Author Archives: Lisa F.

The Environment

…Hello?

Can anyone hear me? Shit. My head is pounding. How did I get here? Ow, my legs. I can’t move them. I think I just woke up from being unconcious. I think I was suppose to die. Where am I? Wheres Oliver? Where’s that woman that Oliver hangs out with? Agh I can’t hear anything.

Let me see if I can remember anything…

I remember Her getting angry about something and I was sleeping so soundly but the way she got angry scared me so bad that I couldn’t help but jump and run somewhere where I felt safe. I stepped outside and felt the brisk, salt filled air against my face and it made my usual wet nose into something as dry as the food that I eat on occasion. It was a pretty clear night from what I remember, I felt so safe when I finally left that house, I felt like maybe I should go for a quick stroll before going back to bed because I was feeling particularly lucky. Maybe I could find a juicy pest to snack on… Man, that thought is making me hungry. Was that the last time I ate?

I walked along the moist grass and I could feel my paws falling into mud puddles on occasion. For a while, I could hear the sounds of the ocean waves, coming in and then going out, coming in and then going out. I heard a rustle in the huckleberry bushes and pounced on the most plump mole rat I had ever seen, oh my god I was so excited and just remembering this is making all this pain feel better but I think before I ate that plump mole rat, he made a wish while he died and that wish had come true.

Right, I was surrounded by four raccoons. Man those creatures are nasty, I’ve heard people admire how cute they are but truly, I find them to be annoying and disgusting. I could NEVER just rummage through garbage looking for something, let alone something to EAT. Well, they came for me, because that was the mole rats wish and that’s the last thing I remember. I vaguely remember crawling back toward the house, but where I am now… it smells like my house but somehow I am not in my house…?

It’s dark. I’m cold. I really can’t move my legs and I can’t feel my tail. Am I okay to just die here?

What was that?

Is that the woman I hear? Is that Oliver’s Woman? Am I smelling Oliver?! Oliver! I try to meow but I can’t. My mouth is parched. I open my eyes a little more and notice the cracks of light coming down. I don’t know where I am, I really don’t. Oh please Oliver, please just see me please please please. I opened my eyes more, hoping that the suns reflection will turn my eyes into another beam of light.

Something is coming. But it smells familiar. It’s Oliver. Oh thank god.

Careful with the tail there.

Identity

To whoever may read this sad letter,

There was one thing I wanted to confess, just in case kamisama misinterpreted some of the actions that I had been partaking in the last few days. If someone were to have watched me the way we watch T.V. but with no back-story, then they would most likely think that I am father with feelings of incest toward my daughter but I wanted to make it clear that this is not the case and I was truly just trying to help. But even then, I still feel like I have committed a sin.

You see, my daughter and I share the family computer, and I know that anytime my daughter logs off the computer, she clears her cache but one night she forgot to do it and I ended up seeing something that made me cry harder than I think I have ever cried before.

I knew she was being picked on in school but I didn’t or more like, I couldn’t even imagine that it was going this far.

It fills me with disgust to even say this but my daughter’s blood soaked underwear was being auctioned off. Can you believe this? I couldn’t believe that some people could be filled with so much hatred to do that to another human being, let alone to someone like my precious daughter. I felt like I had only once choice to help and this is where I am scared that my actions may have been misinterpreted. I made an account on this website: C.imperator (Ah, I love the internet, I love how I can hide myself and be something as strong as a Staghorn Beetle) and I put in my bid. I started bidding not because of hentai feelings for my daughter but I wanted to save her innocence. I couldn’t let the perverts  of the world wide web to mercilessly steal that innocence away from her. I didn’t have much money but I continued to bid higher and higher and hoping and hoping that these terrible people who were bidding on her underwear would just give up and stop, I wanted to scream “SHE’S MY DAUGHTER. STOP. PLEASE STOP.” My palms were so sweaty and I was shaking so much from fear and anxiety. This was my one chance to do right by my daughter, to save her.

And yet… I lost.

maketa.

And I find myself realizing that maybe I’m not as strong as a Staghorn Beetle. But maybe I will be in my next life.

Sincerely,

Loss

Hi Kayla, :)

Hi, do you remember me? I know it’s been a while since we’ve emailed each other but I wanted to open up to you and honestly tell you about how much I miss you and Sunnyvale and how hard life has been since I moved back to Japan. I decided to be honest with you because I know that although you might read this, it probably won’t sink into your head or you’ll probably just ignore it like you had been doing with the last few emails I sent you a while ago. I don’t even know if this is your email address anymore to be honest.

I know before I told you about Japan’s crazy fashion, but to be perfectly honest, I really don’t have the sort of money to afford those sorts of clothing, as a matter of fact, as cute as you may have found my school uniform, I actually get made fun of a lot because my classmates think I look weird in it. They tease me a lot. They say I smell like a foreigner so I thought it would be best if I didn’t send you a “manga style” uniform because I think you’d probably get made fun of for wearing it a lot and you would probably smell like a foreigner like me.

I really miss Sunnyvale and I think Dad misses it too. I am feeling so lost right now because I don’t have any friends here like I did in Sunnyvale but even then, lately I’ve been questioning the sort of friendships I had back home and have come to realize that maybe I never really had any real friends there either but still… At least people pretended to be my friend there and didn’t harass me all the time. I’ve been trying to be strong about it but sometimes it’s really hard. I feel like I am constantly at battle with not only my classmates but within myself. Maybe you were only my friend because I was Japanese but I felt like you still listened to what I had to say, we would both just bitch about things together and that felt nice.

This is going to be my final email to you by the way, sorry I should have mentioned that earlier. I’m going to be gone soon but I don’t really want to define what “gone” means just in case you worry (which I doubt you will). I guess all I really wanted to say to you was… Well… I don’t really know. I think I just felt like reaching out to you because you were a special person in my life for a while and maybe you should know that.

Friends, not friends, that’s same thing right?

-Nao

Mississippi Massala

“Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.”

This quote really resonated with me and I say this because I feel as though this is the struggle that people like me have had to deal with throughout my life. How, no matter how much we may love our current country that we have called home, at the end of the day, if we look any different from the major race of that country then we truly cannot call that place our home.

Home is where the heart is though right? Well, yes and I agree with this to a certain point but for me, home is where I can lay in my bed, home is where I can walk down 4th ave and recognize members of the community. I can only how devastating of an experience it would to be kicked out of a place you call home because of the way you look. For me, what happened to the Indians in Uganda was very similar to the treatment of Japanese Americans in the United States during WWII.

I can understand how it’s understandable how Mina’s parents were opposed to her dating an African American possibly because of the history that they had with Africans in the past because my Japanese family reacted very similarly to my father when my mother first introduced him to the family. My mother said that if her father had been alive, he would never allow for her to marry my dad because of my grandfathers experience during WWII.

 

Final Influence

Within the American cartoon world, there has always been cartoons that don’t show enough female representation. If there is female representation, it is either societies overexageration of feminity or the representation is  very far and few. Throughout the 1990′s, most cartoons had a predominantly male cast with one to four (if we are lucky) different female characters. The lack of representation doesn’t lie within just cartoons but throughout our modern American pop culture.

Cartoons are a thing made predominantly for children but just because it’s catered toward children, it doesn’t mean that cartoons are not important to the development of a child’s brain. Cartoons are one of the first things a tiny human being is going to see. It is important from a young age to teach girls that they ARE strong. That they don’t need to be rescued like their Disney princess counterparts.

Forgive me for incorporating Beyonce into this, seeing as Beyonce doesn’t have much to do with anime, but I wanted to quote the woman who was featured in her most recent song “Flawless” and I am going to use this lens as a way to compare the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her lecture “We Should All Be Feminists” with Sailor Moon.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.” 

What Sailor Moon has taught me was to NOT make myself small. This show was one of the first in which it told me that I can be just as strong as any boy because Sailor Moon and her female soldiers were risking their lives and the safety of the world rested on THEIR shoulders and no one else’s. They fought battles on a daily basis and received cuts and bruises like none other, and even to the point of taking on missions where they KNEW that they were most likely going to be killed, yet they went into the mission with their heads held up high and came out victorious.

“We say to girls, ”you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man”

One of Sailor Mercury’s biggest dream was to be the best doctor in the world. When she wasn’t fighting crimes, she was constantly studying and always made sure to never forget her studies because she understood that in order to be a successful doctor, one needs the best education that they can get. With this dream of hers, no one ever questioned her gender. Not even the men that would rarely appear on the show, as a matter of fact, most of the men applauded her brains and her effort.

Tuxedo Mask is the only male character who is featured as a main character and while this character occasionally helps with missions, more often than not, he turns out to be the damsel in distress and Sailor Moon has to save him quite often. He never questions his masculinity either and instead is grateful for the Sailor Soldiers in helping him.

“Because I am female I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.”

Shows will always have some sort of layer of problems. It’s really  hard to avoid and to try and please everyone is sometimes impossible. I am more than happy to admit that Sailor Moon does push for an aspiration towards marriage whereas the other shows produced for young boys during that time did not have the same message. Yet there are other characters in this show like Mercury, Uranus and Neptune et cetera who do not have the same aspirations as the other soldiers do to marriage.

“We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or for accomplishments which I think can be a good thing. But for the attention of men.”

I couldn’t agree more. In Sailor Moon S, with the introduction of Neptune and Uranus, everyone is competing to find the “purest soul” and it’s either for  themselves or for the safety of the world. Very rarely does this show showcase the soldiers fighting for the attention of a man, and on the occasion that this does happen, it is always featured in a fill-in episode and is not of huge importance to the major plot of any season.

I know for some people they find shows like Sailor Moon disgusting and that it showcases underage girls wearing school girl uniforms with their panties flashing and over-sized breasts but I feel as though this is a very shallow way of viewing this show in particular and other cartoon shows that might feature something similar to the Magical Girl fgenre. Sailor Moon was catered specifically for young girls. Not for men (although all are welcome to watch). This may seem like a harsh opinion but for me it is the men who take a show as innocent as this and make it into a pedophiliac fantasy. I say this because I identify as a feminist, and I have the right to behave however I want, I have the right to wear whatever I want and I do not want to live my life where I am constantly being policed on how I behave simply because I am a woman and Sailor Moon has played a major role in my influencing who I am and what I stand for today.

Sailor Moon is more than just school girl uniforms, it’s about strength, and the unity that comes with friendships. This show is devised of an assortment of characters and all of them are very different from each other, but instead of focusing negatively on their differences, they utilize that difference and work together to overcome either the antagonist or conquering something within their own personal lives. This is so important for the development of a young girl in this modern age. There are more cartoons with the damsel in distress trope than there are of empowered women in cartoons. Don’t even get me started on the lack of women of color in cartoons. (As a side note, because I don’t want to get too heavily into this but just to let everyone know, Sailor Moon is not white.)

In conclusion, shows like Sailor Moon has influenced our pop culture in the United States. With shows like The Powerpuff Girls, or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic  it is very obvious to me on how these shows connect with each other. Whether its the Powerpuff Girls fighting crime or the My Little Pony gang coming together in building a strong friendship despite their differences.

Kato and Enter the Dragon

Probably one of my favorite scenes in Enter the Dragon was the scene where Lee is on the boat with the other fighters going to Mr. Han’s island. More specifically I really enjoy it when Lee explains that his fighting style is “fighting with no fighting.” I think I found it more enjoyable because of how Kato describes it as a way to be in solidarity with the other Chinese workers on the ship. Also I believe “fighting with no fighting” is something that should be incorporated in our day to day lives at times. It’s kind of like saying that actions speak louder than words and by Lee putting Parsons on a small boat and threatening to let go of the rope shows to me a higher class way of being the boss. Fighting with no fighting represents cleverness. Checkmate.

“…”Lee,” however, maintains the transcendental state of calmness, as if ego has been liquidated from the outset of the combat.” (128)  While I agree with Lee’s calmness during his fight with Ohara, in some ways, I was able to see at times his passion and his anger he was holding inside as he was fighting him. It wasn’t until the end that Lee produces this face (pictured below) where he looks as though he is going to cry. As if this isn’t the way Kungfu should be fought.

sadbrucelee

Communication Theme

The other day I was talking to my room mate about how a restaurant I went to once a long time ago, had a mini flat screen television at every single table so that patrons can watch T.V. while they ate their meals. I turned on the T.V. but only for five or so minutes because I couldn’t stand that me and my partner at the time were just not communicating to each other and just zoned out on the T.V. Then I started thinking though, how is a mini flat screen any different from the smart phones that we carry in our pocket?

I work in the service industry at a restaurant, and I find myself noticing more and more that patrons are starting to communicate less to one another in real life and becoming more and more attached to their phones, most likely communicating to other people outside of where they are at the time.

If it weren’t for things like social media, I think I would have less friends. I wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with people I have met in my life. This even goes for my family. I remember growing up feeling so sad that I rarely communicated with my cousins or family in Japan but now with social media and other outlets, I can now stay in touch with them very easily.

So it’s weird though that even though a cell phone, or texting in some ways brings us closer to each other but in other ways it distance us from other people too.

Communication in this book is so prominent, whether it’s Nao communicating with her grandmother via text messaging, to Nao communicating with Ruth through her diary, or how the post mistress communicates with the entire town about Ruth’s finding. When you think about someone or something aging, some things that come to mind is the loss of something, whether it’s memory or freshness but as our world gets older, it’s developing newer ways to communicate yet the communication is losing it’s meaning more and more due to the newer findings (some people argue that communicating over the internet is shallow). Like Jiko, as she becomes older, she is communicating less (she is of few words) yet what she says is very meaningful and can be interpreted in different ways.

Rave culture in Olympia.

So, remember that friend from a post I made a while ago about when I was in the rave scene for a total of two seconds? Well I came across this image on my old friend’s facebook.

I just really wanted to point out how much I loved the essay about trance music in Dave’s book especially going side by side with the image I posted above.

A girl with her “third eye” chakra open, wearing a kimono with cupcakes and weed leaves on it. No. No. No. No.

My name is Lisa

and I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even alive during WWII and you know what? Neither were my parents. But you see, even though this happened 72 years ago, you all keep blaming me in particular for it and I just don’t understand how you can make that sort of accusation. Scientifically, it makes no sense at all.

I hate the 2001 film Pearl Harbor that starred Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. Us Japs killed off that babyface Josh and so many people went wild about this FAKE death. I remember when that movie came out, I was just starting my adventures in A.O.L. chatrooms. When I found out that there was a chatroom for an interest in Japan, my eleven year old self enthusiastically entered one of these chat rooms and when I revealed my ethnic background I was bombarded with messages like :

“YOU KILLED JOSH HARTNETT”

“GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY WE HATE YOU HERE”

“JAP, JAP, JAP, KICK THE JAP OUT OF THE ROOM”

Eleven years old. How can you accuse an eleven year old to have taken part in WWII?

In some ways, I relate to Sameer. I could never tell my family the sort of harassment I was facing when I was young. I only wanted to give them good news about my life. How can I tell my mom that her only daughter was being picked on because I am Japanese. Whether it was in school or on the world wide web, I just had to swallow that pain and hope for the best.

There are so many other harmful stereotypes that different people of different backgrounds have and it needs to stop. Please, stop. I am an American. Just like you.

King of Kowloon

So far, when we have discussed the concept of resistance, one of the ways in which a lot of Asian Americans have resisted assimilation in a subtle way is through food, however I think it’s also interesting that to some extent, another form of resistance is through graffiti.

On page 181, Kato talks about the New York subway system and the graffiti marks on the trains  ”…as a means of communication and aesthetic forum that can be called their own.” (181) I feel as though this statement represents breaking the chain from the corporations that run this country and rising above it and claiming something that is the corporations as theirs. Or in other circumstances, giving a police commissioner a mocking name and tagging that name around public spaces as a means to break from the oppression, racism and power of the police force. (179)

This sort of oppression though is happening all around the world and writing on public walls is a great way to resist, or to voice your anger of what is happening to your community yet unfortunately, it seems as though graffiti is something that the youth is doing and this can be seen as a way of comparing how the sansei within the Japanese American community were angrier on the outside than some of the issei or the nisei. However, I think for someone as old as Tsang Tsou Choi to be engaged in the resistance of the colonization of Hong Kong is incredibly admirable because not only did he try to represent himself in the commotion but he represented a large community of Hong Kong who were also against the colonization.

When you write something down, you have to read it out loud and the way Kato segues into the resistant sounds of Grandmaster Flash and others was really great.