Masaki Watanabe

By Masaki Watenabe After the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster last year, I saw a video clip showing the word “ARIGATO” that local residents had spelled out big using driftwood on a beach swept clean by the rushing big waves.…

Basin Street Blues is one of the most popular New Orleans jazz tunes. You probably know the one that begins “Won’t you come and go with me / Down that Mississippi . . . “ (Louis “Satchmo’” Armstrong’s version). There’s…

‘Life is a journey,’ or so they say. This is not just in the metaphysical sense, I believe. It is also about our actual physical movements over the years from one country, city or locality to another, and even about short family holidays or business trips.

A little while ago, I came across a certain work of art in a magazine, checked it out on YouTube and was extremely moved. It took me several days to figure out why it had connected so readily with my…

I’ve always liked actor Michael J. Fox, from long before I moved here from Singapore back in 1997, because of his personality that I perceived in his TV sitcom (Family Ties 1982-89) and movies (e.g. Back to the Future trilogy 1985-90) characters. There was this savvy but personable air about him that I found particularly engaging.

As the year 2011 draws to a close—and how quick it was!—and 2012 is about to begin, I thought I’d zoom out of the usual realm of “issues concerning our Nikkei/ijusha community” and take a ground-level look at some places…

In today’s Canada, especially in a mutli-racial environment like greater Vancouver, mixed marriages involving Nikkei Canadians and ijusha are nothing unusual.?A year ago I reported in this column that more young women were leaving Japan for life abroad, including those…

Bent on some crazy mission to save that fleeting illusion, if only for naïve, dream-struck kids, yours truly must confess here and now to having resorted once or twice to the “urban-guerrilla-street-art-like” tactic of quickly and surreptitiously transferring that ugly placard from the seat to the top of the piano. Apparently someone (a security guy?) does check, because once I casually sauntered by later to look, and the placard had been put back on the seat, as if to proclaim: “We’re in charge here!"

Peoples of all races must, I would assume, customarily attach a lot of importance to personal names—usually a surname and given name (though not in all cultures, e.g. the Javanese of Indonesia usually have just one name, like Soekarno). Our…

The massive destruction wrought by the great Tohoku earthquake of March 11 and the waves of tsunami it triggered, together with the risk of radioactive contamination due to damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has been aptly…

This spring, as usual, the splendid cherry blossoms Vancouver is famous for adorn our streets and parks. But this time, their beauty brings out all the more the sadness we feel in our hearts because of the major earthquake and…

Have you ever had the experience of trying to explain to non-Nikkei friends words like gaman, ganbaru, shikataganai—common Japanese expressions . . .