Author Archives: Lisa F.

Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune <3

The time has come to explore this side of Sailor Moon. This is the side of Sailor Moon that most fans are aware of but I wanted to bring some light to those who may not be as big of fan as Sailor Moon as I or others might be.

Ah yes the long awaited topic on the homosexual couple in the Sailor Moon series. Let me give you some back info here, so in “Sailor Moon S” we are introduced to some new characters Haruka Tenou and Michiru Kaio (Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune) who are genius high school students who excel in the actitivies they are passionate in and are ALWAYS together. These characters are known to the Sailor gang as just the most beautiful people they know.

Neptune and Uranus

When we see the characters first appearance out of fighting uniform, Haruka (blonde, short hair) is wearing a boys school uniform and refers to themselves with ‘he’ pronouns.The Sailor crew and the audience go wild for him! Then, it’s revealed that Haruka is actually biologically female and this completely shocks the crew but for how long? Literally a few minutes and then Haruka’s gender is pretty much never mentioned again. The unfortunate side here though is that even though Haruka prefers to wear mens clothing and refers to himself with male pronouns, when he transforms into a Sailor Soldier, he is put into the same uniform as the rest of the soldiers. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable he felt wearing that. :(

The relationship between Haruka and Michiru in the Japanese version only hints to the two’s intimate relationship with each other. We never see them kiss, but they profess quite a few times the type of love they feel for each other and even showing jealousies towards other women or men who flirt with them.

So, how did their relationship change when brought over to America?

LET’S MAKE THEM COUSINS INSTEAD!

*headdesk*

Dark blue states represents legal first cousin marriage

Well when you think about it, that makes sense to change a homosexual relationship into an incestial relationship because marriage by incest is legal in more states than marriage by same sex. Still though, a lot of young kids who were watching the American version scratched their head at this because if these two were cousins then they were REALLY, REALLY into each other and in my opinion, that made me MORE uncomfortable than the version I was watching from Japan.

Cousin Marriage source

Sochi Asian Americans!

I found a great article that highlights some of the Asian American athletes who are participating in the Sochi Winter Olympics.

I am particularly really excited for Julie Chu in the Ice Hockey category. The reason being that not only is she the first Asian American Woman to be playing on the U.S. Hockey team but also that she’s a lady! I hear so much about the masculinity of hockey and all of my super manly friends are all about the hockey fights and I just love that there’s a team of women who can bring there game on!

Here is the article:

http://www.asianfortunenews.com/2014/02/asian-american-athletes-at-winter-olympics-2014-in-sochi/

Unfortunately, there is not a large representation of Asian Americans in the Olympics but at least it’s a start…

Connecting Kato

Who: David Carradine

What: Kungfu

When: 1972- 1975

Where: Hollywood

With the success of Kungfu in American pop culture, it seems like the next step for America to take after kungfu movies is to make a T.V. show about it and showcase it the people of the United States. When I was first reading about it, I really liked the idea of where the show, Kungfu was going to take. Then I get to the part where they go into details about the cast of the show and that’s where I felt very disappointed. As per usual though, I don’t really like to focus too much on the negative side of things so I’ll give it this much, I am glad that they utilized Bruce Lee as a plot consultation, at least they were trying to keep things in the background as close to authentic as they could get it. What I don’t understand the decisions in choosing someone whose white, with no interest in kungfu or martial arts in general to be the face of this show. It reminds me in of the section in Dave with the discussion of shows based in Hawai’i, why does Hollywood always want to put a white face on a completely different culture from their protagonist? And if it’s not a white face they want to portray, then instead they try to caricaturize a person’s culture or just having no mention of someones background at all.

“Nonetheless, such investment was not to introduce “realism” but rather to refine the “prop” with sophistication so that the paradigm of the kung fu genre can be processed” (95)

I understand that television is a way to escape from reality but there have been plenty of television shows in the past that try and talk about real historical events that have happened in the past and even in this day and age we have a whole genre called “reality T.V.” but even then, that genre is so misleading because it’s not reality in a lot of cases. Why does Hollywood claim that they want to show the realistic aspects of life but constantly show lies?

 

POP-ositions

One of the ways in which I can relate the globalization that happens in Kato’s book and modern times is when Kato is talking about when the writing for karate changed.

“…the schools in Tokyo saw that name as inappropriate and altered it’s spelling to “karate” by applying the Japanese phonetic system (hiragana) instead of the Chinese ideogram.” (21 Kato)

The way I see the connection is for instance, in one of Sachi’s blog posts she compares and contrasts the American definition of ‘kawaii’ and the Japanese definition of ‘kawaii’. When you read the blog you notice immediately by looking at the photos of her google image search that there is clearly a different definition for each culture.

Or another example is whenever I meet exchange students from Japan, I like to bring them to places like Happy Teriyaki or Koibito and suggest to them they try the teriyaki. I ask because I know that the type of teriyaki that they are used to in Japan, is not the same flavor of teriyaki that we have in the states. So, while I think that globalization in some ways can be a great thing, by fusing two or more different cultures together, it’s something that one has to be careful of doing. To fuse something together, for me, means to understand both cultures and what they mean and the history behind it, otherwise, rather than globalization, I think it turns into something like stealing from another culture or appropriating another culture and that’s never a good thing.

Martha/Mei-Jun/Kungfu

One of the things that really piqued my interest about these movies is that both of them were both directed by Martha Burr and Mei-Jun Chen and the thing I found most interesting is that they were women who had directed these documentaries about Kungfu. So far, from my understanding, it seems as though this recreation/sport/way of life seems to be predominantly male (although the documentaries did show women and girls doing it) as far as historically speaking. I was really interested in these two women though and what drew them to this so I decided to do a little bit of research.

One thing I learned about Martha Burr was that at one point in her life she was “named the Executive Editor of Kungfu Magazine”
(ITVS.org) and so I was able to better understand why she went on to direct two documentaries about Kungfu in particular.

With Mei-Jun Chen who is a native of Taiwan  founded the Lotus Film Productions and has focused her career on primarily making documentaries. (newvideo.com)

Overall I liked that both documentaries were similar in the ways in which Martha and Mei-Jun obviously wanted to focus on each individuals stories of how they got into Kungfu and the interviewees history with it and what was nice about watching the both of them back to back is that I was able to pick up on some of the similarities in the stories between the films. Even in two different countries and two completely different times, most of these Kungfu masters all at one point in their life saw someone else doing Kungfu and feeling overwhelmed by it, they also wanted to take part in it.

 

Magical Girl Anime: Powerpuff Girls!

On November 18th, 1998 The Powerpuff Girls officially debuted on Cartoon Network in America. I remember being wickedly excited for this because FINALLY there was a show that had three girls as the protagonists and they were super heroes! Doesn’t this sound familiar?

PPG

Sailor Moon!

So not only was Powerpuff Girls a huge hit in the states, by no surprise, it also became very popular in Japan as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unfortunately the day came where the Powerpuff Girls was cancelled over here. However, I don’t think Japan was ready to let go of them yet so what did animators in Japan do?

Powerpuff Girls Z!

That’s right. They went ahead and made their OWN version of Powerpuff Girls. Renamed it to “Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z” (which roughly translated means “They Appeared! The Powerpuff Girls Z!’) and they totally added the missing ingredient that the American version did not use. In the American version, the Powerpuff Girls are just always strong, they were born that way. In the Japanese version however, it’s very hard to make an anime about super strong girls and NOT give them the most famous ingredient in the formula that is magical girl animes: THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You hear a lot about anime within our culture that Japan has imported over to us but the cultural exchange happens with some successful cartoon shows being brought back over there and in this case, taking and making it their own thing. I really love this exchange.

Raves TW drugs

When I was under 21, for about six or so months of my life, I got really into ecstasy. I had always primarily done these drugs just with my friends but one of the last times I ever took it was when I went to my first rave down in Eugene, OR in a forrest. I don’t know if I was more sensitive to my surroundings because of the amount of drugs I had taken but I looked around myself and felt very uncomfortable.

“…for electronic dance music is a largely white, middle-class youth subculture.” (15)

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I remember the people I was close to around that time period were my middle class friends. I remember going to their houses and marveling at how large it was or how nice it looked. If I didn’t have enough money for drugs, then they always seemed to have plenty on hand.

So I went to this rave and the rave even had a name it was called “Where Life Begins”. I thought it was so strange that here I was, partying with a bunch of rich kids and all of them always talked about the meaning of life on an incredibly spiritual level yet when they all gave themselves “rave names”, they all sounded so generic and I felt like there was no depth to it. They dubbed me “Cherry Bomb” and I’m still not sure why.

“Tribal techno and trance offer white American youth a way to reimagine themselves through racialized, and even globalized, nothings of otherness.” (19)

Right, right. That makes sense. Most of these kids wanted to escape the monotony of their ordinary lives, they wanted to escape their suburban houses. Then this other trend started happening within our circle of friends I began to notice:  spiritual tattoos. I have one friend in particular who went as far as getting a quarter sleeve of a Buddha (she never claimed Buddhist either) and then the golden ratio tattoo and then the flower of life. She began collecting these tattoos on her body that was both very spiritual yet on the other side was very mathematics.

I felt so strange at this rave in Oregon because while the music was great, everyone was losing themselves in it. They were reaching this higher dimension of spirituality but they were all either incredibly high on meth, cocaine or ecstasy. I just couldn’t understand attaining a higher spirituality while someone is so high on mostly synthetic drugs.

Needless to say, I didn’t continue long on this road of rave culture.

Can you stop telling me… T.W. ableist language

Hey, so I lived in Hawai’i for  six months in 2012 and you know in a lot of ways, it was great. For the first time in my life, I was finally able to ride a bus, filled to the brim, with people who looked like me. I was able to walk down the street from my house and eat at a restaurant where everyone spoke Japanese and it was the closest food that I could get my hands on that reminded me of food straight from Japan. I was able to work somewhere where I spoke Japanese on the daily basis and it was seen as no big deal.

But you know what? I left. I moved away. I came back home to the Pacific Northwest.

When I first got home, everyone bombarded me with questions, the number one being “why would you leave a tropical paradise to come back to a place like Washington?”

I am tired of this question. I am so angry that there is the expectation that Hawai’i is this place for escape, but when people think of Hawai’i they mostly think about Honolulu or Waikiki and I didn’t live in those places, those places are not only expensive but that place specifically CATERS to tourists only. I lived in Mililani Town. Central Oahu. Right smack dab in the middle where I was far away from the glitz and glamour of a “tropical paradise”. I worked in Pearl Harbor and every morning, I had to wake up at 4 o’ clock in the morning to make my long trek to my bus stop and once at the bus stop, I would be surrounded by abandoned cats begging for food (I on occasion shared my musubi with them), when on the bus it was always at full capacity. I would get on the bus at 5:30 A.M. and my job started at 8 A.M. On days I was able to get a ride from someone, it was only a 20 minute drive. Please let this paint a picture in your mind that traffic is atrocious there. It’s exhausting. And  let that painting equal that the island is far, far too over populated.

Once, I went to the most beautiful beach I had ever seen. However, it was military access only. Locals were NOT allowed to enjoy this beautiful beach. Native Hawaiian Locals were BLOCKED OFF from their own beach. I went once and never wanted to go again. I felt disgusted by myself and friends for having the privilege to enjoy that beach.

I worked as a tour guide in Pearl Harbor. During the summer, I probably gave tours to over 80 people a day. Multiply that by having a staff of at least 10 tour guides and just picture the amount of money that my work place collected and yet every day when I left to go home, I witnessed litter ALL over the island. When I talked to my friends who were locals, they all said that it’s a miracle if someone who attends school in Hawai’i ends up finding themselves in college. My room mates friend was a middle school teacher and when we talked she constantly talked about how awful the school was with materials as well as how “retarded” her students were.

I couldn’t stand working in the tourist industry in some ways. I couldn’t stand that we had so much revenue and it all just went back into the companies so that these people from the mainland could visit this fabricated idea of what Hawai’i is really like.

I’m not saying that the state of Hawai’i is terrible, what I am saying is is that the assimilation that’s happening in Hawai’i through the tourist industry is destructive and sad. Haole Army bro’s telling me that Pidgin is terrible and to never learn it. The rich history of Hawai’i that is being shared with tourists is only seen as this spectacle, like going to the zoo and watching the animals and ‘ooh-ing and aah-ing”.

I was alone in this place that to me was being taken over by an outsider culture and the harsh reality that I am also an outsider was much too much to handle alone.

The Wedding Banquet?

I’m not entirely sure why we have watched two movies that explore the process of coming out to your family as a semi positive experience. I say ‘semi positive’ because in the end, everything is better at the end and the families in both ‘The Wedding Banquet’ and ‘Saving Face’ accept their child’s homosexuality.

I’m not trying to make a generalization here though, I don’t want to state that all families would be much harsher towards their children if they were to come out of the closet but I can say from my experience that the Japanese side of my family would never be accepting of this if I were to ever come out of the closet. The times that I have told my mom about different friends coming out of the closet, she was always very quiet about it and would occasionally make a remark on how unfortunate that must be for my friends parents.

I would have liked to see a film that didn’t have so much a happy ending.

However, like I wrote about in my previous post about ‘Saving Face’, this  movie also explores the pressure that Asian American kids feel about the obligation to their parents. It’s really hard to just live freely in America when you know that at the end of the day you need to be faithful to your family and to make sure that you meet your families needs and expectations.