhibit Charts the Evolution of Japanese Art and Society
October 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment
A young woman sitting in a garden, her kimono pulled back defiantly to reveal a single naked breast. A stray dog, glaring menacingly, teeth bared. A woman’s head, eyes gaping, jammed beneath the armpit of a muscular man, seemingly detached from her body but very much alive. These are images from postwar Japan as seen […]
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