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Serving As Your Voice of the Nikkei Community Since 1902
Vol. 63, Issue 21 / May 14, 2008
Good-bye Mr. Sakahara, Thanks Nhien, and an Analytical Approach to SIFF
By David K. Yamaguchi
The North American Post
THIS WEEK three topics come to mind, instead of my customary one.
THE OBITUARY of Toru Sakahara, 91, in the Seattle Times and elsewhere, reiterates to me how working-age Sansei today are but one generation removed from the monumental civil rights battles that have helped define Japanese Americans as a people. The big picture here is that while Redress meant much to our parents in the 1980s, it didn't affect the lives of non-JAs. In contrast, the repeal of the mean-spirited 1921 and 1923 Washington State Alien Land Laws, which Mr. Sakahara had a hand in reversing in 1966, changed the lives of Asians in the state to this day. For without this repeal, both immigrants and foreign nationals could not own property, a key to the American Dream. While the repeal was before my time, I don't doubt that the setting was similar to that of other civil rights contests today-that of David versus Goliath. Rest in peace, Mr. Sakahara.
Photo by David K. Yamaguchi
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TURNING TO Seattle Asian-American journalism, readers of the International Examiner know that its former editor, Nhien Nguyen, has moved on to the Asian Week, San Francisco. All of us will miss Nhien's well-written columns, as well as her fun fashion sense. In my case, when I first returned to Seattle in 1996 after a decade away, it was the International District papers that helped me regain my bearings those first few years. Then, two IE columnists-Nhien, and Chizu Omori-caught my eye as writers who consistently lay down sentences that are smooth and deep. Their work thus continues to be hard for me to toss into the recycle bin. Moreover, throughout, no one had managed to replace either of them on my "top two" list of Seattle Asian-American columnists.
Nhien especially showed us what is possible. If she could learn to write as she does after arriving as a babe-in-arms via refugee boat from Vietnam, then it is indefensible for the rest of us to justify writing filled with grammatical errors. We must do better.
LASTLY, EVERY YEAR about this time the Seattle Times lays out an exhaustive alphabetical listing of the movies coming to the Seattle International Film Festival. Then during the following weeks, the Northwest Asian Weekly and IE print shorter alphabetical lists of the Asian movies on the menu. This paper in turn lists the Japanese titles. All this brings me to one of my pet peeves, which is that after all that, it is still hard to know which movies to attend.
The general communication problem is that of information overload. As any SIFF filmgoer knows, there is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Thus, how can writers and readers cut through the noise to develop a reasonable working list of films to see?
An approach that works for me is to compare the list of Asian films with their ratings on the International Movie Database (imdb.com). When I did this, and select films with a minimum score of 7.3 out of ten-an arbitrary level that works for me-I get the list at right.
A few comments on the short list are in order. First, limiting its first cut to the Asian films makes a lot of sense simply because one must apply "a big knife" to the SIFF list of 400+ films and events to have any hope of making heads or tails of it. Moreover, given the stronger cultural ties between the U.S., Europe, Australia, and South America, if good films originate in those places, they are more likely to make it Seattle on their own, without need for a film festival.
I'd also like to point out my list's order, by date and time. This arrangement makes the list easier for the reader to use than alphabetical ordering, which really only works for lengthy lists.
In addition to learning to write well, like Nhien, we must also strive to organize information in ways that readers can quickly grasp and apply. This concept applies to many fields of endeavor beyond community journalism.*
*More on the fascinating field of Information Design can be had from the website and books of Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com).
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