BOOKMARK
Book gives taste of Japanese-American life

BEING JAPANESE AMERICAN: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa ... & Their Friends by Gil Asakawa; Stone Bridge Press, paper, $14.95

By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

With the Japanese American Citizens League national convention kicking off here tomorrow, it's timely to consider this intriguing book by a Denver-based online columnist (www.nikkeiview.com) and producer of the Denver Post's online edition. The book covers four generations of Japanese-American experience in a contemporary, easily digested essay-with-breakout-and-art format — sort of the Whole Earth Catalog for AJAs.

It's particularly aimed at young Asian-Americans who may need a road map to their roots. Asakawa shares his own experience as someone who moved to America from Japan as a child and never looked back until people began to call him a "banana" (yellow out the outside, white on the inside) and he became curious about just how Japanese he was, and just how American.

The book covers history, customs, food and language, and offers practical advice on researching and making a scrapbook of your personal history, getting involved in Japanese-American communities, helpful books and Web sites and even traveling to Japan. One chapter focuses on the current trendy attraction to things Japanese — manga, anime, sushi bars and such.

Arakawa's copy is fact-packed, breezy and often humorous, with lots of well-designed sidebars and boxes scattered about, so that the grazing reader can page through the book like a magazine and still pick up a lot of information.

I especially enjoyed the dictionary of common Japanese words and phrases — Jozu desu, Asakawa san! (Good job!)