Each July during Obon, Japanese Americans gather in the Nishi Hongwanji Temple gym to buy udon. Under the basketball hoops, they slurp noodles out of Styrofoam bowls before wandering back into the cooling night to dance Obon odori, pacing ovals in the parking lot, waving uchiwa, those round paper fans …
I love those parts that seem incompatible but that, in a person, come together.
Until I went to Japan, I’d talked to my uncle only twice: once when my Japanese grandmother died, and again when my grandfather did.
I work at a Japanese-American community newspaper where, every Halloween, we have the same conversation. Then something happens — like Katy Perry gives a performance, or a fraternity has a theme party — and we have the conversation again. If I had strong feelings in the beginning, they’ve been numbed …
When I tell people about my year in Japan, I tell the best parts. The unexpected shrines in the middle of city blocks. The chestnut cakes that sweetened bitter tea. The wooden temples that stood so tall I could bend my neck back and barely see the place where they …
One of my great aunts died this week [Note: This article was written in September 2010]. 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 …
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.
Journal feed
