Posts by Mitsuru
Mitsuru spends his time worrying about writing, worrying about cooking, and admiring cats in his neighbourhood. Mostly, Mitsuru is mysterious and not in that racist Asian-small-eyes-stereotype way, but because he has no last name. He is a Japanese-Canadian Toronto-based writer with aspirations to some day be a poet.
Obama Bows to Emperor Akihito
Barack Obama’s bow-at-the-waist to Emperor Akihito has garnered some pretty harsh responses in the US. Namely, it is anti-Obama critics jumping on the President’s gesture with the ferocity of a jock at my high school who’s just been implicated as being gay. That the President of the World’s Super Power akin to something along the lines of God of Earth, the United States of America should feel the need to bend over for a small [...] Continue »
So Why Do Asians Love Stereotypes of Themselves?
It was sitting in the middle of a packed theatre in downtown Toronto that I noticed racist jokes aren’t just funny to white people. Fu-gen, Asian Canadian Theatre Company operating out of Toronto has recently produced some plays that are a bit questionable in their reproduction of East-Asian/Asian-Canadian stereotypes. Brown Balls features three Asian men complaining about their lack of luck with white women while fawning over their technogadgets. Banana Boys is a similar plot, [...] Continue »
White Men Making Decisions for Asian Women: Sarkozy and the Burqa
“It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.” Following a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in which the two disagreed on the issue, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a major policy speech condemning the covering. “The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience,” this male, non-Muslim expert stated on Monday, adding that it deprives women of identity and acts as a prison. In 2004, [...] Continue »
Reena Virk: 12 Years Later and No Sign of Justice for Hate Crime
Friday, June 12, 2009 marks the “conclusion” of the fourth trial for the murder of South Asian youth, Reena Virk. Reena was fourteen years old when she was killed in 1997 by a gang of white youth in Victoria, British Columbia. Kelly Ellard and Warren Glowatski are the only members of the entire group of teens tried over the past twelve years in relation to Virk’s murder that were successfully convicted of second-degree murder. Found [...] Continue »
Thomas Beatie: “Pregnant-Again” Man, Once a Filipino
So I had heard a while ago that Thomas Beatie — a celebrity transman — is a mixie much like myself. He too has a white mama, an Asian daddy, and originally, an Asian surname. He too was born with all the plumbing to make and be pregnant with a baby. He too made the decision to get folks to recognize him as male. So I get the whole need to change your gender thing. [...] Continue »
What Does Being “Asian” Mean?
I tried not to take anything they taught me in grade nine geography class too seriously; it was one of those easy courses where the teacher read a National Geographic to herself while you coloured in maps for an hour until the bell rang. And in my eagerness to shade the shorelines, perhaps I missed the lesson that Asia does not just mean China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. That, in fact, it is the biggest [...] Continue »
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