Delayed by about a year, and held wholly online, Okaeri Los Angeles held its fourth conference to connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Nikkei and their allies from across the country. The two-day conference, held over Zoom meetings, featured presentations on mental health, the state of the campaign for marriage equality in Japan, and […]
Creating Space For Queer Nikkei: Okaeri holds online conference to educate and form community
December 9, 2021 by Leave a Comment
U.S.-based soccer player Yokoyama comes out as transgender
June 24, 2021 by Leave a Comment
TOKYO — Japanese forward Kumi Yokoyama, who plays for the Washington Spirit in the U.S.-based National Women’s Soccer League, has come out as transgender in a YouTube video. “In the future, I want to quit soccer and live as a man,” the 27-year-old said in a 19-minute video published on fellow Japanese player Yuki Nagasato’s […]
NIKKEI Q: The pronoun revolution
January 1, 2021 by Leave a Comment
In January 2016, more than 300 linguists, lexicographers, grammarians and etymologists — all members of the 127-year-old American Dialect Society — gathered at the Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. where members honored “they” as the 2015 word of the year. The anointment was more than an obscure event held by word nerds, but instead indicated […]
L.A. ministers criticize anti-gay policy of United Methodist Churches
April 11, 2019 by Leave a Comment
LOS ANGELES — Disturbed by the United Methodist Church’s continuing anti-gay stance, Revs. Mark Nakagawa and Sunyoung Lee, two local ministers with connections to Little Tokyo’s Centenary United Methodist Church, publicly criticized that decision and declared their continued support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer persons. The controversy followed the United Methodist Church’s Special […]
Queering the inquiry of Asian American art
July 19, 2018 by Leave a Comment
QUEERING CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ART Edited By Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017, 296 pp., $90 hardcover; $40 paperback) This anthology grows out of a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored Summer Institute held at New York University in 2012, co-directed by Margo Machida and Alexandra Chang and entitled, “Re-Envisioning […]
Japanese American becomes majority owner of LGBTQ newspaper
January 4, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Michael Yamashita, 51, publisher of the Bay Area Reporter, a San Francisco-based LGBTQ newspaper, became the newspaper’s majority owner, the publication announced Dec. 21, 2017. According to the B.A.R., Yamashita becomes the nation’s first gay Asian American publisher and owner of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer newspaper. Yamashita, who previously owned 31 percent […]
ENTERTAINMENT RE-ORIENTED: #Thiswas2016
January 1, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“When the house is going up in flames, does what’s on the TV matter?” That’s the question I kept asking myself as I sat down to write this year-end column. In October, Michael Luo, then an editor for The New York Times, was accosted on the street by a woman yelling, “Go back to China!” […]
Transgender Americans are terrified of Trump
November 17, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Those who have seen me reporting for the paper may have noticed over the last four months that I am a transgender woman. I did not explicitly advertise this fact, given that my gender does not matter when I’m working on an assignment. The stories I write, after all, are not about me. However, with […]
Activism in reporting
In 2016, I penned an op-ed describing the fear many in the transgender community felt following the election of President Donald Trump. We rushed to process paperwork for gender change requests and name changes, stocked up on medications and braced for the worst. A little over six years on, we continue to survive, but each […]